As I write, people are losing sleep about a scientific experiment in Switzerland that has about as much a chance of destroying the Earth as my toaster does.
When CERN’s recently activated Large Hadron Collider begins high energy collisions later this year, physicists hope that a new chapter in our understanding of the universe will be opened. Inside the massive ring of magniets, in a void colder and emptier than intergalactic space, streams of protons half as thick as a human hair will crash with all the force of two aircraft carriers colliding at 60km/h. The resulting conditions will resemble the fury and chaos of the universe’s infancy, mere trillionths of a second after the big bang. Particle physicists will pore over the massive quantities of data accumulated by the massive, cylindrical detectors stationed at various locations around the ring, hoping to find evidence of as-yet hypothetical particles, extra dimensions, dark matter and more.
The public response to such an endeavour would usually run the gamut from “Wonderful!” to “Who cares,” but the LHC has been dogged by frantic critics who fear that the machine could spawn world-eating black holes. CERN officials have responded that the LHC will not be producing any circumstances that don’t already occur in nature, and that any microscopic black holes that could be formed would evaporate through a process called Hawking Radiation.
These reports have done little to calm the detractors, or the media for that matter. A possible impending apocalypse is a good eye-catcher, after all. When a reporter follows up the black hole story with a statement from CERN that there is “no conceivable threat”, the seeds of doubt have still been sown. A 16-year old girl in India was so distraught after hearing some doom-mongering on a local newscast that she took her own life. Several lawsuits have popped up. One member of CERN’s advisory board received death threats. You can watch people panic in real-time via the comment section for this video:
Why do people believe this stuff?
If people are afraid of something, they will believe it. I think that this is the central truth underlying 9/11 conspiracy theories, alien abductions, the prophecies of Nostradamus and so forth. On the flip side of the coin, people will believe things because they want them to be true. Intelligent design creationism, global warming doubts and - on a darker level - holocaust denial spring to mind. Find a disturbing issue, trot out a fringe expert with a dissenting opinion, and you’re set.
The other problem is that people aren’t built to understand statistical probability on such a massive scale. Scientists have an incredibly difficult time using the word “impossible”. The British Astronomer Royale Martin Rees calculated odds of about 1 in 50 million for the probability that a massive atom smasher like the LHC would one day doom humanity. “Scientists have no right to endanger all of our lives!” the critics say, “They mustn’t go forward with the experiment, no matter how small the risk!” Even if that figure is accurate, 50 million is a huge number. 50 million years ago our ancestors were little shrewish creatures. And yet these odds are comparable to those that motivate people to buy lottery tickets.
What it really comes down to for me is a faith that these people know what they’re doing. The philosopher Daniel Dennett uses the example of e=mc2. Do you know what that means? I mean really understand it. I know what the individual symbols represent, but I don’t understand it on a meaningful level. And yet we have cell phones, the internet, and all the other marvels of modern technology that wouldn’t have been possible without the theory of relativity. I’ll take the scientific consensus over the opinions of shrill protesters any day.
Finally, on a human level, I simply cannot believe that these people would risk their own lives and the lives of their families. Scientists are people too.
Fear of the unknown shouldn’t hamper this experiment either. We don’t know what will happen when the protons reach full speed, and that’s the exciting part.
