Wow, I thought the worry that the LHC might destroy the world was amusing, like most predictions of the end of the world. It turns out people have been sending actual death threats to LHC researchers.
The annoying part of this is that just a couple people (who Mark correctly identifies as crackpots) have managed to generate a storm of publicity. There are pieces in the Times, the other Times, and the Guardian to pick the first three I could find. The WorldNut Daily even ran a poll with… well… “interesting” responses.
What’s even more annoying is that this has happened before. In 1999 a similar media storm surrounded the start-up of RHIC, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, which has been operating happily for many years now without destroying the world. Take a look at those links; you could do a search and replace changing “RHIC” to “LHC” and it would look exactly like the articles published in the last few days. (RHIC has a leg up on the LHC so far, since no one has yet produced a novel about the current iteration of doomsday.) The key part is that it’s not just the same notion, but some of the same people promoting it. Walter L. Wagner, one of the people who has filed suit to shut down the LHC, was one of the main instigators of the noise about RHIC. (A similar suit in the EU, asking for an injunction to halt operations, has thankfully been thrown out.) They were wrong then, and for the same reasons.
So, why is so much attention being paid to this story? It’s clearly the case that “Machine might destroy the world” is a better attention grabber than “Breaking news: science experiment still ready to begin operations”, but that fails to answer for me why people with so little credibility are given so much time in the press.
(There’s also the question of why so many physicist bloggers are taking on the story. Of course, it might be something eminently reasonable like “because it’s all over the newspapers and more, and we need to get some real information out there.” I think there’s more to it than that, and it can be summed up by two words: “creationist envy”. This epic battle with The Crazy won’t last long, but for now physicists get to live it up like the biologists.)
I don’t think I buy the “creationist envy” argument. Who really wants it? Creationism threatens biology teachers’ ability to do their jobs, but it hasn’t tried to stop research altogether (stem cell research partially excepted, if you want to lump that issue in with creationism, which I don’t think is altogether accurate). But these end-of-the-world guys are trying to stop basic physics research. That’s a much bigger deal. I’m puzzled at what the instigator’s goals are: fame? hush money? revenge on the physics establishment for some slight in the past? For all I know he has real fear of the experiments, but I somehow don’t think so.
Rössler appears to be a disturbed individual. Did you read his whole stop-the-LHC paper? It was incoherent in a way that made me think “bonkers.”
I’ve recorded some observations on the situation and some of the personalities in a blog post “Large Hadron Collider: What’s the Risk?”
I wasn’t being serious with the “creationist envy” argument. Of course no one wants to deal with that. People are talking about it because it’s all over the media.
A question for you, since I’m new at this. The title of your post in the comment isn’t a link. Did you not make it one, or is there a setting I need to change to allow you to make them?
Sorry I missed the irony. I’m usually not that dense.
I didn’t try the link because I’ve encountered comment sections that just leave a blank when you try it. I have noticed a couple of folks coming to my blog from here, presumably by clicking on my name “onscrn” which does link to my blog.
I’ll try the experiment, so we’ll both know.
The blog post is Large Hadron Collider: What’s the Risk?
Well, the link works, but it got caught in the spam queue. Good to know on both counts. Thanks for trying it.
[...] isn’t disagreement. There a couple of attention-seekers making noise. They have a history of making these kinds of wild claims. It’s disturbing that they could create an impression [...]