David Barnett writes in today’s Guardian:
I wouldn’t like to go as far as branding the presumably highly qualified and very professional team of physicists gathering on the Swiss-French border today “mad,” but the question must be asked whether the boffins assembling to throw the switch on the Large Hadron Collider have ever read a work of fiction in their collective lives.
If they had spent less time reading Michael Nelkon’s Advanced Level Physics as spotty teenagers and devoted more attention to comic books and spy novels, they might be feeling as much trepidation as the rest of us at their experiments to recreate the Big Bang that gave birth to the universe.
It’s pretty rare to see someone complain that scientists don’t read enough science fiction.
(Barnett is a journalist and the author of several of novels; his website says he’s a client of our friend John Jarrold.)
That cracks me up. Outstanding.
I’m glad to see that I’m not the only one that was a bit freaked out to hear about that experiment. They haven’t done it yet, have they?
That’s hilarious. I may have to frame that quote. :o)
@2 They switched it on. The world hasn’t ended (yet).
Well, they do have their own rock star.
Mad Scientists are a bit out of date.
Thanks for the linkage and kind words, folks. And by all means add your own suggestions to the Guardian blog. You have to register, but there’s some interesting stuff going up on there two or three times a day… there’s at least me and Damian G Walter endeavouring to get genre-related topics into the discussion.
Maybe they don’t feel any trepidation because it’s actually not a dangerous experiment…? Because here’s the thing: in the unlikely event that the LHC could create a miniature black hole (as some seem to fear, still), then so too could the cosmic rays — that are hitting our atmosphere all the time. And I’m pretty sure those haven’t destroyed the universe yet.
But if you’re still worried, and want status updates on whether of not the universe has been destroyed, you may want to check here.
Still, everybody should be reading more science fiction, just on general principles.
I, for one, would welcome the sleep that death brings. So I have high hopes either way.
Click here:
Has the large hadron collider destroyed the world yet?
*giggle*
One distinction, folks: They’re not trying to re-create the Big Bang – just the moments right after it went boom. And yes, even Stephen Hawking has stated that there is virtually no chance any little black holes actually would be created by the LDH. And he’s the one who says he’d get a Nobel Prize for it. There’s just not enough energy to make it dangerous.
If one more newspaper calls me a “boffin”…
Do we really need to know the origins of mass and if there are extra dimensions, or why Higgs boson is so elusive? (Perhaps it just doesn’t want to be found…)
Why would I want to know more about quark-gluon plasma or what happened to the missing anti-matter that was created around the time of the Big Bang?
The Big Bang itself, I wonder if it was some other planet in the distant past messing around with high-energy collisions that started it off?
6 Billion spent on this LHC and paid for by whom exactly and this expenditure approved by…?
I wonder, if there had been a worldwide ballot, if normal people, like you or I, would have preferred that amount of money to have been spent on searching for a cancer cure or an alternative source of energy (instead of fossil fuels) such as some sort of catalytic-converter which would split h20 into a fuel. Or if they would have said, ‘Yes! that sounds a good way to spend 6 Billion, I really can’t live without knowing how the universe started…’
I’m interested in this related experiment.
That is a great link, philbert.
“6 Billion spent on this LHC and paid for by whom exactly and this expenditure approved by…? ”
The elected representatives of the governments contributing to the LHC.
Next question?