USA Today reports this morning about fears surrounding the Large Hadron Collider, a $6 billion experiment in particle physics, which was launched in early October with phenomenal proton-smashing results. The collider made it through nine days of operations before shutting down due to technical difficulties. USA Today writes, “The collider — a 16.6-mile underground race track that will smash protons together in an attempt to re-create conditions from the beginnings of the universe — is the most recent example of a scientific experiment that taps into the public’s deep reserve of doomsday fears.”
Only a sociologist can sort this out…
There is something in the human psyche that makes us view some innovations or research with great suspicion, fearing that careless scientists will blow us all to kingdom come, says sociologist Robert Bartholomew, author of the 2001 book Little Green Men, Meowing Nuns and Head-Hunting Panics: A Study of Mass Psychogenic Illness and Social Delusion. “People see what they expect to see in a search for certainty, especially during times of crisis, as they attempt to confirm their worst fears and greatest hopes.”
Lack of understanding, “combined with anxiety, has been responsible for scares of all sorts over the centuries,” he notes, ranging from witchcraft trials to UFO sightings. Scares often arise from such anxieties as war jitters, including the phantom zeppelin sightings that convulsed Great Britain before World War I.
After describing a number of different ‘scientific nightmares’ from the last century, sociologist Robert Bartholomew claims that the Large Hadron Collider has joined the ranks…
“I believe this is a social delusion with legs,” Bartholomew says. After all, the actual collisions of protons at the lab won’t start again until spring, when he believes fears will resurface that the colliding protons will create black holes in the same way that imploding stars do in space.
“In the case of the ‘Collider Calamity,’ believers are likely to redouble their efforts to stop the experiments, and their numbers are likely to grow in the short term,” Bartholomew says. “Most ‘believers’ seem to think Armageddon will happen when the experiments become more sophisticated.”
Read the full story.
Comments 1
onscrn — November 7, 2008
The sociological quotations you cite make it sound as though fear of the LHC arose spontaneously in the population. Far from it. A couple of men with no scientific credentials chose the publicity-attracting method of filing a law suit against the project, and the media picked up the story, accepting these pretenders as "scientists" who were alarmed about the possible end of the world. The same characters went through the same shenanigans ten years ago with another accelerator (we survived!), but that was before the internet became so big. I've written about the situation in a blog post Large Hadron Collider: What's the Risk?".