Sunday, October 05, 2008
The Tragedy of the Large Hadron Collider
Like many people, I spent the night of Tuesday, September 9th thinking fatalistic thoughts about the end of the world. Scientists at CERN, the research institute in Geneva, were switching on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). This machine will smash together particles travelling at nearly the speed of light, creating conditions only in existence for a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, and answering a whole number of questions about the nature of the universe.
The British press were awash with tongue-in-cheek stories about how this could trigger a black hole. The comment boxes were awash with terrified people who took them seriously. Speculation raged on whether the black hole would form instantly and just suck us all in, or whether it would take 4 years to develop, creating a planet-sized catastrophe.
The LHC probably won't look like this
In the event, the switch-on went fine – which it would have in any event, mainly because the scare stories failed to mention the LHC was just turning on the beams, not smashing them together. That was due to happen at the end of October but, after a helium leak, will take place next spring. If you're worried about the end of the world, this winter may seem pretty short.
And a lot of people are worried. The comments ranged from 14 year olds wailing about having their lives ahead of them and could the scientists stop whatever they're doing please, to people warning that no one really knows what's going to happen, and the odd exhortation to enjoy life to the fullest since it won't be around much longer.
If this sounds catastrophic... it is. This is a theme I'll return to on this blog: our culture is suffused with catastrophism. It had a year to die down after the no-show of the Y2K bug, and then 9-11 set it off again. The malaise simmers just beneath the surface, erupting when it can attach itself to something visible, like melting Arctic ice caps, or a particle accelerator.
Pretty much the prevailing mood these days
Along with catastrophe comes its younger sibling, conspiracy: the idea that someone, somewhere, knows more than we do and controls our destiny. So there were predictions that the planet-sized black hole would develop just in time for the end of the Mayan calendar in November 2012 – Mayans having predicted the search for the Theory of Everything, apparently. Someone suggested helpfully that the Big Bang was the result of a previous civilization turning on its own Large Hadron Collider.
These speculations may sound silly. And indeed, after talking with a friend of mine who knows a little about science, I was reassured. Black holes are unstable, spinning off energy. A small one would burn itself out long before becoming visible. Black holes may develop from a particle collision, and they may suck in surrounding matter. But they can only do that in relation to their original mass. A black hole two protons large could suck in 100 times its mass and that would still only be 200 protons, far too small for us to see. We hear a lot about black holes being the size of peas and consuming stars. But that's because before they collapsed, they were entire stars themselves. Black holes made from tiny particles remain tiny.
No need to keep yourself in a constant state of catlike readiness
But no one talked about this in any article I found. The answers to people's fears, from justified to outlandish, followed a predictable, liberal pattern. Either that these people were idiots, who didn't understand science; or that if we didn't do run these experiments, we might as well live in caves and not investigate anything. No one asked why people were so frightened.
Technology is received by most people as something to save us: carbon sequestration, solar power – or kill us: flying drones, microwave weapons. But we have no control over technology; no one ever consults us about what gets made. This echoes most people's lives as a whole: we have no control over decisions made that affect us. From pollution to job cuts, things just happen to us. It might be an election year, but you'll never get to vote on plant closings, or whether you need a boss, or whether the profits of your company should be given to shareholders or put towards new mass transit.
If we controlled technology democratically, mass transit would look like this.
As for the usual defence that science just discovers, while technology implements, this is a naïve, liberal approach to human endeavour. The pure science of the LHC is rare, and even the CERN Institute sponsoring it is better known for inventing the internet. Not only does much science get funded by vested interests like Big Pharma and the military, but the very structure of the capitalist economy dictates what questions get left out. There is no money for science or technology to cure global warming, disease or famine on the scale required. There's plenty for prestige projects like the LHC.
Th resulting sense of lack of control is exacerbated by the decline of the left. When social movements, unions and leftist organizations are militant and active, people get a sense of their collective power. If a decision gets made that affects people, they don't accept it with resignation, they fight it. But when people are atomized – as they are in North America, at least – the world appears even more frightening and uncontrollable than normal. A sense of catastrophe looms, conspiracy theories abound. We have no power, the logic goes; 'they' control everything.
So it should be no surprise that, when a Large Hadron Collider gets thrown into this mix, everyone panics. Denouncing people for it is useless, because it misses the point. You don't have to be a revolutionary to know the planet is dying and the economy is eating itself from within (temporary, I think, but that's another post.) You do have to be a socialist to understand the how and why; in the absence of that understanding, and of a movement to force socialist ideas onto the political agenda, people are left with fear, alienation and a sense that something is going horribly, inexorably wrong.
The LHC won't destroy the earth. But capitalism could, for the vast majority of us. People deserve more credit for sensing that, even if that free-floating fear affixes to the wrong object.
The British press were awash with tongue-in-cheek stories about how this could trigger a black hole. The comment boxes were awash with terrified people who took them seriously. Speculation raged on whether the black hole would form instantly and just suck us all in, or whether it would take 4 years to develop, creating a planet-sized catastrophe.
The LHC probably won't look like this
In the event, the switch-on went fine – which it would have in any event, mainly because the scare stories failed to mention the LHC was just turning on the beams, not smashing them together. That was due to happen at the end of October but, after a helium leak, will take place next spring. If you're worried about the end of the world, this winter may seem pretty short.
And a lot of people are worried. The comments ranged from 14 year olds wailing about having their lives ahead of them and could the scientists stop whatever they're doing please, to people warning that no one really knows what's going to happen, and the odd exhortation to enjoy life to the fullest since it won't be around much longer.
If this sounds catastrophic... it is. This is a theme I'll return to on this blog: our culture is suffused with catastrophism. It had a year to die down after the no-show of the Y2K bug, and then 9-11 set it off again. The malaise simmers just beneath the surface, erupting when it can attach itself to something visible, like melting Arctic ice caps, or a particle accelerator.
Pretty much the prevailing mood these days
Along with catastrophe comes its younger sibling, conspiracy: the idea that someone, somewhere, knows more than we do and controls our destiny. So there were predictions that the planet-sized black hole would develop just in time for the end of the Mayan calendar in November 2012 – Mayans having predicted the search for the Theory of Everything, apparently. Someone suggested helpfully that the Big Bang was the result of a previous civilization turning on its own Large Hadron Collider.
These speculations may sound silly. And indeed, after talking with a friend of mine who knows a little about science, I was reassured. Black holes are unstable, spinning off energy. A small one would burn itself out long before becoming visible. Black holes may develop from a particle collision, and they may suck in surrounding matter. But they can only do that in relation to their original mass. A black hole two protons large could suck in 100 times its mass and that would still only be 200 protons, far too small for us to see. We hear a lot about black holes being the size of peas and consuming stars. But that's because before they collapsed, they were entire stars themselves. Black holes made from tiny particles remain tiny.
No need to keep yourself in a constant state of catlike readiness
But no one talked about this in any article I found. The answers to people's fears, from justified to outlandish, followed a predictable, liberal pattern. Either that these people were idiots, who didn't understand science; or that if we didn't do run these experiments, we might as well live in caves and not investigate anything. No one asked why people were so frightened.
Technology is received by most people as something to save us: carbon sequestration, solar power – or kill us: flying drones, microwave weapons. But we have no control over technology; no one ever consults us about what gets made. This echoes most people's lives as a whole: we have no control over decisions made that affect us. From pollution to job cuts, things just happen to us. It might be an election year, but you'll never get to vote on plant closings, or whether you need a boss, or whether the profits of your company should be given to shareholders or put towards new mass transit.
If we controlled technology democratically, mass transit would look like this.
As for the usual defence that science just discovers, while technology implements, this is a naïve, liberal approach to human endeavour. The pure science of the LHC is rare, and even the CERN Institute sponsoring it is better known for inventing the internet. Not only does much science get funded by vested interests like Big Pharma and the military, but the very structure of the capitalist economy dictates what questions get left out. There is no money for science or technology to cure global warming, disease or famine on the scale required. There's plenty for prestige projects like the LHC.
Th resulting sense of lack of control is exacerbated by the decline of the left. When social movements, unions and leftist organizations are militant and active, people get a sense of their collective power. If a decision gets made that affects people, they don't accept it with resignation, they fight it. But when people are atomized – as they are in North America, at least – the world appears even more frightening and uncontrollable than normal. A sense of catastrophe looms, conspiracy theories abound. We have no power, the logic goes; 'they' control everything.
So it should be no surprise that, when a Large Hadron Collider gets thrown into this mix, everyone panics. Denouncing people for it is useless, because it misses the point. You don't have to be a revolutionary to know the planet is dying and the economy is eating itself from within (temporary, I think, but that's another post.) You do have to be a socialist to understand the how and why; in the absence of that understanding, and of a movement to force socialist ideas onto the political agenda, people are left with fear, alienation and a sense that something is going horribly, inexorably wrong.
The LHC won't destroy the earth. But capitalism could, for the vast majority of us. People deserve more credit for sensing that, even if that free-floating fear affixes to the wrong object.
