Cultural Collisions

What the Large Hadron Collider Saga Tells Us About Science and Society

SOURCE: © CERN When the public hasn’t been monitoring developments in science, people can fall back on Hollywood images of big strange projects that go badly awry. If scientists monitored public perceptions, they could engage before misinformation spreads.

The good news is that September 10 has passed and the Earth is still here. But of course, it may only be because of a mechanical glitch.

In case you haven’t already heard, I’m referring to widespread concerns that the recently completed Large Hadron Collider or LHC—the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, built by Europe’s CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research)—will in some way destroy the world. The alleged means by which it might do so are numerous: Some worry the machine’s high speed proton collisions could create tiny black holes that grow to engulf us all; others that it might generate “strangelet” particles that change everything into their particular form of nastiness; and so on.

Scientists have repeatedly dismissed such concerns—cosmic ray collisions with the Earth’s atmosphere, they point out, are happening all the time and are much akin to what the LHC will produce, and we’re still here—but they’re up against something not entirely rational in nature. In a sense, people just can’t help it: They’ve been trained, most centrally by Hollywood, to think of big strange science projects as having an inherent tendency to go badly awry. And there is no bigger science project in the world than the multibillion-dollar LHC.

Sure enough, there’s currently a film going forward, based on Dan Brown’s book Angels & Demons, the plot of which turns on villains trying to use antimatter taken from CERN to destroy the Vatican. CERN has set the record straight, but the likelihood that its webpage will equal the Ron Howard/Tom Hanks film in viewership is about the same as the probability of the LHC sucking us all into a vacuum.

It ought to be possible for scientists to be more anticipatory of public reactions, to predict them, to monitor sentiments and misinformation that’s circulating and seek to engage long before things reach the boiling point.

Meanwhile, several lawsuits have been filed trying to stop the LHC from beginning its dastardly proton smashing. Where scientists merely want to achieve a deeper understanding of the nature of matter and the universe—and perhaps discover the mysterious Higgs boson, and thereby determine whether particle physics’ “standard model” is correct—public reaction has been so extreme that it has prompted death threats directed towards CERN researchers.

In any event, the apocalypse is currently on hold: In early runs the LHC blew a gasket and now won’t be operational until 2009, when the first particle-colliding experiments can begin.

The delay gives us ample time to reflect on this whole saga—which serves as a particularly noteworthy example of what is today almost a general principle regarding major scientific events that draw mass attention. Members of the public, having scarcely followed the underlying research, and nourishing very different initial assumptions, rarely see such developments in the way that scientists do. In some cases, they may strongly recoil on grounds that to scientists might seem simply irrational.

Take, for instance, the 2006 vote by the International Astronomical Union to demote Pluto from planetary status. The decision of a relatively small group of scientists, made on the strict basis of technical considerations, prompted a global backlash that is still ongoing. In such cases, the public, which hasn’t been monitoring developments in science, is suddenly shocked to hear what is going on; and the scientists, who haven’t been monitoring the public, are just as surprised at the backlash.

And yet these are critical moments for the world’s scientific community, centrally because it’s so hard to get science on the public radar to begin with. When it finally does occur, you don’t want it to be over something petty, like the Pluto issue, or something silly, like fears that the Large Hadron Collider will make us all cease to exist. The good news is that such developments spark dramatic levels of interest in science; but the bad news is that they’re highly negative encounters with the scientific community, rather than positive ones.

So how should we deal with such situations? Well, it’s difficult: You can’t easily stamp out misinformation, and in the case of particle accelerators, apocalyptic concerns greatly predate the LHC. However, for precisely this reason, it ought to be possible for scientists to be more anticipatory of public reactions, to predict them, to monitor sentiments and misinformation that’s circulating and seek to engage long before things reach the boiling point.

In fact, that’s precisely what’s happening with nanotechnology: There’s a lurking worry, having been fanned Michael Crichton’s novel Prey and other chatter, that this form of research, too, could unleash some sort of apocalypse. But the National Nanotechnology Initiative has engaged scholars to study and anticipate such concerns, in the context of more broadly examining public participation in nanotechnology. In short, the fear of backlash, based on misunderstanding, is being addressed through attempts to reach out to stakeholders and inform them about what nanotechnology can and can’t do.

There’s outreach from CERN, too—the hilarious Large Hadron Rap has been seen by millions of people on YouTube, and several safety studies have been undertaken to respond to public fears. Still, the official responses appear to have been more reactive than proactive; and the black hole and strangelet fears have long since reverberated around the globe.

So as we wait for the particles to finally collide, let’s not forget to study collisions between scientists and the public as well: There are strong forces here, too, that are poorly understood.

Chris Mooney is a contributing editor to Science Progress and the author of two books, The Republican War on Science and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. He blogs on The Intersection with Sheril Kirshenbaum.

Tags: Media, physics

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