By the way - having had so much to do with particle accelerators I find all the "scare" surrounding the LHC immensely funny and depressing at the same time.
Why funny? Because while it is true that that there are scientific safety concerns, most people (including me =) simply lack the knowledge to be able to assess the potential risks the HLC project might carry with it and hence opt for spreading a lot of misinformed bullshit instead. Now, the bullshit they are saying is quite funny BUT now we come to the depressing part... Since when did our civilization become so backward?
I mean - in recent years every time a huge scientific project is announced some moronic hippies brring up idiotic arguments against it... We are living in a world where creationism is taught at schools *somewhere* as a scientific theory after all and evolution is treated as if it were based solely on faith...
The main problem is, I think, that science picked up pace so fast recently that the general public simply can't keep up and the things scientists are doing are regarded as some kind of black art... One of Arthur C. Clarke's laws springs to my mind immediately: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I also blame stupid modern media that opted mostly for "soft" sci-fi with lots of nonsense instead of scientific accuracy which can be immensely fun if represented correctly (but requires some brains and proper research instead of cookie-cutter blockbuster scripts) - people are unaware that in certain areas we have advanced BEYOND what is seen in all the movies.
Hell - up until recently I wasn't aware that
fusion reactors are old news (even though they don't manage to produce any energy gain -
YET) or that things like the "hypospray" (from StarTrek - known as
jet injectors IRL) have existed for decades...
I spent the last few months (on and off =) trying to understand how
quantum computing is supposed to work and I'm still pretty much in the dark. :-P
Anyways - I really hope that the general cluelessness won't stop scientific advance even if it has dangerous implications... I'd rather die in a cool way, e.g. by being sucked into a
micro black hole, than have stoopid fanatics kill me in a nuclear war they started because of somebody's different system of beliefs or because they wanted some oil... ;-)
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