Things can only get better. That, or the world collapses
at 10:23am
on Thursday, 28th August 2008
The Large Hadron Collider at CERN has been switched on. And we're apparently still here. Over at the Sci Foo camp, I bumped into Brian Cox, Physicist and former keyboard player for D:Ream. He works at CERN and told me about a science NGO I hadn't come across before. "Sane Science" are one of the organisations who have been, Cassandra-like, ringing alarm bells about the LHC. They point us back to the beard-stroking whimsy of the few scientists who once said that there just might be a teensy possibility that the world might get swallowed up from the inside through the creation of a mini black hole. This is fun:
Anyroad, we seem to be fine. Given that the LHC is designed specifically to explore the boundaries of our uncertainty, though, I can't help but sympathise with some of the NGO's arguments. We are in a world of incalculable uncertainty, where a whole bunch of claims and possibilities are up for grabs.
When we were doing the Nanodialogues project, one of our participants took a strong precautionary stance towards new technologies. We were talking about previous experiments like this:
"They didn’t know for sure that it wouldn’t rip the whole planet apart. They didn’t know. They were taking an atom apart, taking the energy, that thing that holds everything together, that force that holds all of this together. But to rip that open the first time, they didn’t actually know that it just wouldn’t chain react forever and tear the whole fucking place to pieces. They didn’t ask us about it, did they? They didn’t go, “Well, what do you all think about this?” They just went all ahead and did it."
There's a lot to be said for going ahead and doing it. But we still don't really have any modes of governance - beyond crossing our fingers - for some of these more exciting areas of science.
Anyroad, we seem to be fine. Given that the LHC is designed specifically to explore the boundaries of our uncertainty, though, I can't help but sympathise with some of the NGO's arguments. We are in a world of incalculable uncertainty, where a whole bunch of claims and possibilities are up for grabs.
When we were doing the Nanodialogues project, one of our participants took a strong precautionary stance towards new technologies. We were talking about previous experiments like this:
"They didn’t know for sure that it wouldn’t rip the whole planet apart. They didn’t know. They were taking an atom apart, taking the energy, that thing that holds everything together, that force that holds all of this together. But to rip that open the first time, they didn’t actually know that it just wouldn’t chain react forever and tear the whole fucking place to pieces. They didn’t ask us about it, did they? They didn’t go, “Well, what do you all think about this?” They just went all ahead and did it."
There's a lot to be said for going ahead and doing it. But we still don't really have any modes of governance - beyond crossing our fingers - for some of these more exciting areas of science.
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mathew
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