Quite Random

Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a twat.

Scientists working on the world’s biggest machine are being besieged by phone calls and emails from people who fear the world will end next Wednesday, when the gigantic atom smasher starts up.

Such is the angst that the American Nobel prize winning physicist Frank Wilczek of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has even had death threats, said Prof Brian Cox of Manchester University, adding: “Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a twat.”

The head of public relations, James Gillies, says he gets tearful phone calls, pleading for the £4.5 billion machine to stop.

“They phone me and say: “I am seriously worried. Please tell me that my children are safe,” said Gillies.

Scientists get death threats over Large Hadron Collider - Telegraph.

How many people who phoned the CERN scientists in tears, or making death threats, or sending abusive emails, or even resorting to legal action to try and stop the experiment, even bothered to look at the information on the LHC? That miniscule particles will be collided in a space less than the width of a human hair? That the whole test environment is chilled to cooler than the ambient temperature of space, 100 meters underground, surrounded by an awe-inspiring arsenal of instruments that will be able to study the experiment at the atomic level? That what CERN is doing next Wednesday has happened several hundred thousand times already with the bombardment of Earth by high energy particles from space, without any black holes appearing?

No. Looking at the information is too much to expect. These idiots have seen a video of the Earth imploding into itself on YouTube, maybe just watched Bruce Willis in Armageddon, and decided that the LHC is some kind of Doomsday machine. It’s not. It’s a bold, expensive, fascinating piece of research, the result of the collaboration of hundreds of scientists from over 80 countries over the last 20 years, and it could, just could, give humanity new information on the very beginnings of our existence, our creation – not unlike having a genetic blue print for the universe.

I should be sympathetic towards these people and their fears, but no. These fears are the product of deliberate, cultivated ignorance.

Humans have been wiped out in their millions for years by wars, religions, diseases and natural disasters, and most of these were the result of human ignorance, not human curiosity, and sure as hell not cosmic rays. Galileo was kept under house arrest by the Inquisition for the last years of his life by the Catholic church for suggesting that the Earth revolved around the Sun and not the other way around, and you can bet that the CERN scientists would experience a worse fate at the hands of a band of lunatics who possibly believe the Earth is six thousand years old, and really believe that the LHC will destroy us all.

Get a grip.