Yesterday, while riding to work, I heard the NPR story on the testing of the Large Hadron Collider.  The purpose of this massive machine (though still about 3 times smaller than the Superconducting Super Collider would have been…) is to probe the basic building blocks of the universe.  The subatomic world made up of bosons, quarks, and so on.  The particles that carry mass, for instance, that give the bigger particles (protons, electrons, neutrons) their mass.

I’ll be honest, this sort of physics isn’t exactly my cup of tea.  I’m not much into the string theory part of physics.  I personally find the self-organization and collective phenomena that occur in materials much more interesting.  But, I also think this stuff is important and is the most successful example of the predictive power of physics.

So, it was a bit unexpected, but I was very proud, as a physicist, to hear about this story.  And excited.  It was very nice to hear such a prominent story about science.  Both on NPR and on Google, the two places I get most of my news, this was a feature story.  And, for just a moment, politics was pushed aside for something bigger and grander than any political story.  It was very cool.

Then, I also read about the people who are scared that the LHC will create black holes that will then swallow the Earth.  They think the experiments should stop, just in case.  I’m glad they aren’t getting their way, since science shouldn’t be controlled or determined by people who are afraid of things they don’t understand.  I don’t think science should necessarily go unchecked, but I do think that the vast majority of scientists are very responsible people who aren’t going to do something they think has significant danger associated with it.  I also wouldn’t be surprised if these people are the same that think Global Warming is a hoax perpetuated by elitist scientists and that we don’t have to do anything about it, even just in case.