I was mentioning this elsewhere recently so for some of you this may be a bit of a repeat. But it's an important issue and I think we need to address it, seriously, calmly, and honestly, and with a maximum of transparency and openness. Especially in light of stories like this:
The "Big Bang" experiment at CERN has set new records for colliding beams of particles this week, and is now shutting down for a couple of months to prepare for even higher energy work, the research center said on Friday.
The collisions in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are part of an experiment to recreate conditions immediately after the Big Bang at the start of the universe to understand the nature of matter.
"This first running period has served its purpose fully: testing all the LHC's systems, providing calibration data for the experiments and showing what needs to be done to prepare the machine for a sustained period of running at higher energy," CERN Director-General Rolf Heuer said.
"We could not have asked for a better way to bring 2009 to a close," he said in a statement.
Look, I think I've made it quite clear throughout this blog's history that I firmly support Science. Science has brought the world many wonderful things, like penicillin, Tang, light bulbs, and spyware. So I stand foursquare behind Science, as long as it is done openly and honestly and with all due respect for the opinions of intelligent, interested citizens such as myself. Remember -- we are the taxpayers who fund projects like this, and so the scientists are, really, our employees. When they discharge their duties correctly they are entitled to respect and fair treatment, just like, say, a competent butler or footman.
Thus, I say this only reluctantly: I am very, very deeply disturbed about the creation and operation of the Large Hardon Collider, and I believe I am entitled to Answers.
The ethical problems of the project are obvious. I've browsed through many of the media stories and even some of the scientific literature about the Large Hardon Collider: I have done many Google searches. But nowhere do I see any discussion of how the project coordinators went about obtaining the necessary permissions and releases regarding the owner/operators of the Large Hardons in question. But this is an elementary requirement! These are, presumably, human beings we are talking about! And yet, according to the linked story,
Scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) collided beams at 2.36 tera-electron volts (TeV), a new record crowning operations of the world's most powerful particle accelerator since it was relaunched in November.
Even to the layman it is quite clear that when you ram Large Hardons together at that sort of velocity and with that sort of power, accidents are bound to occur. But where is the information about proper safety precautions? Medical treatment? Notification of relatives (God forbid)? Lubricant? Nowhere! This is enough by itself to suspect wrongdoing, if not outright conspiracy.
Moreover, look at this again: "The collisions in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are part of an experiment to recreate conditions immediately after the Big Bang at the start of the universe." Foolishness. If you want to understand any sort of a "Big Bang," you need to look at the state of Large Hardons immediately prior to the event! What do these "scientists" take us for, anyway? I'd say the project organizers here have egg or something all over their faces right about now.
And I also don't understand for the life of me why these "scientists" are so sneeringly dismissive of fears that the Large Hardon Collider could not possibly result in vast quantities of "goo." But what the heck else do you expect when you're talking about Large Hardons! Goo! You don't even need to understand the Third Law of Thermodynamics to know that, though of course, as always, it helps.
I'm not a scientist, but it seems clear to me that there is something dirty about the Large Hardon Collider project, and that it's the taxpayer who is really getting the shaft. We need lots of bloggers to grab tight hold on this issue: we must insistently compel these "scientists," who are just the willing tools of socialist politicians, to release their code, and their hard, raw, and -- crucially -- uncut data, even if it makes them shudder and scream to do so. Otherwise these insufferably cocky "scientists" will keep giving us the reacharound, I mean, runaround.
If they refuse to comply we should steal their emails, which are probably little more than links to porn sites, anyhow. In no other way can we possibly have an Honest Conversation about this Crucial Issue.
UPDATE. Wow, this has been up for four minutes now and still no Insty link. Weird.
UPDATE. Whoops, forgot to mention how the Hardon Scientists are Religious True Believers, etc.