A german woman living in Zürich wanted to force the FRG to shut down CERNs Large Hadron Collider since, as she argued, it might create tiny black holes that would destroy the earth.

Today, the Federal Constitutional Court dismissed her case. They argued that “zur schlüssigen Darlegung möglicher Schadensereignisse, die eine Reaktion staatlicher Stellen erzwingen könnten, genügt es insbesondere nicht, Warnungen auf ein generelles Misstrauen gegenüber physikalischen Gesetzen […] zu stützen” (source) – to force the government into action it is not enough to issue warnings based on a general distrust towards the laws of physics.

I really do think that sentence is extremely funny.

No, I have not suddenly fallen among the creationists – the headline is a quote from “The left Hand of Darkness”, a superb novel by Ursula K. LeGuin [1]. So it looks like we need a better word for all of the earth and the planets and the moons and stars.. Oh wait. We have one: It’s Cosmos [2].

But it is a cosmos unfinished: It was born in the Big Bang – not an explosion, despite the name, since ‘explosion’ means that matter violently expands into the surrounding space. The Big Bang was an expansion – it was when space came into existence. And, as one of my favourite podcasts reminded me some time ago, the process isn’t [3] finished – like they say, the universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding, and that’s a pretty awe-inspiring thought if you ask me.

And of course that means more room for awesomeness.

1. It’s a strange thing – LeGuin’s stories with  rather plausible ideas of time dilation and hermaphroditism are dismissively called  “soft fiction” or “social fiction” while writers like, say, Niven or Pournelle are called ‘hard sf’ writers while they go on and write about FTL space ships – the idea of Faster Than Light travel is about as scientific as the tooth fairy.
2. As the Bad Astronomer Phil Plait reminds us, today would be Carl Sagans 75th birthday
3. And propably never will be.

Google sometimes shows excerpts from comments instead from the actual posts in search results. That means that in the Google result list my name is now linked to the ramblings of somebody who thinks that the world will end when the Large Hadron Collider starts working. By the way, this will be tomorrow morning.

It would be a pity if you simply ignore the event, but it is perfectly safe to do so. The worst thing that can happen is that many textbooks on particle physics will have to be rewritten (of course from a certain point of view this is also the best thing that can happen).  This might lead to some exciting developements in the future, but at the moment it’s basic research without immediate applications.

No, the LHC is perfectly safe. Among the reasons why I know that is a) said comment (which claimed that earth will be eaten by black holes) has been read and officialy laughed at by a physicist from the Max-Planck-Institut für GravitationsphysikMax Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam (I have to say I know some really cool people) and b), even more importantly, because the people who built the LHC are sitting right on top of it. As soon as physicst start evacuating Switzerland I will start worrying, but up until then I will get on with my life.

And while you will find my name linked to stupid comments in Google I am myself not stupid (or so I hope), I thought I rather mention this.

The Large Hadron Collider, located at CERN in Switzerland, is a doomsday device constructed from blueprints some aliens projected to earth in the form of crop circles and mutilated cattle anuses (or whatever the plural of anus is) which, when activated, will rip a hole in the fabric of space and time and unleash monsters from another  dimension that will bring this world to an end by 2012, as predicted by the Maya several thousand years ago.

Or so some people want you to think, more or less.

In fact the LHC is a particle accelarator that will hopefully give answers to some unresolved questions in physics (like “why do things have mass”, which is a pretty big thing not to know) and which will undoubtly create a lot more new questions in the process.

This raises the question, if science always comes never to an end and increases rather than decreases the number of unknowns, then why do we keep doing it, instead of saying “Goddidit” or “I don’t know or care” ?

There is a long answer to that which involves the fact that, while we’re a far cry away from knowing everything we at least know something, and not the least that we have an idea about how much we don’t know. But there is also a short answer that rather involves the fact that you needed to be a man of straw or a lump of dirt not to be interested in the world around you: just being alive is simply not good enough.

Science is a way to find out about the world; its companion, Art, is a way to cope with what you find out. And sometimes the two celebrate a happy union, like in this, right, rap video, which is not only tremendously funny but also explains (did I say ‘also’ ? That’s the fun of it – ) in rather simply Terms what the LHC is and what it does. The credit for this evidently belongs to science writer Katherine McAlpine, and I hope many many people will look at it.

It’s “Lange Nacht der Wissenschaften” – The Long Night of the Sciences – in Berlin and Potsdam; the Universities and Science Institutes in the two cities will open to the public with dozens or even hundred of shows, speeches, discussions and exhibtions, ranging in theme from social sciences over languages, history, geography and medicine to mathematics, chemistry, physics… well go see for the self, you’ll find the complete list of events (in german) if you follow the link above.

I caught a cold during a motorbike trip and don’t feel quite fit, but I will nip out to catch at least a talk about the history of quantum mechanics and the related exhibition about Max Planck.

The Long Night of the Sciences is a pretty cool event – the width of topics covered is nothing short of amazing. If you’re in Berlin today you shouldn’t miss this.