Event Horizon: War on Physics?

Phew.
We're
still here. Thanks be to the God-particle! That was a close one. Or not.

Maybe you missed it but those crazy European physicists
cranked up the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) and, lo and behold, we
haven't
been sucked into oblivion! If you listened carefully, you may have heard
the
clink of Champagne flutes, celebrating the achievement.

Nestled 300 feet beneath the French-Swiss border just
outside Geneva,
the world's "biggest and most expensive particle
accelerator," as The New York Times
describes it, the LHC, accelerates protons powered by 7 trillion electron
volts
apiece. The protons are smashed together "to create tiny fireballs"
in order to recreate the immediate post-Big Bang conditions that "last
prevailed when the universe was less than a trillionth of a second old."

We're talking about a way-back machine that
allows scientists to peer into the past -- to within a New York
nanosecond of the universe's
birth!

So after 16 years and $10 billion, the LHC finally got
down to the business of making subatomic particle soup -- a milestone for
physicists hoping to discover what has come to be known as the
"God-particle," or Higgs boson. The NYT
calls it a "moment of truth" for those
"who have staked their credibility and their careers, not to mention all
those billions of dollars, on the conviction that they are within
touching
distance of fundamental discoveries about the universe."

Pretty exciting. Or scary, depending on your outlook.
For American Enterprise Institute economist Kevin Hassett, the LHC
provides an
occasion to ponder improbable possibilities and perhaps draw up military
plans
for bombing rogue science experiments in foreign nations.

What worried Hassett was the possibility of the LCH
creating a mini-black hole that might quickly grow sufficiently large
enough to
devour the entire planet. Or as the great philosopher of science Jerry
Lee
Lewis might say, goodness gracious/great tiny balls of fire!

Hassett sounded the alarm in January. The policy questions raised by LHC, he wrote, "are bigger
than the machine."

Like what? Well, like the possibility of
"planetary destruction -- whether it's the next physics experiment
at even-higher energy or a genetic experiment that might unleash the
perfect
disease."

Even worse, Hassett cautions, is that "the
world's governments have no mechanism to coordinate rational thinking
about these risks. If the U.S.
wanted to stop the LHC experiment, it would have no recourse short of
military
action."

First came the war on evolution, then the war on
climate science. Do we now have a war on physics -- a new front in the
"culture wars?"

Fellow "dismal science" practitioner Brad
De Long thinks so, lobbing this volley at Hassett from his blog:

"I know
that
the American Enterprise Institute is not shamed by anything, but even an
organization that is not shamed by anything should be ashamed of
this....Leon Lederman named the hypothesized Higgs boson the 'God
particle'
as a joke, because its effects were everywhere yet nobody had ever seen
it in
the flesh -- not because it was in any way powerful or dangerous or
numinous or
terrifying. It saddens me to think of the physicists who are going to
have to
waste their time dealing with this..."

How do we non-specialists choose a side? Bertrand
Russell was right. "Clearly, if you are going to believe anything
outside
of your own experience, you should have some reason for believing it.
Usually
the reason is authority...but we all know how often authority has been
proved
mistaken." And no less an authority than Stephen Hawking calculates the
earth-destroying probabilities of man-made mini black holes to be far
less
worrisome than the man-made effects of climate change.

Speaking at the Royal Society in London, Hawking said:
"we
have concluded the dangers posed by climate change are nearly as dire
as those posed by nuclear weapons."

But about the LHC, Hawking wrote:
"some
have asked if turning on the LHC could produce some disastrous,
unexpected result. Indeed, some theories of spacetime suggest the
particle
collisions might create mini black holes. If that happened, I have
proposed
that these black holes would radiate particles and disappear. If we saw
this at
the LHC, it would open up a new area of physics, and I might even win a
Nobel
prize. But I'm not holding my breath."

And I won't hold my breath waiting for this
battle to become a war. Conservatives have their hands full fighting
"junk"
science, battling both climate and evolutionary science while defending
an
animal faith in economic policies rooted in social Darwinism.

I'm riding with Hawking on this one, despite
having been imbued with an end-of-the-world vision that bears a striking
resemblance to Hawking's description of death by black hole ("In those
days,...the sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light,
and the stars of the heaven shall fall...). Besides, Hassett is the guy
who
made a name for himself in 1999 by wrongly predicting the stock market
would be
at 36,000 by now.

If Hawking's authority is "proved
mistaken," then maybe we can start talking about getting those military
plans in order. It's not like we won't have time. Circling a
gravity-clogged drain of a black hole, space-time slows way down, such
that a
second "would be spread out over an infinite period of time" -- even
as we "pass the point of no return without noticing it."

If there's anything
scary about the LHC, it's
what it says about the state of physics in the U.S. Buried in the NYT report, it's noted that the
LHC
start-up "cements a shift in the balance of physics power away from
American dominance that began in 1993, when Congress canceled the
Superconducting Supercollider, a monster machine under construction in
Waxahachie, Tex."