Hold the front page
It’s outside my area of expertise and took place almost a month ago. But it’s still the biggest thing to happen in the world of science for quite a while and so I’m going to write about the switching on of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Or, more specifically, I’m going to write about the publicity that surrounded the switching on of the LHC, because it was equally as impressive. For the LHC will be used to investigate the intricacies of sub-atomic physics, an area of science with few immediate practical applications and which most people don’t really understand.
Nevertheless, the switching on of the LHC at its base outside Geneva in Switzerland on 10 September was attended by over 300 journalists from around the world and given substantial coverage in the next day’s papers. In the UK, it was shown live on television and BBC Radio 4 turned over practically its entire day’s programming to the event.
This kind of exposure is pretty unprecedented for a scientific event, especially as this event comprised sending a beam of protons slowly around the LHC one way and then the other. Impressive, admittedly, but hardly making for edge-of-the-seat broadcasting.
Now the sheer scale of the engineering project involved in building the 17-mile long LHC, which cost $5.5 billion and took 15 years, explains some of the interest. As does the fact that although the specifics of the work due to be conducted at the LHC would be incomprehensible to most people, its more general aims and abilities can be explained in a few attention-grabbing sound-bites.
So there was much talk of the LHC recreating the conditions that existed a few moments after the Big Bang, and thereby potentially helping to reveal the origins of mass, shed light on dark matter, uncover hidden symmetries and find extra dimensions. Even the warnings of possible, if unlikely, disaster from the LHC creating black holes simply served to increase interest.
Finally, this was a scientific development that could be pinpointed to a certain time and date, whereas many scientific breakthroughs are only apparent in hindsight. Although even this time and date were contentious, as the LHC had already been undergoing initial tests for a number weeks. But 10 September represented the first time that photons were sent around the complete 17-mile course.
Overall, the European particle physics laboratory Cern, which manages the LHC, must have been very happy with the coverage. But it only took a few days for the dark-side of this wide-spread exposure to rear its head, when on 19 September news agencies around the world reported that the LHC had sprung a leak as one of its massive magnets overheated. Now this kind of set-back was not exactly unexpected with an instrument as massive and complex as the LHC, but it might have passed unnoticed by the outside world if the switching on hadn’t been accorded so much publicity.
Still, for at least one day, science became a front-page story and that is surely to be welcomed.
