Bless the Press

I had to travel to Reading today to meet with a supplier, so over breakfast for a laugh I picked up a copy of the Daily Mail and read their article on the switch-on of the LHC. This event, as the whole world must have noticed, received blanket media coverage even though nothing much beyond calibration of the instrument will be happening for the next few weeks.

Tales of the end of the world abounded in the more reactionary papers and even the sober ones were asking questions that even GCSE physics students could have answered without pausing for breath. All very silly and diversionary, and all guaranteed to elicit sighs of exasperation from the particle physicists at CERN who must have been heartily sick of telling people that there was only an infinitesimally small chance of creating a black hole at all, and even if one were to be created it would evaporate again a split-second later. Oh, and far more powerful atom-smashing is going on right above our heads at the edges of atmosphere, and has been doing for millions of years, with no ill effects. That's assuming there would be any atom-smashing happening at CERN anyway, which as I said isn't scheduled until next month at the earliest.

So I wasn't expecting great things from the dear old Daily Mail, but even I wasn't prepared for the depths of incompetence their article plumbed. The writer couldn't even be bothered to research the name of the main particle being hunted for by the LHC experiment, referring to it as the "Higgs bosun." Presumably this mythical sea-faring particle was expected to pop out of the collider and declare "Har-har-harrrrr! Where's me grog you scurvy swine?"

It's a bosON you bozos.

What made this pre-school error even funnier was that they'd padded the article with a five-minute multiple choice quiz in which one of the questions - "What's the correct name of the God particle being sought by the LHC?" (or something like that) had "Higgs bosun" as one of its incorrect answers, along with boson, bosom and another. Pity the poor simple-minded reader who had scanned the main article for the answer!

Part of the article, and a good percentage of the letters page, was devoted to the usual fatuous rantings of people who just don't understand science, but see the cost of the project and set off into a red-faced orbit of indignation. "What's it for?" "What will we be able to do with it?" "Shouldn't we be making sure we can feed everyone before wasting money on this rubbish?"

Good grief. It's for science. Who knows what we'll be able to do with it? When quantum theory was proposed and investigated, it didn't have any known application, but it led directly to the development of the transistor. Where would we be without them, eh? What do you think powers the computer you type your ignorant articles on, moron? Open your eyes and look around you. Every single aspect of your life is the way it is today because of science. You should be thanking the pioneers of chemistry and physics for your mobile phone, your central heating timer, your television, sat-nav, low temperature washing powder, combi-boiler, and on and on and on.

When you're sitting on the wrong side, temporally speaking, of a great discovery, any predictions about what it might lead to sound inevitably like science fiction. Wind the clock forward and everyday life will have come to rely on whatever it is the LHC teams will unearth about the way the universe works. It might be anti-gravity, limitless free energy, instantaneous communications, the ability to transform matter, or more likely it will be something that we cannot even conceive now in our wildest imaginings. But the drive to discover it is the epitome of the human condition. If you're not interested, you might as well still be a monkey.