Knowing the mind of God? That's just crazy talk

Stephen Cauchi
September 14, 2008
FOR physicists, the holy grail is the Theory of Everything — or, as British scientist Stephen Hawking once called it, "knowing the mind of God". On the Swiss-French border, buried dozens of metres underground, is the latest scientific attempt to know God: a 27-kilometre circular tunnel containing two pipes enclosed within superconducting magnets, supercooled by liquid helium.
Meet the Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest scientific instrument, which hummed into life this week. The collider is the biggest version yet of what is known among scientists as a particle accelerator (more colloquially an atom-smasher).
By piling beams of protons and other subatomic particles into each other, scientists hope to answer some of the big questions in physics: what is the mysterious "dark matter" that fills most of the universe, the origin of forces such as gravity and electromagnetism, and the structure of matter at the tiniest sub-atomic level?
The project has also produced lawsuits around the world from individuals concerned that atom smashing could produce microscopic black holes, planet-destroying lumps of matter known as "strangelets", or vacuum bubbles capable of rebooting the universe.
It's not the first time there has been concern that mad scientists might destroy the world. But is the fear justified, or simply feeding on an unfounded stereotype perpetuated by pop culture?
Movie buff and St Kilda Film Festival director Paul Harris points out that the mad scientist has been around since the 19th century: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), Robert Louis Stephenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and H.G. Wells' The Island of Dr Moreau (1896) among the better known. "It's an archetype that's always been there in fiction," said Harris. "The stereotype for the layperson is we don't really know what science is but it rules our life and we're a bit mistrustful of it, especially when we know there are boffins out there who meddle with nature and end up creating monsters."
Among Harris' favourite mad scientists is Rotwang, from the 1926 German classic Metropolis, whose female "machine-man" is one of cinema's most striking icons. He sees Rotwang as the classic "deluded megalomaniac who tries to create the perfect robot and who lacks the spiritual qualities and the commonsense nous to see that all you're doing is creating harm".
Many would argue the evil scientist stereotype is not without merit. Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) is an amalgam of several scientists, including Wernher von Braun, the inventor of the V2 rocket that pummelled Britain in World War II, and Edward Teller, who helped invent the first nuclear bombs.
In an eerie parallel to doomsday fears surrounding the Large Hadron Collider, Teller did consider the possibility that the first nuclear bomb test, at New Mexico in 1945, could ignite the Earth's entire atmosphere. That test was truly a leap into the unknown: the scientists involved placed bets on how strong the blast would be.
More recently there have been other scientific "threats" to humanity. Take the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Plaques on spacecraft that advertise the Earth's location and greeting messages beamed to the cosmos from the Arecibo radio telescope have attracted criticism from those such as scientist and author David Brin who are concerned it may alert hostile ETs to humanity's presence.
The emerging field of nanotechnology — extremely small instruments and machinery — has also attracted doomsayers, including American scientist K.Eric Drexler, author of the landmark 1986 book Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology. Drexler warned that out-of-control "nanobots" replicating themselves could swiftly turn the entire planet into a mass of "grey goo".
But it seems the good old particle accelerator remains the main scapegoat. As noted by physicist Phil Dooley from the University of Sydney, previous colliders also copped lawsuits from those worried about the end of the world.
Dooley points out that the type of reactions in the Large Hadron Collider occur naturally all the time from cosmic ray interactions with the atmosphere. "No, the world won't end," he said. "The energies the collider will create are greater than any experiment we've ever seen before — closer to the big bang than we've ever witnessed. However, the particles are very small, so it's not really a big bang, more a nano-bang — an incredible amount of energy but in a tiny area.
"Even in the extremely unlikely event that a black hole is created, it would be so small that it would be almost impossible to detect, and not at all dangerous."
But, as worldwide reaction shows, old stereotypes still hold. "For the average person there is this fear of science and they like films that look dimly at the messianic mindset of scientists who don't know when to stop … boffins who believe in pure research so will go to any lengths," says Dooley. "It's like science versus humanism or something." (theage.com)