Todays question came about from all the media attention on the The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) which is the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator complex, intended to collide opposing beams of protons with very high kinetic energy. The question I posed was
“With the LHC now fired up are we wrong trying to play god? Or is it a good thing?”
Danclements was first to answer with ”I don’t think the LHC falls under the realm of God Playing, we won’t reach that until we start altering the human genome.” Elfinamsterdam added “I don’t think its trying to play god, I think we need to reenact things in order to discover how they work. To understand nature. We need to play with it and take it apart. As with many things this is the best way to learn. Ignorance isn’t always bliss. Physics is the understanding of how the universe works. These experiments help us understand where we came from.”
I mentioned to Elfinamsterdam that “I still personally think creating an energy 100000 times hotter then the sun in a pipe 100 meters underground very dangerous” her response was swift “In specific yes, I think its dangerous. In general reenacting circumstances and situations is the only way to learn. bit like cycling here, in theory taking your 6yr old kid to school on your bike is a good idea, in practice allowing her to stand on the parcel carrier with her hands on your shoulders as you cycle through traffic is rather dangerous! Id say it is dangerous alright! no? both CERN and the cyclists could be in for a nasty surprise, lets hope they both go to plan”
It was great to see Bigsteve1275 back answering with “in some cases yeah would be good to find a cure for cancer but trying to recerate the big bang ! Not the best idea along with GM food and dolly the sheep.” I piped in with “also creating the big bang opens up the next never ending question where did the particles come from to create THAT bang.” to which he replied “LOL yeah could also put an end to the question of god”
Icedcoffee came in late this evening with his reply “God? It’s all about the science. Where did we all come from?? while also trying not to get into a huge debate about this; beliefs and such playing ‘master of the universe’ maybe… im still confused what they hope to do with the knowledge, they can’t do any harm.”
This whole experiment really has got divided views, and all we can do is wait and see what comes of it in a few weeks time.
I have also decided to move question time from the mornings to the evenings instead, I think 8.15am is far to early to be asking these sorts of questions, so join me next week after 5.30 for another question that is on my mind.
Thanks as always to all todays contributers.
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Was that question designed to rile the scientists amongst your readership?
Sorry John, but I personally think it’s such a poorly thought out question. Did you take some time to contemplate what reaction that would get — I hope so at least — but then I’m afraid I really dislike what your attempting to do here.
Anyhow moving on… relating Religious beliefs to Science and then pitting one against the other and then further also assume that if it was ‘Playing God’ then assuming that doing so is bad thing? Who made you Judge, Jury and Executioner?
Moving on again… Elf had some good points, as for it being dangerous — well the best minds of our generation has grouped together planned, replanned, and replanned further - they’ve then redeisgned, tweaked, measured to the the nanometre every single aspect of the LHC and repeated every step 100s of times to ensure it was correct. This is not some new technogology we’re testing. It’s just a bigger experiment than what we and the americans are already doing at the moment and have been doing for the last 50 years. Without those experiments we would not have anything like the understanding of the universe we live in today. But our understanding of this universe is still flawed… we still can’t account for mass in our standard model of the universe, and we can’t tie the 4 forces of the universe together, the mathematics we use to describe what we understand about the universe on a quantum level is ugly and at times, even arbitrary. So it’s clear to anyone who understands anything that we’ve learnt so far on our journey into space-time that we are missing something fundamental… The discovery of the Higgs particle (the particle assumed to be the particle associated to the force of gravity) would make everything piece together nicely, and if we don’t find it then the result of that is even more exciting - as it means we have made some fundamental errors in our whole view of the universe.
Fear is an irrational response to lack of knowledge. People are afraid of the LHC because they don’t understand it, or haven’t taken the time to try to understand it. The press pray on the common fears of the people and whip up the masses in a media frenzy to sell their poorly-fabricated stories - and some people keep this bad meme perpetuating because it can cause an interest debate or provide more readership.
I have faith in the 1000s of brilliant minds that designed and built the LHC and I have no worries about it what-so-ever. It’s not ‘Playing God’ unless of course you also feel lighting a fire is, but whose to say that playing God is a bad idea? Just looking around me, shows to me that it seems like s/he needs a little help as it is, and I also know if something I’d created actually self-maintained itself most of the time - it would get a lot more respect from me than something that was very needy of my time and effort.
exactly the sort of answer I was hoping for, I have to say the whole god thing ain’t based on religius beliefs more on the fact that people have called the particle they are hoping to find the “god” particle. Anyhow these questions are put forward to try to get views from both sides of the fence, so I do think my question still stands as a good one. It got a great response from you didnt it!
This is nothing to be afraid of. The machine is a big bad monstrous machine , but what it is tryinig to achieve is very common. It is trying to collide two protons head to head in a controlled environment so that we can observe the happening and get detailed recordings of it.
The collision of hadrons (as in Large Hardron Collider - LHC ) happens in nature with cosmic rays hitting our athmosphere. As we can’t predict when a ray will hit earth, and most of this happens in the high athmosphere we need the LHC to recreate this in the “laboratory”. The risk assessment have been done on the basis that this happens in nature. It is estimated that what the LHC is enacting has happened about 100 000 times before in nature. As such it is safe, the safety is not based on scientific theories but nature as we know and have observed it.
Personally I think the fear of this has roots in “Angels and demons” by Dan Brown. I found “Davinci Code” entertaining, not having any feeling about the sloppy interpretation of christian history. Angel and demons hav cern and particle physics playing the role as christianity did in the davinci code - i found that silly but still entertaining. After reading it I can relate more to the critics of the davinci code…
As a reply to “Are we trying to play god” I’ll say that I belive that if there is a god or similar entity watching over us his/her/it wish would be to gain a larger understanding of our universe. To those saying science can answer all I ask “what was before the big bang” - or - “what is outside the universe”.
If I hadn’t gone into computer science I’d maybe be on of the scientist studying particle physics at CERN.
PS - dont forget that CERN gave us the web - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee !
As Øyvind correctly states the CERN scientists defend the safety of the experiments saying that the collider is enacting collisions that have happened about 100 000 times before in nature. However almost in the same paragraph of their publicity materials they also excitedly point out that the collider is the (or at least one of the very few) coldest place in the universe. … so these collisions may take place in nature, but they don’t take place under the same conditions…. hmmmm?
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