Large Hadron Collider is a GO

Well today is a great day for those of us who complete science nerds Large Hadron Collider was fired up at CERN. Experiments to be conducted at CERN will help us understand the fundamental nature of the universe and perhaps ultimately enable us to understand gravity. It is very clear that scientists at CERN are very excited about the success of this first day; the time of this writing both beams have now completed at least one circuit after the tunnel. In fact several of them have got together and put together a “rap” which I recommend as both educational and fun.

WARNING RANT ABOUT TO START!!!!

It’s somewhat disappointing that while the European Union was able to generate the will to finance this quite remarkable set of experiments attempts to do the same here in the USA were squashed by our politicians when they removed funding from a similar project that had been planned by US scientists. The level of anti-intellectual Ludditism that we see in American society is truly worrying given a that our current dominance as a world power is based entirely upon our leading edge in science and technology.

Perhaps it is appropriate that Neil Stephenson’s new book “Anthem” should also have come out this month, a book that deals with a society in which those who might be considered the scientists are sequestered away from the rest of society. Some time ago C.P. Snow talked about the two cultures and the problems of communicating with those in the sciences. This problem seems to be getting worse and perhaps in the future we will see two cultures arising here in the US one a technocracy made up of a relatively small number of individuals who understand science and technology and a second in which the rest of the population are mired in a society based on superstition, wasteful and pointless consumerism and anti-intellectualism.

That we might be moving in that direction can be seen by the fact that several of the scientists who are part of the Large Hadron Collider programme have been receiving death threats from individuals who believe the nonsense that they read on the Internet concerning the possibility of the LHC causing the end of the world.

For many years United States has been a mecca for those of us who wished to work in the sciences, many of the achievements that have led to the American predominance in the sciences came about because of the continual influx of scientists from abroad. Growing anti-intellectualism, meaningless government regulation and the growth of high-powered scientific centres all around the world significantly challenge the modern United States. We need leaders, and it really doesn’t matter what political party they belong to, who understand the importance of science, science education and wide-spread scientific literacy to the future economic health of the United States of America without which, like the Roman Empire before us, we will be on the long slow slope into decline and superstitious chaos.