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The magic of science

Kate Chisholm

Wednesday, 10th September 2008

Big Bang Day (BBC Radio 4); The Essay (BBC Radio 3)

The Big Bang project is the largest scientific enterprise since the moon landings, and may on the surface appear a similarly fruitless waste of money ($10 billion has been quoted). But just as Apollo gave us Teflon, so Cern (which by the way stands for Conseil Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire) has given us the web and cancer-scanning machines as a by-product of physicists’ attempts to work out what might happen if protons are sent on a collision course with each other. Unlike Apollo there’s no national pride involved in the mission: Cern was set up with the post-war enthusiasm of the 1950s to bring scientists from different countries together to work on projects that would have nothing to do with military prowess but everything to do with human progress. It’s an optimism that now seems like ancient history — until you hear the physicists of Cern talking about their work.

Simon Singh’s afternoon series, Big Bang Day: Five Particles was the best way in to all of this, five short programmes of 15 minutes each explaining what all the fuss is about. Singh confessed that he had grown up wanting to be a ‘particle physicist’, which seemed extraordinary to me. I’ve heard about dark matter for years but have only just this week really discovered what particle physics is all about, and even then I’m not quite sure I’ve fully understood it. How do you know that you want to be not just a physicist, but a particle physicist, from the age of seven or eight? I was just beginning to get the hang of electrons and protons (‘Imagine sparks coming off a carpet when you walk across it; those are electrons’) when Singh introduced us to the mysterious question of sparticles and supernovas.

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Dodgy Geezer

September 12th, 2008 4:47pm

Good god, Kate, can't you even spell 'Dirac' correctly? And has your sub-editor never heard of this great Nobel-prize winner?

Please, just stay away from commenting on science. Not only you, but all the rest of the 'liberal' arty journalists. You don't know what you are talking about, you make fatuous and incorrect statements, and you start up scares amongst the rest of the uneducated masses which cost proper scientists time and trouble to allay..

Pelasgos

September 16th, 2008 6:12pm

Dodgy Geezer, why you scientists
have such an elevated opinion of
yourselves, do you think that
science moves the world? Money
does. Also, I don't think that people trust you that much.

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