This week got kicked off with the news of a lawsuit, filed in Hawaii, to stop the turn on of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The week got weirder. The story got some traction on the comedy show circuit. “The Daily Show” and “Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me” both featured some ripping on the idea of physicists and their crazy supercollider that could destroy the Earth. Jon Stewart asked his guest, who had written a book about bad science (yikes?), whether the physicists at LHC cared that turning it on might destroy the earth with black holes. The guest made it sound like all we wanted to do was study a bunch of silly particles, without regard for the rest of the world. Similarly, on “Wait Wait”, one of the panel members quipped that we don’t need to turn on this machine to understand the early universe. “It was darker than it is now,” she quipped, “and there were no good restaurants.”
Douglas Adams might disagree with that last one…
I know these are comedy show, but it kills me a little inside to be laughed at. I’ve never enjoyed the feeling of being the laughing stock. On the other hand, if we’re right and we get new benefits to the world as a result of all this hard work to understand the universe, who will be laughing last?
