This last week’s episode of the TV show “Bones”, named “The Science in the Physicist”, featured the Large Hadron Collider. Specifically, a suspect in the murder of a theoretical physicist sent over a hundred death threats to the victim because he feared the end of the world when the LHC turned on. In the show, he quotes the chance of such a thing happening as 1/50,000,000, and states now that he knows the victim is dead he will sleep 50,000,000 times better.
What the show failed to note – and here, I do understand that there is only so much science one can cram in these programs – is that the LHC has already happened about 400,000 times in the earth’s atmosphere since the earth formed [1]. The suspect claimed to be very smart and also an “agnostic” (and therefore due to the latter could not be a young earth creationist). The show’s main character, Dr. Temperence Brennen, is usually snarky in her rationality, so I’m surprised that a writer didn’t stick the comment about the earth’s atmosphere in her mouth.
It’s worth keeping in mind that while “Bones” is a fun show, with quirky science (as my wife noted in her public lecture, why did it take the characters a whole hour to figure out that hydrofluoric acid was dissolving the bones of a body without harming the tissue?), it’s a TV show and it doesn’t get everything right. It does capture the fear of these kinds of unknowns in a palpable way, albeit putting them in the mouth of the wrong character. The right character to be afraid of the LHC destroying the earth would have been somebody who didn’t understand the energy of cosmic rays, the age of the earth, or many other things.
This character claimed to have a degree in physics, but be working in the private sector. Somebody with a degree in physics should have thought about this problem a little, about the tremendous energy of cosmic rays and the tremendous age of the earth.
The difference between the natural version of the LHC, and the human made version of the LHC, is simply this: we get to see it happen this time. But all the so-called bad effects should have already happened. Thanks, earth.
[1] http://steve.cooleysekula.net/blog/2008/09/09/black-holes-and-peer-reviewed-revelations/
