The hunt for a theoretical particle reveals an alarming trend in science: the competition to be the next ‘great man’—at any cost.
A surefire way to get yourself onto a roll of “great men”—if that’s your bag—is to make a revolutionary contribution to science. Newton had gravity, Einstein had relativity; even the nuclear-bomb guy gets remembered more positively than not these days. Great scientists are almost synonymous with great men.
True, the grand discoveries these men made have sometimes become tools for wrongdoing, and certainly they’ve been the source of violent disagreement—but the moral character of the men themselves, overwhelmingly defined by their objective, noble quest for knowledge and understanding, usually remains unimpeachable.
As I’ve argued in this column before, though, flattening our most brilliant historical figures into nothing more than “great men of science” does a disservice, both to the men themselves and to our own understanding of their legacy. Only when we dig deeper are the best stories revealed, along with my focus today: the most alarming trends.
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Let me reassure any scientists reading that I don’t intend this column to be one more about the world-ending capabilities of particle accelerators, or the sort of scaremongering that appeared in many media outlets alongside the inauguration of Europe’s Large Hadron Collider last year; I have neither the technical knowledge nor the sensationalist streak to write one of those.
Still, because particle accelerators are (thanks to the LHC) pretty well known these days, they seem like a good place to start.
Particle accelerators, if you don’t know, are essentially very large racetracks for very small dogs. Built in giant, doughnut-shaped tunnels, they’re a place where physicists can steer beams of particles ’round and ’round in ever-faster circles, until—unlike real dog racing, thankfully—the competitors smash into something. In the resulting fireworks, with any luck, discoveries get made, and Ian Sample’s recent book Massive: The Missing Particle That Sparked the Greatest Hunt in Science (Basic Books, $25.95) deals, as the title suggests, with the quest for one discovery in particular: the Higgs boson (sometimes called “the God particle”).
The Higgs is a particle predicted by theoretical physics—by a man named Peter Higgs, natch—that’s thought to be responsible for endowing everything in the universe with mass. For theoretical particle physics that’s a relatively exciting idea, but as a story the “hunt” for the Higgs is pretty odd, because, though Sample artfully avoids saying it in such blunt terms, nobody has ever actually come close to finding one in nature—so the book feels like it’s still waiting for an ending. (It’s like watching an episode of House where the patient dies at the end without Hugh Laurie having any idea why.)
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What merit Massive does have lies in its provocative synthesis of all the reasons why particle accelerators are a great idea, even given the tiny chance that they might destroy the world. (Actually, says Sample, they might destroy the whole universe—but who’s counting?)
Essentially the case for these high-stakes experiments has two parts: one, that it’s theoretically so unlikely a particle accelerator would cause the end of human existence it’s not worth worrying about; and two, that the potential benefits of discovering the Higgs (or anything else) far outweigh those outlandish worries.
Again, particle physics isn’t my area of expertise, so I won’t address the first part. But I would like to at least give the second a rigorous cross-examination.
Is there really enough benefit to society in discovering a theoretical particle like the Higgs—or a theoretical element on the periodic table—to justify the enormous costs, whether real or potential?
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Imagine the situation in a slightly different way: you’re looking after your neighbor’s kids, and you have two possible ways to occupy them. First, there’s a Wii. Second, there’s a puzzle, but with a few wrinkles: it has 50 million pieces; you’ve lost the lid so you don’t know what the picture is; and when two particular puzzle pieces are put together in a certain way—you don’t know which ones, or how—it destroys the universe. (This isn’t your father’s Milton Bradley.)
Now, in all likelihood, these kids will be able to fiddle with that puzzle forever without anything bad ever happening, and on the plus side as the picture builds up it turns out to be a highly accurate theory of particle physics. But still: wouldn’t you rather play it safe and give them the Wii?
This might sound like a stupid analogy. Actually, in terms of practical consequences, it’s less analogy than description of the real stakes in particle accelerator experiments. None of the physicists involved can say with any certainty that they won’t destroy the world, and the only concrete benefit they can offer is that they’ll have a better grasp of their esoteric theories. Even Sample, a keen apologist, can’t manage much more than the limp “when we make progress in pure science, technological benefits”—the Internet is his most recent example—“often follow.”
Perhaps that’s true, but note the “often”: is it really worth even the tiny possibility of ending all life on Earth—or in the universe—for the equally small chance that we might come up with the next Facebook?
In any case, regardless of what you think about the philosophical issues, and regardless of how worried you are about a black hole devouring the Earth, the LHC draws an estimated 1,000 gigawatt hours of electricity per year, about enough to power 100,000 American homes for that same period of time—an environmental cost Sample and most other LHC apologists fail to mention. Given how much other scientists are screaming about global warming these days, that alone seems inexcusable: the LHC probably is unlikely to destroy the very fabric of existence, but it may yet destroy life on Earth more indirectly.
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Where Massive deals mainly with Peter Higgs and the contemporary hunters for his namesake, Sam Kean’s The Disappearing Spoon, and Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World From the Periodic Table of the Elements (Little Brown & Co., $24.99) is a more wide-ranging and light-hearted survey of the sundry contributors, over the last several centuries, to that staple of high-school chemistry labs: the periodic table.
Kean’s book is a fascinating collection of character sketches and trivia items—the eponymous disappearing spoon is a reference to a favorite practical joke among chemists, in which a teaspoon is fashioned out of gallium, a metal that looks like aluminum but melts at 84F—and for that reason is generally engaging.
But as with Massive, the central “plot device” here is awkward, and at several points the book feels aimless and unsatisfying. And—also as with Massive—the larger underlying problem seems to be an assumption by the author that the interestingness of stories like this is self-evident; that scientific discovery has merit by definition.
Once again, though, I’m left wondering if that’s true. Is there really enough benefit to society in discovering a theoretical particle like the Higgs—or a theoretical element on the periodic table—to justify the enormous costs, whether real or potential?
That might sound closed-minded, but there should be more to science than getting your name attached to a discovery, and when reading these two books it sometimes feels like that sort of childish competitiveness is the driving force behind a lot of contemporary empirical work. And while some might call that competitiveness part of being a man, it’s not necessarily a sign of being a great man—so instead of maintaining the Become-a-Great-Man-Quickly machine of modern science at its current levels, perhaps its time we turned down the power.
—Particle accelerator photo via Wimox/Flickr
Great scientists are almost synonymous with great men.
Nope. Many great scientists are great women.
The same thing could be said for nearly any field of study. It is awfully critical to assume someone chooses their career other than to be famous, well maybe for actors and musicians, but leaps and bounds a different story. I assure you the grand majority of scientists choose their career for nearly the same reasons anyone else.
*It is awfully critical to assume someone chooses their to be famous
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Science is a competition? Who is the winner besides, well, everyone.
But seriously if you think there is some competition to be recognized by science you can use your own personal knowledge for this one:
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/lists/all/index.html
This is a list of all the Nobel prize winners divided into their respective fields. Go take a look and see how many of these you know. 10%? 5%? How many 21 century scientists AND their achievements can you name off. You are probably not the minority not knowing many. Your claim that scientists are scientist to become great men quick is false.
The simple fact of the matter is that cosmic rays (charged particles moving at nearly the speed of light) strike the earth millions of times a second. Many of these impacts have energies thousands or millions of times greater than the maximum energy the LHC is capable of imparting to a colliding particle pair. Let me repeat this for emphasis: Particle collisions millions of times more powerful than those generated by the LHC have already happened, some of them struck atoms in your own body. You are still here, the planet is still here. Your accusations and baseless fears are… Read more »
I think you have fallen into the same issue of Hubris that most theists fall into: the very arrogance that we have the power and capability to destroy the universe. Silly at best. Absolutely stupid to worry about.
Einstein played a huge role in the development of nuclear weapons! His special and general relativity created a little key that opened a huge door E=MC2 (which was almost the beginning of the manhattan project)! I don’t see colliding lead ions to see quark-gluon plasma and see what was actually happening in the beginning of the universe as that intensely scary. Yes anti matter is scary but the amount we can actually keep around and for how long during an experiment are relatively miniscule. As far as energy consumption, do you know where they get their energy from? I honestly… Read more »
I agree with the scientific freedom argument in principle, but the difference between the LHC guys and Einstein (or Galileo, or Pasteur, or Planck, or…) is that none of the stuff those scientists of the past did had any potential (tiny or otherwise) to destroy the universe. And since most other branches of science are governed by ethical standards that evaluate projects according to potential harm to human subjects, I don’t see why physics should be any different. (I’d happily sit Einstein down and give him a stern talking-to if he was pulling LHC-level stunts, too; since all he did… Read more »
In questions of science the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. ~Galileo The history of science teaches that the greatest advances in the scientific domain have been achieved by bold thinkers who perceived new and fruitful approaches that others failed to notice. If one had taken the ideas of these scientific geniuses who have been the promoters of modern science and submitted them to committees of specialists, there is no doubt that the latter would have viewed them as extravagant and would have discarded them for the very reason of their originality… Read more »
While I really enjoyed reading this article, Andrew, I have a giant bone to pick with your thesis. Regardless of how these two books made you “feel,” scientific research is no more governed by “childish competitiveness” than writing is governed by a congenital self-absorption. This isn’t to say that these human qualities don’t exist in both fields, but you’re missing the bigger picture by a long shot. The LHC isn’t a lark or meant to explore what the article dubbed “esoteric theories.” And it most certainly isn’t meant to birth the next Facebook. (God forbid.) The accelerator is the result… Read more »
That puzzle analogy reminded me of my childhood. My bff growing up lived in a really sketchy house. There was a lightswitch at one end of the house by the bathroom that we weren’t allowed to touch because it would do bad things to the house (rumor had it) if we flipped it on. It remained taped down the entire time they lived there. I’ve always just accepted that, and never asked why it was that way, or what was actually wrong. To this day, I still don’t know. Does there have to be a benefit to anything so long… Read more »