Artist's Statement
What exactly the Large Hadron Collider will
do is something I can understand only in the most reductive,
metaphorical layman's terms, in rare, momentary satoris
I really have to strain for, and usually only when Brian
Greene, or sometimes Lisa Randall, explains it. The main
thing they’re hoping to accomplish is find evidence
of a Higgs Boson, the only elementary particle predicted
by the Standard Model not yet observed, and the one that
gives other particles mass. Do I really have any idea what
this means? I do not. What I do get is that it is only
at extremely high energy levels that certain phenomena
which would otherwise remain totally theoretical can be
observed. These gigantic supercolliders are the only way
to test some of the more otherworldly implications of particle
physics and string theory, such as the nature of dark matter
and the existence of higher dimensions. I find this cool.
The U.S. was to have built such a supercollider
in Texas, but congress cancelled funding for it back in
1993. Science is one of the stupider things I can think
of to get jingoistic about—it's up there with art
as one of the great collaborative intergenerational human
undertakings--but it still disappoints me that my own country,
which split the atom and landed a man on the moon, decided
it didn’t have the money to resolve some of the profoundest
questions about the nature of reality but did manage to
come up with funds for the destruction of Iraq. This seems
to me kind of like not being able to afford music lessons
for your daughter but somehow always having enough cash
on hand to buy cocaine every weekend. It was a symbolic
turning of the tide in this country, receding from our
high water mark of scientific preeminence. Now the Europeans
are hosting the project instead, while we’re still
debating the monkey trial.
It’s funny that evangelicals only
stage really organized outcries over evolution, rather
than, say, geology or particle physics. How come no picket
lines in front of the moon rock repository, where scientists
have blasphemously dated basalt back 4.5 billion years,
well before the appearance of the moon on Day Four of Creation
five thousand years ago? Why no demand for equal time for
Creationism at conferences on string theory, which doesn’t
acknowledge the hand of a divine creator in supersymmmetry?
Perhaps I'm belaboring the point. It is because they are
too stupid even to have ever heard of these things. None
of their sources of information--their pastors, Good
Morning America, USA Today, Time magazine--has told
them about bosons or or branes or the electroweak force.
Lately I find myself feeling less contemptuous
of Creationists than sorry for them. The creation myths
of religion were only primitive efforts to understand the
origin of the world and the nature of being in the absence
of any information. Now, for the first time in history,
we’re actually able to get at the answers--the actual,
correct answers--and most people are too blinded by their
emotional attachment to the old bedtime stories to look
at the truth now that it’s staring them in the face.
It’s especially depressing because the truth, insofar
as we’re able to apprehend it, is so much more elegant,
complex and beautiful, a far more aweful revelation, than
the crude fables of religion. Our spiritual lives may be
more impoverished, but our picture of this universe is
so shockingly immense and rich compared to the dwarfish,
arid worldview of five thousand years ago. I recently went
to Baltimore's the Walters Art Gallery to see an exhibit
of ancient maps and an ancillary exhibit of photos from
the Hubble telescope. Compare the crude Medieval maps that
show the earth as a disc divided cleanly into the continents
of Asia, Europe and Africa (with the Garden of Eden at
the center), with the Hubble's Deep
Field image—galaxies like handfuls of jewels,
each an unreachable island universe teeming with worlds
we’ll never know. A glimpse of this vision, like
seeing Zeus in all his glory, is enough to make you fall
to your knees and cover your eyes. The human imagination
is incommensurate to the mystery we inhabit. Biblical (or
Talmudic, or Koranic) literalists remind me of children
wrinkling their noses at Belon oysters and asking for more
Chef Boy-R-Dee. They just want the world to be as simple
as they are. (Which is one reason evangelicals, as a group,
hired a guy as dumb as they are for the job of running
the country; they hoped that intelligence wasn’t
that important, that guts or faith or “moral clarity” would
be enough, which, it turns out, sadly, no.)
And yet I share some of Carl Sagan’s
naive belief that if only science were more widely publicized
people would might take more of an interest in it, might
learn some skepticism, and might even, per Brian
Greene’s recent op-ed in the Times,
quench some of their thirst for wonder that’s otherwise
being lucratively slaked with cheap, dehydrating New-Agey
booze. Instead we get a steady diet of political gaffes
and celebrity gossip, sports and infotainment, Doritos
for the mind. (See my artist’s
statement for “Enough Local News” for more
of my mouthing off on this subject.) Oh, never mind me,
I’m just some snobby Ivory-Tower elitist who thinks
some board of philosopher-kings ought to confiscate all
the TVs and shove string theory and Proust down everyone's
throats. Forget it! Let’s go back to talking about
Miley or A-Rod or whoever.
In the interest of scientific literacy I
should clarify that there is just about no realistic possibility
that the LHC will generate a mini black hole, strangelet,
or any other phenomena that might destroy the world. Some
doofi did sue the LHC in a Hawaii District Court, demanding
that they, like, cease and desist until filing a more detailed
Environmental Impact Statement reassuring us that they
were not going to accidentally suck us all into Yuggoth.
You can read the LHC's safety report here, if
you're really worried about it.
Thanks to my friends Ellen, for good advice
on the Lovecraft panel, and Cynthia, for help thinking
up New York Post-style headlines. It's harder
than you'd think.
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