IP: black holes, physics exeriments, and the end of all things

[David Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

I quoted a bit moore than usual because I am disturbed by the section 
"playing at God" The "writer" forgets the millions saved by 
antibiotics and the fact that suggest it is not the Internal 
Combustion engine that de-sabilizes our atmosphere. I suspect ABCnews 
loves the anti-science tone of this guy.

Dave

Atlas Shrugs

Commentary

If scientists can be counted on for anything, it's for creating 
unintended consequences. (Michael Dougan)


Special to ABCNEWS.com

     Hoping to forestall the end of the world, I contacted Brookhaven 
immediately. "We certainly do not wish to destroy the earth," sniffed 
spokeswoman Diane Greenberg, who clearly has been fielding plenty of 
questions like mine. Then she sent me a statement by Brookhaven Lab 
Director John Marburger, entitled "On Consequences of RHIC 
Operations."

     "The amount of matter involved in the RHIC collisions is 
exceedingly small - only a single pair of nuclei is involved in each 
collision," Marburger states. "Our universe would have to be 
extremely unstable in order for such a small amount of energy to 
cause a large effect. On the contrary, the universe appears to be 
quite stable against releases of much larger amounts of energy that 
occur in astrophysical processes.

     "RHIC collisions will be within the spectrum of energies 
encompassed by naturally occurring cosmic radiation. The earth and 
its companion objects in our solar system have survived billions of 
years of cosmic ray collisions with no evidence of the instabilities 
that have been the subject of speculation in connection with RHIC."

Playing at God

Why am I not reassured by this? The short answer is that the 
experiment is conducted by human beings - the same folks who brought 
you the internal combustion engine, which threatens to destabilize 
the planet's climate, and powerful antibiotics, which ultimately 
created an invincible staphylococcus bacterium. In other words, 
technopride goeth before the fall.

     The longer answer is that Melville's scenario is perversely 
seductive in a Kubrickian sort of way. Think of Dr. Strangelove  and 
2001: A Space Odyssey. There are few things quite as persuasive as 
the vision of humans, their thirst for knowledge and progress 
insatiable, stumbling on a way to destroy the planet. It is an 
end-of-the-world scenario that has launched a thousand movie scripts.

     Human progress has always had a nasty habit of producing 
unintended consequences - usually because the prideful progenitors of 
progress insist on pooh-poohing any possibility of danger. Now, in 
recreating the beginning of the universe, we are essentially playing 
at being God - an unforgivable offense, punishable, as tragedians in 
the Bible and other literature have prophesied for centuries, by 
annihilation.
....

Fred Moody is the author of I Sing the Body Electronic: A Year with 
Microsoft on the Multimedia Frontier and of The Visionary Position: 
The Inside Story of the Digital Dreamers Who Made Virtual Reality a 
Reality. His column appears on alternate Wednesdays.

> http://www.abcnews.go.com/sections/tech/FredMoody/moody990914.html