GUEST POST BY TOM WHYNTIE
Physics isn’t really renowned for its „laugh out loud“ moments. So when the Large Hadron Collider broke down last year, after only just over a week of running, a new and rich seam of science-based comedy gold appeared in the lithosphere of human endeavour. It wasn’t immediately obvious – it was only when the end-of-year panel quiz fest began that most comedians, indeed most non-CERNites, started asking about just what had happened to the (in)famous Big Bang Machine. „They broke it? After only nine days? You’re joking!“
Sadly, they weren’t.
I was there, over a year ago now, when the news broke. It was a seemingly typical Friday night on the terrace of CERN’s imaginatively named „Restaurant 1″. You could almost see the wave of despair wash over the assembled physicists as the rumours passed from one plastic table to the other. Some were shouty. Some settled on a quiet contemplation of how it would affect their painstakingly planned research programmes. Most went to get more beer.
A lot of the what I heard that night foreshadowed what we saw on „Have I got News for You“, „Mock the Year“, etc. – there were many wry smiles and sarcasm-laced post-dictions on display that seem to be part and parcel of a culture that expects, and almost relishes, failure. In the talks I give to schools and the general public about CERN and the LHC, I’ll try and laugh it off too. I’ll ask, almost rhetorically, how it was that these „experts“ were not only at home to Mr Cock-Up, but put balloons on the door, sent him a Facebook invite and texted him the postcode for the TomTom? How it was that, even though we supposedly had the power to destroy the Universe as we knew it (depending which nut-job blog you happened to read), and certainly recreate the conditions close to its very beginning, the only bang under Switzerland happened when a dodgy bit of soldering caused several tonnes of helium to escape from our collider and put science on hold for more than a year?
That tendency to „laugh it off“, is, for me at least, part of a defence mechanism – because it was disappointing. Not on the scientific level – as the CERN Press Office rightly continues to stress, setbacks and getting it wrong are an intrinsic part of pioneering science. The LHC is a 20+ year project. But for human beings (and yes, we are human beings), a year is a long time. It’s a year longer away from your family and friends. It’s a year longer of your requests for a whole pint of beer being met with a disdainful raise of the waiter’s eyebrow. And for some it’s worse than that. Some people will retire from a career-long involvement with the project without seeing those protons smash together. Some students promised real data for their PhD thesis for the umpteenth year in a row will submit a „unique contribution to knowledge“ based only on computer simulations, denied, for the moment at least, new insights on reality from the subterranean atom-smashing that they have painstakingly helped to prepare for.
So how does it affect us now, as we prepare for „Switch On 2.0″? I can only speak for myself, but the second time around has been more difficult. How excited can you/should you get? Should I bother getting rid of every little bug in my computer code, or should I book myself on the next EasyJet flight to Gatwick, head back to London and try and crack the lucrative(?!) science/comedy circuit? Of course, we carry on. We work on trying to get it right – as far as you can get anything right in science. Nobody said it would be easy. I’m not sure if anyone said it would be this hard, but we have to keep in mind that what really is amazing is that it’s happening at all – the sheer scale of the engineering needed, the sheer level of international co-operation required, make this an achievement regardless of the actual results.
As I write this, protons have been injected into a few sections of the tunnel – the first we’ve seen since last year. We then need to get them going all the way around the ring, and then smashing into each other, and then smashing into each other at high energy. It’s looking good, but there’s a long way to go and a lot of work to do. So we keep going, and we do the best we can.
Even if it doesn’t work this time, one can always resort to comedy. When I think about what might happen if I don’t get to put real data in my PhD thesis, I’m reminded of what a fellow student, who finished her PhD on the LHC last year, said in a Radio 4 interview we did together. She was asked if, knowing that she definitely wouldn’t get data from the Geneva-based black hole machine into her write-up, she would be disappointed. Without batting an eyelid, she stressed the importance of the preliminary work in getting everything that followed right, that it was a long-term and hugely collaborative project, and finished her response with the immortal line:
„Well, it’s not the end of the world, is it?“
Tom Whyntie is a PhD student at Imperial College London and winner of FameLab 2009. He is currently based at CERN.
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