It’s not every day that scientific researchers need to defend themselves against charges of destroying humanity.
And yet, a group of several dozen physicists associated with the Large Hadron Collider may be getting pretty good at it.
Just eight months after fighting off accusations that their $10-billion particle-smashing project in Switzerland might create microscopic black holes that would devour the Earth, the scientists are now explaining why the world’s largest Christian church can’t easily be annihilated with antimatter.
The occasion is the opening this past weekend of the new Tom Hanks movie Angels & Demons, in which a secret society opposed to the Catholic Church tries to destroy the Vatican. The attackers use a small amount of antimatter made at the Hadron collider and stolen from its host institution, CERN, the European particle-physics laboratory where some of the film was shot.
The movie might have meant more bad news for the Large Hadron Collider, which not only fought legal claims over the black-hole controversy but also managed to operate for only nine days last September before one of the connections linking two of its 1,600 giant magnets melted. That triggered a cascade of other problems that shut down the machine for a year of repairs.
But many of the scientists associated with the collider—who number about 1,700 from 94 U.S. universities and national laboratories—are seizing the opportunity Angels & Demons presents.
“It’s a godsend,” says Joseph M. Izen, a professor of physics at the University of Texas at Dallas, who delivered one of the more than 50 lectures scheduled worldwide to explain to moviegoers the actual science of antimatter.
“Life presents just a couple of these opportunities when the public is paying attention, really paying attention to science, and in this case it’s a movie which talks about antimatter and is set at CERN,” Mr. Izen says. The film is “a chance to tell our story.”
That story includes the numerous benefits already realized by humankind from quantum mechanics in general and particle-smashing colliders in particular. Devices such as the Hadron collider are designed to help scientists discover the fundamental elements that form the universe. Practical applications have included critical technologies underlying medical-scanning equipment, more-durable automobile tires, food preservation, and the Internet.
Antimatter is another of the accelerator’s products. Most kinds of particles found in the matter of the universe have associated antiparticles that are equal in mass and in other properties such as average lifetime and magnetic strength, but carry the opposite electrical charge and magnetic direction. And particles and antiparticles do give off energy when combined.
But, as Mr. Izen and the others have been explaining to audiences gathered in theaters, science centers, and university lecture halls, antimatter isn’t quite as easy to make and transport as Angels & Demons suggests.
Antimatter can only be produced in extremely minute quantities by advanced particle accelerators such as those at CERN and Fermilab, the government-owned laboratory near Chicago. Yet the fictional plotters pursued by Mr. Hanks are depicted as having more antimatter than Fermilab, a top producer, would make in 100 million years.
And if not held in a vacuum by the strong magnetic fields of those accelerators, particles of antimatter immediately combine with regular matter, making impossible the movie’s plot device that antimatter could be carried around in a small battery-powered container.
Mr. Izen and his fellow researchers aren’t typically trained or experienced in public debate, and they can quickly find themselves disagreeing on how much detail to provide, what risks and uncertainties to discuss, and how much potential danger is really present.
When activists first began suggesting the Hadron collider could produce a black hole that would destroy the Earth, CERN “took a conscious decision not to be so proactive about it,” says the science agency’s spokesman, James D. Gillies.
“In hindsight,” Mr. Gillies says, “I think we would have been a little bit more proactive about it, because it became a much bigger story, to be perfectly honest, than we ever anticipated.”
Others believe the public still doesn’t need to know all the details and uncertainties. They include Karen Gibson, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pittsburgh now involved in experiments at Fermilab, who is credited with conceiving the Angels & Demons lecture series.
Scientists need to do a better job of helping taxpayers understand what research they are financing and why, Ms. Gibson says. But she thinks scientists can also go too far, especially when the subject is complex and has the potential to scare people.
So she was chagrined when some physicists involved in the black-hole controversy told questioners that they couldn’t rule out any chance of Earth’s being destroyed by a black hole, because nothing can be absolutely guaranteed. “That’s just the wrong answer,” Ms. Gibson says “You don’t have to make the statistical argument, probably, in these things.”
Mr. Izen, in fact, says he has a “zinger” ready for any audience member who might still ask whether a black hole created by a particle accelerator might devour the Earth. A black hole is an entity with a gravitational field so powerful that nothing can escape it. But the tiny black holes created by particle collisions are so minuscule they have nothing nearby to suck in, and are therefore believed to simply “evaporate,” Mr. Izen says.
That’s just what Ms. Gibson’s mother told people at her local gym, says Ms. Gibson, who sees an up side to the black-hole controversy. “I was so proud,” she says “because my mother is not a scientist.”
