From Big Bang to Little Whimper

You could almost hear the disappointment in the voices of the TV reporters covering the large hadron collider story yesterday. Nothing went wrong. No black holes were created. Geneva wasn't destroyed. The lab wasn't attacked and burned to the ground by a mob of angry villagers waving flaming torches and shouting "Kill the monster". Consequently, the visual aspect of their story simply consisted of them standing outside a building in Switzerland. You could see that even as they gave their reports, they were secretly hoping that sirens would start wailing and people would start running out of the building behind them - on fire. Consequently, the whole thing seemed something of a anticlimax, especially after the huge build-up the media had given it. But that's the problem with science - it is rarely spectacular, let alone mildly visually interesting. Whilst colliding particles at the speed of light sounds exciting, it doesn't look interesting. In fact, there's nothing at all to see.

Which, of course, is why the media loves to concentrate on the downside of scientific endeavour - the disasters, the nuclear bombs, radioactive leaks, horrible mutations and unspeakable human experiments. Nuclear explosions and two-headed homicidal maniacs look far more exciting than a building in Switzerland. Likewise, mad scientists make for better copy than hose nice rational characters dedicated to the expansion of human knowledge. It doesn't help that the average 'science correspondent' seems to have gained their entire knowledge of the subject from watching old black and white science fiction films on late night television. That's why they're so disappointed when they find that the average scientist doesn't have a private lab like Dr Frankenstein's - full of sparking electrical gear and brains in jars - in their basement, and instead work in some huge, clean research institute. If only more scientists were like Vincent Price or Peter Cushing, we might well be overrun by giant insects and surgically created monsters, but at least news reporting of science would be more interesting.