Fear and black holes

Everyone is scared. All the time. We wake up and ask us: ‘Will there be water left at the end of today?’, ‘Will terrorists bomb my tube later?’, ‘Will China and Russia attack as this evening?’, ‘Could Amy Winehouse make my kids start being addicted to drugs?’, ‘Does Gordon Brown try to put the bird flu virus in our tap water?’, ‘Will Sarah Palin really become vice president?’, and so on.
But what everyone seemed to have feared the most these days was a massive black hole that would first destroy Switzerland, then Europe and then the rest of our little world.
Crazy scientists from all over Europe were gathering near Switzerland’s Geneva somewhere under the earth to build the kill-the-world machine, was what the media told us.
Yeah, whatever. Even though scientists explained that this machine would not create black holes, or at least no black holes that could be harmful to our “peaceful” planet, the public and the media seem to have been attracted by the fear. The possibility that some mad scientists could destroy the world was just too good to not be written about. Even though the danger was not real.
Yesterday’s Süddeutsche Zeitung, a left-ish daily from Munich, called the Large Hadron Collider the Urknallmachine, the big-bang-machine. I liked the title and immediately thought of a funny conversation I had, the other day.
I was in a train from somewhere in Switzerland to Milan, as a probably 70-year-old man from Denmark sat opposite me and saw me reading something about the LHC in the Guardian. He looked at me and, after a while, warned me (in very bad English) of the danger of this scientific experiment.
Funny enough, he was not talking about the actual machine (“the closest men ever got to God,” as he put it) but about the damage the computer that calculated all the data could cause. The man said that to calculate all the data from the LHC, a new über-computer had to be developed.
This “super computer” is a network of many computers from all over the world. This massive system will (hopefully) be able to find out how our world came into existence. But, he said, if a hacker would hack into the system, it could be used to disconnect certain regions, maybe even an entire continent!!, from the inter-web.
See, that is something to fear, not a self-made black hole!! But then, the old man could have been a liar and not, as he claimed, a former professor from Copenhagen... Interesting story though, I think.
Schreiber