Large Hadron Collisions Between Science and Society

My latest Science Progress column just went up: It's about the controversies surrounding CERN's Large Hadron Collider, which many people crazily think is going to open up black holes, turn us all into strangelet particles, etc. There's no basis for it--but, there was a good deal of basis for scientists to expect this kind of public reaction. For the Large Hadron saga is, as I write,

...a particularly noteworthy example of what is today almost a general principle regarding major scientific events that draw mass attention. Members of the public, having scarcely followed the underlying research, and nourishing very different initial assumptions, rarely see such developments in the way that scientists do. In some cases, they may strongly recoil on grounds that to scientists might seem simply irrational.

Take, for instance, the 2006 vote by the International Astronomical Union to demote Pluto from planetary status. The decision of a relatively small group of scientists, made on the strict basis of technical considerations, prompted a global backlash that is still ongoing. In such cases, the public, which hasn't been monitoring developments in science, is suddenly shocked to hear what is going on; and the scientists, who haven't been monitoring the public, are just as surprised at the backlash.

And yet these are critical moments for the world's scientific community, centrally because it's so hard to get science on the public radar to begin with. When it finally does occur, you don't want it to be over something petty, like the Pluto issue, or something silly, like fears that the Large Hadron Collider will make us all cease to exist. The good news is that such developments spark dramatic levels of interest in science; but the bad news is that they're highly negative encounters with the scientific community, rather than positive ones

You can read the full column here.