Big Bang Day or The End of the World as we Know It

By Mark Featherstone

Image from www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/sep/08/particlephysics.physics

Sometime on Wednesday 10th September Scientists at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, will turn on the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) or ‘God Machine’ in an attempt to re-create the conditions of the big bang which originally gave birth to the universe. The LHC, dubbed the ‘God Machine’, is the world’s largest particle accelerator. Constructed under the Earth’s surface near the French-Swiss border, the objective of the LHC is to fire particles around its 17-mile circumference 11,000 times every second before smashing them together to simulate the conditions at the moment of the birth of the universe. According to CERN scientists the colliding particles will produce temperatures 100,000 hotter than the sun and enable them to observe the production of the famous Higgs-Boson particle which, in theoretical terms at least, gives all other particles their mass or weight. Thus CERN scientists believe that they will be able to observe the very production of mass or, in philosophical terms, the emergence of something from nothing through conditions generated by the ‘God Machine’.

The history of modern culture is characterised by critiques of supposed scientific attempts to play God. In this respect the invention of the LHC is no different. Less than ten days before the proposed turn-on date for the ‘God Machine’, critics from the scientific community, led by German Chemist Otto Rossler, launched a legal bid against CERN in the European Court of Human Rights. Rossler’s claim was that the attempt to replicate the conditions of the big bang could inadvertently produce microscopic black holes which could subsequently grow uncontrollably until they swallowed the entire planet and everybody on it. CERN’s position, which was that theoretical evidence suggests that any microscopic black holes produced by the ‘God Machine’, would immediately collapse in on themselves long before they could have macroscopic effects, was upheld by EU scientists. As a result the clock is ticking. According to critics of the ‘God Machine’ if we are not swallowed by a black hole, we will suffer through the production of ‘strangelets’, a ‘vacuum bubble’, or a variety of other totally theoretical un-intended consequences.

Given that I am not a theoretical physicist, I am in no position to comment on the relative value of Rossler’s apocalyptic view, which seems to have been dismissed by the scientific community, but there is more to the ‘God Machine’ than its scientific significance. For sociologists and cultural critics what is significant about the LHC, and the various responses to its creation, which range from quasi-theological claims about unlocking the secrets of creation itself to apocalyptic fears about the collapse of the planet into a man-made black hole, is that it has captured the public imagination in ways that the theoretical science which underpins its construction never could. What is this wider cultural significance?

In the first instance the LHC’s promise to unlock the secrets of the origins of the universe touches humanity’s primal need to understand the conditions of its own existence. Long before the Ancient Greeks first began to develop theoretical physics, prehistoric people had contemplated the stars and imagined their own origins. Before science became the dominant mode of thought, the form of knowledge which we turn to in order to understand our own existence, people thought about the world through religion. In much the same way that the ideas of Newton, Darwin, and Einstein failed to unseat religion, it is unlikely that the ‘God Machine’, which may uncover the origins of the universe and eventually explain how nothing suddenly became something, will ever stop people believing in their various Gods, simply because what it will never be able to uncover, or provide, is the human ‘meaning’ of the universe. No matter what the ‘God Machine’ enables scientists to say, it will never allow them to tell us why life matters.

Perhaps one day in the near future, the ‘God Machine’ may allow scientists to explain how nothing became something, and thus solve one of the most vexing problems in the history of philosophy, but they will never be able to answer the more trouble question that haunts the only self-conscious animal on the planet. Given that there is something, rather than nothing, what is the significance of existence? Why does ‘the something’ matter? If, as modern philosophers have long suspected, there is no meaning in existence, how should we live? How can we live in a meaningless universe? The beauty of the religious answer to this question of existence was, of course, that it was insoluble, in that nobody could prove the existence of God one way or the other, and that the more or less likely existence of what philosopher’s call a prime mover meant that somebody or something had cared enough to invent people in the first place. What would it mean if we were to discover that the universe was truly self-generating and that explanations about origins do not require a prime mover?

The German writer Friedrich Nietzsche told us that God is Dead in the 19th century and dropped humanity into a meaningless void characterised by despair, boredom, and the violent will to create or impose meaning upon the world. Other writers took up Nietzsche’s challenge. The famous Russian writer Dostoyevsky expanded upon Nietzsche view. He believed that if there is no God everything and anything is permitted. In this context ‘everything permitted’ essentially meant that people could become Gods, that they could remake the world in their own image, and uncover the secular origins of the world and universe. Fast forward through the history of what sociologists call modernity, which takes in Mary Shelley’s original scientific dystopia Frankenstein, the technological nightmare of world war I, the Holocaust, the Atom Bomb, and Chernobyl, and it becomes clear that in many ways the fear of technology expressed in the court challenge to the ‘God Machine’ is not without precedent or in cultural terms really all that surprising.

Humans have a long history of fearing science and technology, dating back to the ancient myth of Prometheus, the titan who stole fire from the Greek Gods and had his liver eaten out by a vulture for his trouble, and the prediction that the ‘God Machine’ will create a black hole which will swallow the planet is simply the most recent in a long line of techno-scientific dystopias, which include the fear of computer technology, expressed in films such as The Terminator and The Matrix, and the fear of genetic engineering, examined by horror movies, such as Godsend. What horrifies people about science and new technology is the idea that even though humans have risen to the status of Gods in their heads, they are still prone to error and cannot be trusted with their new-found Godlike powers. Thus, in much the same way that everyday life is littered with good intentions gone bad, we suspect that the grand schemes of scientists will eventually lead to catastrophic consequences.

If we follow the logic of the French thinker, Paul Virilio, who has written about the idea of the accident, we may conclude that the problem with the ‘God Machine’ is that it offers a techno-scientific dystopia for a global age. Whereas the techno-scientific accidents which originated in the 19th century, such as train wrecks, threatened the lives of the people on the crashed train, and the techno-scientific accidents of the 20th century, such as Chernobyl, threatened the lives of people on a particular continent, the potential techno-scientific accident of the 21st century, the ‘God Machine’, threatens the existence of the planet itself. But beyond the obvious problem of the un-intended production of a black hole capable of swallowing the Earth, I think that the real human fear that the God Machine speaks to is the fear, or perhaps a better term is anxiety, that there is no real meaning in the universe, that everything ever created was simply an accident of colliding particles, a kind of cosmic crash, and that as a result nobody or nothing really matters to anybody or anything beyond humanity itself.

If this is, in fact, the case then it might be that we have been teetering on the brink of a black hole, a void of meaninglessness, which has allowed us to treat millions of people in the world like so many atomic particles devoid of meaning and significance, long before the LHC was invented or even imagined. In this respect we do not really need another doomsday scenario, a vision of world collapsing into a black hole, to drop us into a techno-scientific dystopia, because in many ways, and for many people, we are already living in a techno-scientific dystopia where life means very little. How, then, can we defend against our anxiety about meaninglessness, which I would argue has been projected onto the ‘God Machine’, and its potential to create a black hole destined to swallow the world, and generate some kind of human significance in the world? My answer would be that we must respond to the possibility of meaningless, and the idea that the creation of the universe was the result of colliding particles, by creating a meaningful social world and treating other people as more than stupid colliding particles. This is what the famous sociologist Emile Durkheim meant when he said that God is society. His view was that society, the place where we meet and talk to other people, is the space were meaning is created. There is no meaning outside of the human world. It is only when we recognise this fact, and restate the importance of the original ‘God Machine’, society, that we will be able to understand the value of the LHC without anxiety about the threat of global destruction.