Happy Birthday to the Large Hadron Collider

Today is the five year anniversary of the first experiments performed at the  Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the centerpiece of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in the suburbs of Geneva, Switzerland.  There, more than 10,000 physicists and engineers are probing the fundamental structure of the universe by smashing particles together at speeds near that of light and watching the results, hoping to develop insights into the basic laws of nature.

While this is way cool, I caution:

• There is no guarantee that humankind will ever know the truth about the ultimate building blocks of the universe.  We evolved in a certain direction, e.g., spatial perception in three dimensions – which poses a problem, given that there are apparently many more. I hate it when that happens.

• The problem of sustainability could take us out before we get too much further along in our investigations. Population growth, over-consumption of resources, toxicity, ocean acidification, loss of biodiversity, the rapid mutation of pathogenic microbes, climate change and the resultant shortages of water and food all scare the heck out of me.

Having said that, happy birthday to the LHC and Godspeed to the brilliant particle physicists (“smarticles” as my daughter would say) at CERN.