"There is still a great deal of the universe we don’t know. In fact, most of it is beyond our grasp and so far, every time we’ve stepped into an unknown realm of nature, we’ve come away all the better for it."
Hopefully the CERN particle accelerator will be used to reinforce scientific truth instead of enforcing political truth. To this end the hadron collider is scheduled to investigate the ideas proposed by Heinrik Svensmark.

The Large Hadron Collider is just another machine.

No doubt Robert Hooke saw "scary" things when he looked down through his microscope, as did Galileo in peering upwards with his telescope. But that didn't stop them from seeing the wonder of those "unseen" worlds hidden from view but which deeply affected everyday life.

The LHC will just as surely open new doors and windows for us, and just as surely will make us ask new questions, requiring new answers and showing us even more "scary" things.

Man, I thought all that talk of of creating a mini-black hole, or creating stranglet soup was just one big joke. I had no idea people actualy took that stuff seriously.

We need better education!

(Man, I've just had a scary thought that all those I.D. people arn't just a comedy troup, that they actualy belive that stuff... nah.. that one is just to far out there.)

"But to be afraid of the Large Hadron Collider is like saying, 'Don’t look through that new telescope, you might see something scary!'"

I wish someone like you was around during Galileo's day. And Darwin's. Mind you, I think you'd have been publicly flogged for your viewpoint in those days.

Some of the folks here are coming close to the right reason for promoting fear of science, but aren't quite reaching it. On top of comments already posted, I'd dare suggest that people in power have the most to lose in the quest for knowledge. This includes the likes of Stephen Harper, who wouldn't even acknowledge Canadian contributions and a Nobel Prize winning effort on climate change.

"Hm, so the Earth wasn't created in six days after all. I wonder what else my pastor is wrong about..." This is dangerous thinking, you know.

I don't think anyone is afraid of adventure. To be fair a lot of science is beyond the layman's conception and what was being said could potentially go wrong was that the world could end. That's a big thing to try and digest.

Given that so much of what science has produced has been as a double edged sword, from atomic energy to industrial pollution, is it really any surprise that people have hesitations and anxieties about end results?

The tone of this article was perhaps too condescending and failed to account for why people have fears in the first place.

The problem today is that the internet exponentially increases the effect of an idea.

In the past, an idea would have been thought up in a small town and passed around to a few hundred people. Now, 20 of those people will post it on the internet and the same idea is seen by thousands! This makes ideas much more difficult to quash.

While this is both good and bad, the main point here is its different. People need to be much more vocal in quashing bad ideas, both off and on-line, if they expect to get anywhere.

To generalize, we're talking about the ethics of know-how in science, and about risk assessment of danger to ecology or human life in pursuit of science. So far it seems like it has been hard to know how to do anything really dangerous, let alone do something dangerous by mistake. It has taken institution and government-level thinking to get there, and so we the public take weary comfort in assuming that safety checks exist at a political and international scale.

In physics that operates at scales of energy rarely encountered on the planet, most of us lowlanders go along with the argument that the danger is slim. Our magnets, coils and accellerators are dim reflections of the cosmic kilns we have the pleasure to observe through neato Hubble photos. And where we do see evidence of the destructive power of physics within reach - in photographs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, evidence equally of our own stupidity and addiction to war - we say it takes real group effort to pull it off, and therefore not likely.

Now how about other realms of unfettered exploration? Will it soon be too easy to know how to make a virus, a nanobot? So easy that an individual borrowing some lab time can pull it off? The classic question then: once that knowledge is discovered, then how can it be controlled?

There are scientists who don't really want to bother with ethical and risk-factor calculations, they just want to plunge ahead and do the science for whatever purpose, and a call to have them managed by some institutional seive isn't going to catch them. The history of humanity ends up being both a tribute to ingenuity and organization, but equally a study of fallable human nature.

We have become afraid and cheap. Discovery needs vision and costs money. Just ask Columbus. Sure we've landed probes on Mars and we've made things smaller - computers for one, and faster - communications for another, but the last great technological leaps came out of the seventies. We no longer can fly from New York to London in two hours now that the concord is gone. The shuttle is well past it's prime with no real manned space craft is coming on line for at least five years. We should be on the Moon. We should have explorers planting flags on Mars (and maybe playing golf too). But these things take courage and cost money. Both in short supply these days. i guess it's time to listen to our Ipods and dream of yesterday.

Like Dr. Frankenstein, we have created our own monster with a life of it's own...a ‘culture of fear’ fuelled by special interest groups whose currency is fear. Agendas like Homeland Security (Be afraid!). Or with gems like the Weapons of Mass Destruction hoax it’s more a wonder anyone gets out of bed anymore. It’s a door slamming, pants dropping farce - a culture that won’t let grandma take her knitting needles onto a plane lest she attack the captain. Who needs the Comedy Network anymore we have reality!

In this country we are not immune, the long gun registry is a fine example of fear based policy making. Did anyone look objectively at the statistical threat? We would be safer today if we spent the same billion dollars on rock salt to grit the paths in winter.

I feel fortunate having grown up in the ‘60s when all we had to worry about was shadows from giant mushroom clouds. Nuclear war was such a surreal and mad concept it was easier to mentally cope with than the lexicon of insidious fictions we have to self edit through today. The only solution, if there is one, is education.

In the mean time, let us breathe deep and realize that it is all...a complete fiction.

We know what will happen when they cross the beams... we saw Ghostbusters!

The analogy of looking through a telescope or a microscope is a poor one in this case. The concern that some people have isn't that we might learn something that doesn't fit with our world view, it's that the LHC might end up killing people by creating a black hole, or by causing some other unexpected catastrophic event. If one scientist wants to risk his or her life to learn something, that is one thing, but if they want to risk the lives of other people as well, that is another.

I don't believe that dismissing these concerns will go far in convincing people that the LHC is safe. This is a perfect opportunity for the scientific community to engage with the broader community and discuss the concerns people have and the merits and value of the experiments the LHC will be involved in and the theory behind it, and hopefully both sides will come to better understand each other.

Forgot to note my wrap-up point. The problem with comparing the space exploration and other primary science with the LHC is that most of that presented minimal worst case scenarios. Even if the biggest thing we've put into space dropped on us (Int Space station I think?) we're looking at a fairly minor impact, assuming it didn't all burn up on re-entry.