Unscientific Americans

In an earlier post I indicated that one of my interests is particle physics. I also commented on the news that the LHC at CERN was going live this past week. Well, the news reporting on this subject was quite interesting. The news ranged from the accurate (that the scientists at CERN were firing up the LHC for the first time and running tests) to the totally off base (the LHC was live and after use there were no tiny black holes and all was well).

If you ever wondered why China, India and third world countries around the world are catching up with us you have part of the answer. If our schools don't make us all dumb paying attention to the mainstream news surly will. There was a time when those who reported the news were literate, maybe more so than the average person in the country. Those days are long gone. The average person has more education and common sense than the average reporter. But the know-it-all attitude that goes along with being in the news business remains. To that, add the fact that the editorial choices that are made in what constitutes news and you have the answer to the question of why people are online looking for news from weblogs and YouTube rather then buying their local newspapers and watching local and network news.

I can't remember the exact date that this happened for I can point to the event. Back in the late 80's after I graduated from college and was in the workforce for a year or two I read an article about the New York Times. The Times decided to lower the vocabulary in their publication so that it was on par with vocabulary used by the average 8th grader. This you're not smarter than an 8th grader decision was supposed to help the Times reach more readers. My sense is that the average reporter was not as smart as veteran journalists - the kind of which we once respected.

Getting back to science, there will be a day in the next month or so where the LHC does actually perform an experiment. When that happens we may see some interesting things but my sense is that the end of the world is not going to be one of them. What the LHC is going to create is something close to the conditions present in the universe not seen since the Big Bang. The end of the world will not come, in my opinion, because the LHC will simply not be able to provide enough energy and the universe will absorbe much of what energy and matter used in the experiment.