Surviving The Big Bang Machine

Yes, we're still here! Despite the nay-sayings of the doom-mongers, scientists at Europe's particle physics lab, CERN, switched on the ultimate physics machine yesterday – and the world has survived.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is designed to recreate a tiny bit of the Universe as it was just a squintillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Its aims, on paper, are pretty esoteric. If Nature cooperates with the physicists' dreams, then the LHC will uncover the Higgs boson, conjure up particles of dark matter, check up on supersymmetry and maybe probe into other dimensions.

Well, sci-jargon doesn't come a lot denser than that last sentence. But this week, words like these seem to be tripping off everyone's lips. In my local bar last night, bar-tender Adam was regaling me with his excitement about possibly tracking down the fourth dimension. I overheard two guys at the bar – not previously known for their conversations about science – discussing Hawking radiation from mini black holes.

Meanwhile, my friend Rowan was more interested in what the LHC will reveal about the nature of dark matter in galaxies. He has been inspired to sign up to the Galaxy Zoo project, where members of the public classify galaxies that have been netted by the automatic Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

As someone who's been a science hack for longer than I care to admit, I've never known physics to engross the public in such a major way. My own field - astronomy - is usually the headline-grabber; and even there we'd probably have to go back to the claims of "fossilized microbes" in a Martian meteorite, over 10 years ago, to see such public furore.

But why? Read on to find out how I think pseudoscience can be a good thing....