Archives for September 2008

What will our legacy be?

It may seem a little premature to start talking about what the earth will look like after we're gone, but that's exactly what Jan Zalasiewicz, a geologist at the University of Leicester, has been doing.

Taking the perspective of alien explorers arriving on earth a million years from now Dr Zalasiewicz applies the lessons of his own research to piece together the fragmented clues we will inevitably leave behind.

Buried in the record of shifting continents, ice ages and rising and falling sea levels, the aliens stumble across something quite unique in a thin layer of rock: a period of massive upheaval, of dramatic climate changes, mass extinctions and strange movements of wildlife across the planet...and finally the petrified remains and fossilised bones of a lost civilisation.

It's sobering to think about the era in which humans have risen to dominate the planet - the Holocene - in the context of geological time. At 10,000 years it's a remarkably short period. The seam that will mark our passing in future rock formations will be a very thin one - but it should provide rich pickings for alien explorers.

Our activities have already left a significant footprint on the planet, and it's not a pretty picture. Jan Zalasiewicz argues that it's not too late. But we will have to mend our ways if the alien postscript on planet earth is not to describe a world dominated by an incredibly clever, but equally foolish, bipedal ape.

So did the Royal Society do the right thing or not? Was professor Michael Reiss merely reiterating stated policy when he said science teachers should debate creationism in the classroom, or was he undermining the very foundations of the scientific world view?

Don't be fooled into thinking that this is a spat about whether Michael Reiss (who was the Society's Director of Education) was forced to step down over something he didn't actually say...that he was misquoted, but that the damage was done and he had to go. This row goes to the heart of what science in a modern democratic society is all about.

First the facts....Michael Reiss was talking at the British Association's 'Festival of Science' last week in a debate about creationism. He was talking about what a teacher should do if, in a science lesson about evolution, one of the pupils raised doubts or brought up creationism. He said the teacher should engage with the child, and try to explain why the creationist view was not a scientific explanation.

At first the Royal Society defended him, insisting he had been misquoted in the papers. But it seems something of a campaign was mounted to rid the society of this turbulent priest. On Tuesday the Society threw in the towel, announcing that even though Michael Reiss had been misquoted he had agreed to go.

But that announcement has sparked quite a backlash. Many want to know why, if Michael Reiss was misquoted in the papers, the Society didn't defend its man? And what does it say about the state of science in Britain if the Royal Society can't tolerate or debate alternative world views?

According to one of the country's leading experts the UK's energy policy is like a slow motion train crash unfolding before your eyes. In a report published today professor Ian fells accuses successive Governments of sitting on their hands over the last 25 years, and of engaging in wishful thinking about the ability of renewables - like wind and solar power - to bridge the looming energy gap.

On the other hand environmentalists accuse professor Fells of a long term love affair with technological fixes like nuclear power, and of downplaying renewables. The Secretary of State John Hutton says the report both over states the problem and underestimates the efforts Government has already made to plug the gap.

What isn't contested is that we stand to loose 30% of our electricity generating capacity over the next decade as existing nuclear and coal fired power stations are decommissioned. The row is about what's going to replace that generating capacity and how quickly we need it.

So who's right?

Professor Fells' crystal ball offers a vision - nightmare might be a better description - of energy shortages, electricity rationing, and increasing reliance on gas imported from Russia. The Government's view is of a smooth transition to a new generation of nuclear power, clean coal and renewables. Environmentalists are championing energy efficiency and greater investment in wind, wave and solar power.

The issue seems to be how much time we have to develop new technologies like carbon capture and storage (which could clean up our coal and gas fired stations), commission new nuclear power plants, and develop renewables before the lights begin to go out in the middle of the next decade.

The big "switch-on" of the Large Hadron collider has exceeded everyone's wildest expectations.

A few moments ago the operations team managed to get both streams of protons circulating in opposite directions around the whole ring. Speaking in the main control room a delighted director general Robert Aymar declared: "It is now time for the physics to begin."

Things had got off to a shaky start earlier in the day. You could see the strain etched on the faces of control room staff - and the hundreds of physicists, engineers and support staff who had crammed in to every conceivable corner of the room to watch.

And then, just a few minutes behind schedule, came the moment everyone had been waiting for: first beam.

Since then things have developed rapidly.

Lyn Evans had allowed for a whole day to get the beam round the whole machine once. Riding the wave he ordered the injection of the second beam to be brought forward. Astonishingly that's now completed its own journey going in the other direction.

All in all a staggering success, and a great day for physics....the LHC works. Now, where's that Higgs Boson?

Well wow! Who knew particle physics could be so exciting?

For a few minutes this morning things got very tense here in the main control room at Cern, but in the end it's gone better than anyone could have hoped.

As I write the first beam of protons is circulating around the entire 27 kilometre ring of the LHC - something that was expected to take all day. Things have gone so well in fact that the operations team are talking about getting a second beam going the other way around.

And all about me hundreds of very excited physicists are smiling broadly and congratulating each other with the kind of bravado that tells you it was no sure thing.

One of the main topics of conversation seems to be who's house the beam is currently running under. Francois Grey won that debate when he reported that his wife had rung to say the dog started to bark at the ground the moment the beam shot by.

Of course this is just the start of the process, and there's still plenty of physics to come. But for now everyone at Cern is just basking in the moment. And after 30 years why not?

The LHC's dress rehearsal goes with a hitch.

Things are hotting up in the main control room here at Cern. We've just been through a full dress rehearsal for the big "switch on" of the Large Hadron Collider - due to take place at 8.30 tomorrow morning.

I watched on a giant computer screen alongside dozens of scientists and technicians as a beam of protons was fired down a linear accelerator, slung round two synchotrons to pick up energy, and finally dumped at the gates of the LHC.

Tomorrow those gates will be open, and - if all goes well - the first proton beam will shoot clockwise round all 27 kilometres of the LHC at very nearly the speed of light.

But it could have been very different. Last night a component on one of the cryogenics units - which cool the core of the machine to minus 271 degrees - snapped, and two sections of the LHC began to warm up again.

"It's just a little piece of wire about six inches long," operations group leader Paul Collier told me.

"But it just goes to show what can go wrong with a machine of this size and complexity."

The problem has now been fixed, and the temperature in both sections is falling back towards absolute zero. "Fingers crossed," Paul Collier says. "We're still on course for tomorrow. But if it happens again now we'll be in a lot of trouble".

But after all, something should go wrong in a dress rehearsal if it's going to be all right on the night...

There's been a lot of fevered speculation about whether the Large Hadron Collider might spawn a black hole that swallows the earth when it's finally switched on tomorrow.

The subject came up again in this morning's interview with Stephen Hawking, who speculated about whether their appearance might win him the Nobel Prize. That comment refers to some of his earliest work as a theoretical physicist.

Building on Roger Penrose's research on relativity - which showed how a massive star could burn out and collapse in on itself at the end of its life - Prof Hawking showed that black holes are not completely black after all: they emit radiation (now, gratifyingly he noted, called Hawking radiation) meaning that they would gradually shrink and finally disappear in an explosion.

According to Prof Hawking the idea occurred to him as he was getting into bed one night in 1970...and fearing he might forget it overnight, he got up again.

Hawking's proof is a beautiful piece of mathematics, and if the LHC does spawn black holes, and they do vanish again in the way he described that would almost certainly win him a Nobel Prize. But as he says in the interview, he's not holding his breath.

Don't panic!

The world is not going to end when scientists switch on the Large Hadron Collider (the giant atom smashing machine buried under the Swiss Alps) on Wednesday. That's the verdict of an exhaustive safety assessment.

Some scientists have voiced fears that switching on the LHC could trigger a black hole that would swallow the planet (and the rest of the solar system for good measure) in a matter of minutes. Led by a German chemist, Otto Rossler, they're using the European Convention on Human Rights to try and block the launch - which is due to be covered live on the Today programme.

The LHC is the biggest and most complex scientific instrument ever built, and at £4.4bn, it's also one of the most expensive experiments in history. It's designed to smash together beams of protons travelling at nearly the speed of light triggering a massive release of energy....so massive that it will recreate the conditions that existed in the universe just a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.

Physicists hope the results could help solve some of our most fundamental questions about the nature of the material world, reveal the secrets of dark matter, and even point the way to a theory of everything.

Today's report provides the most comprehensive assessment on the safety of the project to date. It shows that the LHC almost certainly will produce microscopic black holes (perhaps at a rate as high as one every second) but that these will be so small and unstable that they vanish as quickly as they form.

The scientists point to the evidence from cosmic rays, which regularly produce much more powerful particle collisions than the LHC as they bombard the earth....and we haven't been swallowed by a black hole yet.

For more information on the LHC go to Radio 4's Big Bang website.

It's the stuff of science fiction, but could mirrors in space or giant atmosphere processing plants actually put the world's climate back on track?

That's the question being addressed by the Royal Society, which has given over an entire edition of the scientific journal Philosophical Transactions A to discussing the pros and cons of geo-engineering - planetary scale interventions to manage the carbon cycle and reduce greenhouse gases to an acceptable level. A sort of technical fix for global warming.

Some of the ideas that come under the heading of geo-engineering seem to have been lifted straight from the pages of a science fiction novel. But if launching millions of tiny mirrors into space to reflect sunlight sounds too far fetched how about using rockets to spray sulphur into the upper atmosphere? That idea was inspired by research on the impact of Mount Pinatubo's eruption in 1991. Sulphur ejected from the volcano spread far and wide over subsequent months leading to a significant, if temporary, cooling of the region's climate.

More mundane - though no less dramatic in terms of their impact - are proposals to increase cloud cover by spraying salt into the atmosphere, or to seed the oceans with iron (triggering plankton blooms that would draw carbon from the water before locking it away on the sea bed as these tiny shell-building creatures died and sank to the bottom).

Going green

Until recently these ideas were given short shrift by serious scientists. Policy makers have concentrated on efforts to reduce carbon emissions and on developing renewable energy technologies. But getting people to change their fossil fuel burning habits has proved a hard nut to crack. We simply aren't "going green" fast enough to avoid dangerous climate change, and that's forced geo-engineering up the environmental, and political, agenda.

But before you nip out to burn some guilt-free rubber in the 4x4 there are still some serious problems to overcome.

In the first place, geo-engineering solutions mean fighting pollution with yet more pollution, and all these proposals bring problems in their wake. Then there are the political consequences of one country, or group of countries, taking action than might trigger dramatic consequences in another part of the world. And, of course, there's no way of knowing how effective geo-engineering will be.

If we assume some sort of technical fix is going to get us out of jail free, and carry on burning fossil fuels in the meantime, we could end up with an even bigger problem in the years to come.