Eventually. But according to recent press reports, the world should already be a distant memory, swallowed up in a black hole created by a bunch of crazed scientists, bent on discovering the meaning of life at any cost, deep underground somewhere in Europe.
The event that generated this unbelievable frenzy of misguided nonsense was the turning on of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland. In the UK, column inches for such ‘flicking of switches’ are usually reserved for the likes of the Spice Girls turning on the Christmas Lights in London’s Oxford Street. Not this time, finally an act of engineering got the spotlight, and was the coverage positive?
Unfortunately, it wasn’t. Why? Because the perception was it was all about scary science that nobody really understands except nerds in lab-coats who can solve a Rubik’s cube in the blink of an eye.
It’s still amazing that such revolutionary acts of science can create such levels of wide-scale fear, generated almost entirely by sensationalist journalism which is often founded on a lack of knowledge. Complete naivety seems to be deeply routed in much of the world’s population as to exactly what science does and the role it plays in bettering society.
One of the great ironies of the recent furore was to be found on the BBC website, which was inundated with users questioning scientist’s ethics for tampering with the earth’s natural balance (probably posted by people who think recycling means going twice as far on a bicycle).
It may have been opportune to point out to these web addicts that CERN is credited as the birthplace of the Internet. No science, no CERN, no Internet. Hopefully you get the picture.
You may ask what this has to do with tunnelling? Well, not much to be honest, apart from the fact that CERN has some magnificent underground engineering, including some of the largest weak-rock caverns in the world. But it has, once again, made me jump on my soapbox about the way the public perceives science and engineering.
In 1934, the UK’s Queensway Tunnel, in Birkenhead, was opened by none other than King George V, in front of hundreds of thousands of people who turned up to witness the event.
We need to look at what has happened since then, and why engineers have somehow lost their crown. At least then we can attempt to climb back to the lofty heights of yesteryears.
