Shortly before 2008 began, while I was picking up last minute New Year's Eve supplies, I heard something on National Public Radio that surprised me.
According to the report, the Times Square Ball in New York scheduled to drop later that night had spent much of 2007 being renovated and remodeled so that it could now proudly display over 16 million colors.
At the time, I didn't think much of it, but later on, my thoughts turned not to sex, like so many of my peers (and certain fruit flies I could mention), but back to this magic colorful ball. Really? 16 million colors? After the original three primary colors and their love children the secondary colors, and black and white, what else could there be? Let's go nuts and say each of these has a million variations (a million!), that's still only half of the total colors this ball can display.
As my mind boggled (a state many of us are used to on New Year's), I came to two conclusions. First, whoever's job it was to calculate the number of colors on the New Year's ball must have a pretty crappy job. I mean, who wants to be a professional calculator, someone to turn to when you need an impressive stat?
My second conclusion, though, was that the NPR story demonstrates how sometimes science (and its own love child technology) loses its way. It's nice and all that we have big expensive party favors that are made of Waterford crystal and can make so many colors. But, like, there's starving kids in Africa; is this really the kind of stuff we should be working on?
What about, for instance, the Large Hadron Collider being built at CERN? (CERN, the world's largest particle physics laboratory in Switzerland, is responsible for, among other things, the World Wide Web and the discovery of quarks.) The new LHC researchers hope to get going in May 2008 will be the most powerful particle collider ever, creating conditions close to the big bang that physicists think started off the whole universe.
The LHC might, in short, answer some basic questions about life. And yet, I hear so little about it. How come the press for the LHC isn't as good as that of the New York Times Square Ball? Maybe the LHC needs a stats guy of their own.
As I held my liquor while all about me were losing theirs on New Year's, I realized it's almost no wonder that people don't think much of science these days, as if it were just another profession good only for neat toys like the famed billion color ball, and not the effort to, you know, figure out how everything works. Ever since, I've figured we could use more of that sometimes. Especially, say, when it comes to hangovers.
Concerned the LHC may lead to another big bang that ultimately destroys our universe? E-mail Bill at science@dailycardinal.com.
