The Photograph That Ought to Inspire Fear of Falling Past The Event Horizon That Awaits Mankind

Try to imagine this mofo firing subatomic particles at each other at speeds you
can't even begin to imagine. If you can't tell, that's a guy standing in that thing.

This photo, of the ATLAS detector under construction at the Large Hadron Collider¹, was published in May of 2006 in a press release by STMicroelectronics. ATLAS is a particle detector experiment being built at the LHC in order to determine the invisible things that make up our universe and how they came about. The image, once widely disseminated, will raise public awareness of the sheer scale of the LHC and its experiments. The ATLAS weighs around 7,000 tons and will be used to detect a very broad spectrum of energy that may be produced.

The LHC poses many theoretical threats to human existence. While the public is largely unaware of them, particles such as a Micro Black Hole² or strangelet³ could be created during experiments carried out at the facility. The photograph's illustration of the size of the project is potent enough to concern everybody aware of the risks. It's great enough to make man wary of technology, in the way that roller coasters or really big spaceships can.

The photograph should effectively cancel out the happy, carefree relationship the public had with scientists after the publication of the classic picture of Einstein:

Arthur Sasse/AFP-Getty Images

. This photograph showed people the human side of scientists. Even if they could develop theories and understand concepts that the average man hadn't the wherewithal to attack, they stuck their tongues out like we did. The image entangled the idea of a scientist with the idea of wacky, fun guy, which entanglement survived in the public consciousness for the remainder of the 20th century. Most people, upon hearing the word "physicist," think of an eccentric, asexual man with atypical hair, instead of the enormous machines attempting to rip holes in the universe.

¹The Large Hadron Collider (hereafter LHC) is a particle accelerator in Switzerland and France that serves to provide proof of the theoretical Higgs Boson, a very important subatomic particle. Once activated, it will be the largest and most powerful (and most dangerous) particle accelerator on Earth.
²This is like a regular black hole that you hear about. It is an infinitely massive singularity with a gravitational pull so strong that nothing can escape. They can theoretically decay in the form of Hawking Radiation, but the phenomenon is completely untested.
³A strangelet is a type of strange matter containing an equal amount of up, down, and strange quarks. If a strangelet were created, it could possibly catalyze a runaway fusion process that would turn every nucleus in the planet into strange matter.