On a bright Alamagordo evening almost 60 years ago, a posse of scientists sat in an army hut chewing tobacco and comparing Bunsen-burner scars. The faintly frantic air in the room that night might have been a result of their plan, the next day, to trigger the first nuclear explosion in history. Or it might have been because, despite reassuring data, there was a small possibility that the blast would ignite the planet’s atmosphere.
Some wag with a PhD called Fermi had apparently mooted the toast-in-seconds theory as an ice-breaker, but no doubt the smiles were a little fixed and the laughter a touch hysterical: it seemed unlikely that their actions on the morrow would bathe Earth in a life-evaporating inferno, but all the same it wasn’t the sort of thing you’d want to explain to an indignant press if it went wrong.
In the end it went off sans apocalypse and toasts were drunk as the dust of a thousand armadillos floated away on the hot breeze. A sane human being would have walked away, ashen-faced and determined never to go near the devilry of physics again. But sanity and humanity have never been prerequisites for a career in science, and still they peer at the universe’s unmentionables through safety goggles, glorified scab-pickers. Still they dangle us over the pit, watching fascinated as the cord frays, recording its rate of disintegration for future study.
Take, for instance, the team who revealed with Alamagordo-like jocularity that its attempts some years ago to recreate absolute zero in a laboratory might theoretically have triggered a black hole in central London. Thanks for asking us, chaps. And what, incidentally, was Plan B? Tie yourselves to the nearest table and hang on, as the Thames drains away into the space-time continuum?
This week it emerged that Nasa has decided to scrap radio- and microwaves as a means of beaming our location and vital statistics into deep space in its search for alien life. Instead its efforts will now involve written information, carved or printed, and shot off at likely suns: single asthmatic physicist seeks outgoing telepathic carbon-based being, 24 to 36, for sushi, chess and sedate sex. Send picture or algorithm.
Some might question the wisdom in advertising our location: if there’s life out there with the ability to read our solicitations and get here, it’s probably bringing spores, midwives and disintegrator cannons. But as usual humanity wasn’t asked if it would like to break cover.
But perhaps the alternatives to science are worse. Look at Touched by an Angel. Or Kinshasa, where Bafana Bafana ran headlong into the African Prenaissance on Sunday.
The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is a palpably dim name for a state that is neither democratic nor a republic in any real sense, but when Zaire was being renamed it seemed a better option than the more pop- ular Trans-continental Revolutionary Citadel of the AK-47 of Pope Incarnate, Field Marshal Laurent Kabila, and his Flaming Brethren the Kool-Banana Vanquishers of the Belgian Satan.
Indeed the DRC has often seemed to be a man-made black hole resisting its more excessive urges, and mercifully that turbulent status quo was prolonged by a South African defeat. The pacifying goal in question, a scrabbling effort that seemed to arrive from somewhere behind the netting (to confirm that the laws of physics and logic were strangers to this roiling cauldron of patriotic aggression), provided relief not only to the tourists but also to their protectors: the legion of security guards along the touchlines would have battled to do anything heroic, blinded as they were by their misted-up gasmasks, and the helicopter crews on standby to evacuate the South Africans in the event of a win were struggling to plot a course to the nearest rooftop that kept them away from DRC military anti-aircraft guns and fans with catapults.
But as at Alamagordo, nothing went wrong, and in the clear light of the arrivals hall the South Africans diplomatically expressed their concerns. The coach spoke of professionalism and courage, and spoke true. But given the past 60 years, one wondered if the players (or their families) had been briefed about the 1% chance that the atmosphere would ignite, or asked if they wanted to play sport in a place where a departure from scripted nationalist fantasies of victory brings with it the possibility of violence and premature death.
And all of that for 1-0. Isn’t that binary for ”It’s not worth it”?