You can always count on the Daily Show. As John presaged earlier this month, correspondent John Oliver visited CERN to do a report on the LHC, which has finally appeared. Watch as John Ellis lays the science smackdown!
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | M – Th 11p / 10c | |||
| Large Hadron Collider | ||||
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The best thing about it is that, once again, Jon Stewart and company have taken an issue that completely flummoxed most major news media — in this case, the purported danger that the LHC will destroy the world — and actually get it right. In addition to visiting CERN itself, Oliver scored an interview with Walter Wagner (”graduated UC Berkeley with a Minor in Physics”), originator of much of the hysteria and lawsuits. You’ll get to hear Wagner explain that the probability the LHC will destroy the world is — wait for it — fifty percent. You know, because when you have two things that can possibly happen, obviously each has half the probability, right? I don’t want to say too much about Walter Wagner, because, if nothing else, the guy is really fond of a good lawsuit. So I have no comment whatsoever on Walter Wagner’s competence or sanity. But I do know people who are utterly incompetent and completely insane, who resemble Walter Wagner in certain ways. I’ll stop there.
See, major news media? It’s not that hard!
May 1st, 2009 at 9:01 am
Thanks, I really needed this.
May 1st, 2009 at 9:24 am
LOL! The ending is just brilliant. Not too mature, perhaps, but still.
May 1st, 2009 at 9:35 am
I’m quite impressed with how good of a job they did at making John Ellis seem like an asshole.
May 1st, 2009 at 10:25 am
Ha! The ending really was well-played. “Well, like you say, there’s a fifty percent chance it’ll work.”
May 1st, 2009 at 10:40 am
the final remark was just brilliant
perhaps i should try to mate with another male more often
May 1st, 2009 at 10:44 am
The part I liked most about this piece is they managed to use the story critique the cable news media’s idiotic science reporting. It’s too bad that the exciting headlines (i.e. headlines which bring in advertising revenue) often turn TVs into stupid-rays.
May 1st, 2009 at 11:18 am
I thought Ellis was great, but the 50/50 thing was just scary…is this guy really teaching science?
May 1st, 2009 at 11:37 am
This was great! Finally SOMEONE in the media got it right…John Ellis did great too playing along with this.
May 1st, 2009 at 12:00 pm
[Bayesian Joke]
With the prior information that Walter Wagner has, 50/50 is probably a fair estimate.
[/Bayesian Joke]
May 1st, 2009 at 1:45 pm
@Pieter
Oh snap!
May 1st, 2009 at 3:46 pm
The sharpest part of this I think was them showing clips from all the mainstream news outlets reporting Wagner in the same way that John Oliver was — only without the satire.
May 1st, 2009 at 4:15 pm
They didn’t have to rip on John Ellis by airing a segment where he gets defensive.
May 1st, 2009 at 5:15 pm
[...] La mejor explicación del LHC [...]
May 1st, 2009 at 5:56 pm
Would have been nice if Oliver sneaked in some real journalism while talking to John Ellis like “CERN states 5 physicists assigned to the LHC Safety Assessment Group, to include you, John, were never involved with the LHC experiment in the past. But you have been giving lectures on this experiment since 1987, and on reading your old blog you was very much involved with the LHC experiment. Why did CERN lie about your involvement with the experiment before being assigned to the LSAG?”
I know, the kind of question only John Stewart would ask, but never will.
Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_of_the_Large_Hadron_Collider#CERN-commissioned_reports
John Ellis blog:
http://qd.typepad.com/24/
May 1st, 2009 at 6:02 pm
NEW PHYSICS IN HIGH-ENERGY e+ e- AND HADRON HADRON COLLISIONS.
John R. Ellis (CERN) Oct 1987
http://usparc.ihep.su/spires/find/hep/www?irn=1770012
May 1st, 2009 at 10:53 pm
Please! John Ellis was not defensive! He was awesome!!! Like the best kind of no bullshit straight shooting scientists ever. I loved his childish drawings especially. Great piece, thanks for the link SMC!
May 1st, 2009 at 11:55 pm
“Evilgeniussaywhat?” …lol, I think he did get a bit ticked but so wha? It was funny.
Hey, there’s a 50% chance I’m going to be the richest man in the world tomorrow so you’d better be nice to me.
May 2nd, 2009 at 1:11 am
Amazing! I wouldn’t expect less from the “Daily Show”. John Ellis was great. Wonderful sense of humour.
May 2nd, 2009 at 7:12 am
[...] Daily Show Explains the LHC | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine "The best thing about it is that, once again, Jon Stewart and company have taken an issue that completely flummoxed most major news media — in this case, the purported danger that the LHC will destroy the world — and actually get it right." (tags: dailyshow humor jonstewart johnolliver media science lhc) [...]
May 2nd, 2009 at 9:04 am
John Oliver: which…is….is…cold?
John Ellis: f*cking cold.
lol!
May 2nd, 2009 at 10:57 am
John Oliver is one of the smartest comedians today!!! Next to Demetri Martin, and Patton Oswald. Bravo John!
May 2nd, 2009 at 11:45 am
Good thing I’ll never get to visit CERN.
I’dn’t be able to keep from humping and smooching John Ellis.
May 2nd, 2009 at 12:48 pm
Well, I’m going to have to change my opinion. I’ll quit rolling my eyes at people who seem to get their real news information from the Daily Show. That was good. That was exactly what this issue needed.
May 2nd, 2009 at 1:21 pm
“I loved his childish drawings especially”
He was drawing a feynman diagram for vector boson fusion. One of the primary higgs production interactions. Not really childish.
May 2nd, 2009 at 1:52 pm
50-50 Chance of distroying the world? Don’t you mean 99.9% of distroying the world? That why the magnets are in the wrong place; schrodinger’s cat?
High diddle diddle,
The Cat and the Fiddle,
The Cow jump’d over the Moon,
The little dog laugh’d to see such Craft,
And the Dish ran away with the Spoon.
Well am still here! Am pretty sure I can see more imformation about what I wrote above , than the LHC will ever produce and I havent collapsed in to a black hole.
May 2nd, 2009 at 2:28 pm
That was irony, student. A form of humor, you know. Anyway, I should have said childish scribbles. And Feynman would have laughed his head off at that joke.
May 2nd, 2009 at 6:59 pm
since no one knows what physics we will see at the LHC, how can one be sure of anything? There could be physics that we don’t understand that could create black holes and destroy Earth. Since we don’t know what this new physics is, the 50-50 odds could be reasonable. Just because know one yet has come up with a theory of black holes at the LHC, doesn’t mean that it can’t happen. Just sayin’
May 2nd, 2009 at 8:04 pm
I have to say my favorite part of that was the dialog very near the beginning:
Oliver: “Evilgeniussayswhat?”
Ellis: “You’re getting incomprehensible.”
I absolutely love the precise language that he uses there to completely circumvent the joke. One of these days, I hope to be well-practiced enough to use language that precisely.
May 3rd, 2009 at 2:26 am
There is nothing good about Wagner’s side of the lawsuit. For one, it was dismissed. In the appeal of the dismissal, Wagner advanced the theory that US Dollars are the only form of money that matters in the world. I mocked this with LOLcat speech and suggested in February that The Daily Show was the proper venue.
May 3rd, 2009 at 3:34 pm
There are definetly four documents in the media, which shows, that CERN-representatives
uses a perfect-Zero-Risk-language when refering to the LHC. There are other documents in the media, that shows, there exists scientists, who say, the risc is not Zero, although small. This is an important scientific contradiction, which may not stand before beginning the LHC-experiment over the limit of 2 TeV.
May 3rd, 2009 at 6:04 pm
If I were completely clueless about the physics community, one would get the impression from the daily show report that all physicists at the LHC were white males.
May 4th, 2009 at 7:48 am
z Says: You wouldn’t get that impression after 15min walk through the halls at CERN…I guess the probability is 50%.
May 4th, 2009 at 9:54 am
@ maddox: Um, no.
May 4th, 2009 at 2:50 pm
@ NotJohnStewart: Um, yes. at the very least we don’t know what the probability is.
May 4th, 2009 at 3:27 pm
@ NotJohnStewart: ps: If you asked scientists in the 1800s what is the probability for theories like quantum physics, special relativity, and general relativity to be true, they would unanimously
said 0% ! And they would all have been dead wrong.
Nobody knows how to calculate this probability since we don’t what new revolution lies ahead. May be we see quantum gravity at the TeV scale against common expectations and no one really understands this theory. Everyone is quoting probabilities out of their ass but the truth is that nobody really knows.
May 4th, 2009 at 4:35 pm
A bit off-topic: Have you been noticing what sort of stuff Discover is publishing lately?
May 5th, 2009 at 2:22 pm
@maddox: Um, no. It’s not that these collisions haven’t happened before – it’s that we haven’t been able to do it in an environment that’s controlled and directly observable. Far more energetic collisions happen in the atmosphere all the time, and though I haven’t looked at the sky in the last hour, no black holes. That’s why the probability is so low. Because it’s already been tested. If we were colliding at energies beyond what the earth has experienced or what we’ve observed in the range of our telescopes, then we might be able to say we don’t know the probability.
May 6th, 2009 at 3:03 pm
Did you know …. that Walter Wagner is the evil twin of Harvey Newman at Caltech?
May 6th, 2009 at 4:49 pm
[...] Reparaturarbeiten am LHC machen spürbare Fortschritte: Der letzte Ersatzmagnet ist im Tunnel – aber wie geht’s [...]
May 9th, 2009 at 5:36 pm
The probability of 1 in 50 million of a destructive incident was calculated for RHIC in 1994. At those odds the estimate was half a chance of destruction by 2100. Since no time frame was given a half a chance of destruction is still 50/50. The LHC will create a quark/gluon plasma 25 to 30 times greater with the lead cycle. Presumably the 50/50 option will arrive a whole lot sooner.