ATLAS e-News

Comedy news show takes on the LHC

18 May 2009

Comedian John Oliver fooling around in the Visitors' Centre

CERN was in the spotlight again on Thursday April 30th, when a segment about the LHC aired on American comedy news program The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

CERN people are used to tough questions; those they ask themselves and each other, those they get from interested family and friends, and those that are thrown at them by the media. But according to well-known CERN theorist John Ellis, his grilling at the hands of comedy character John Oliver was the trickiest interview he has ever done.

“It was quite an experience,” he summarises of his time spent fielding questions such as ‘Why do you want to destroy the Earth?’ and ‘Do you even know what a Kelvin is?’ John Ellis was the picture of composure, and admits, “I was prepared to be asked some outlandish questions,” having spent time watching science features from the program’s archives.

He says he was motivated to take part in the unusual challenge because: “I was aware that The Daily Show is extremely influential, particularly among the younger and better educated in the US.”

The LHC segment focussed on the controversial court case brought against CERN by American botanist Walter Wagner. His dubious take on probability was inter-spliced with John Ellis’s assured scientific assessment that there is “zero percent chance” of the LHC creating a microscopic black hole that could destroy the Earth. By editing these pieces side by side, The Daily Show explicitly highlighted the dubious logic on which Wagner has based his argument.

The program, and in particular Oliver’s feature reports, are characterised by an irreverent approach to all their subjects, but in the end Wagner and the media commotion surrounding his accusations caught the most flack.

ATLAS’s Alessandra Ciocio spent over two hours with Oliver, taking him to the cavern, explaining the experiment, and elucidating the motivations and the excitement of the scientists here. Even though she has plenty of media experience under her belt, she still found some of his methods a little neurotic: “It was different and unpredictable,” she explains. “He had a script and he was trying to provoke with every statement that he made.”

According to Alessandra, Oliver spent almost half an hour transfixed by the iris scanner: “All these lights and buttons!” Later, following a glut of outrageous questions, she was unfazed when he slipped his arm around her and declared that he found the cavern a particularly romantic setting. She responded by agreeing that yes, it is indeed very exciting to be in a place where people are passionate about making big discoveries about our Universe.

“My mission was to convince them of the nature of our research, and hope that they would use it as a background for [the piece] … to explain the science,” she says with a smile.

Ceri Perkins ATLAS e-News