Ireland's science-shy Government

Madam, - Dr James Fryar (June 25th) understandably laments the low numbers of Irish students opting to study physics at secondary…

Madam, - Dr James Fryar (June 25th) understandably laments the low numbers of Irish students opting to study physics at secondary level.

To what extent, I wonder, does the low status of the subject reflect the indifference of a science-shy Government?

Recently I visited the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) at Meyrin, near Geneva. There, in the world's largest particle physics laboratory, scientists investigate the fundamental forces that shape our universe.

It would be impossible for anyone, even a non-scientist like myself, not to be inspired and excited by what is going on there. Twenty European governments share in that excitement, but not Ireland's.

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In the next few months CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project will attempt to recreate the conditions present at less than a billionth of a second after the Big Bang, 13 billion years ago. In a 17-mile circular tunnel deep beneath the Jura mountains, beams of protons travelling in opposite directions will be accelerated to within a whisker of the speed of light.

Instruments of almost inconceivable sensitivity and complexity (one weighs 12,000 tonnes) will analyse the debris resulting from the collision of these sub-atomic particles.

Physicists are reasonably confident that the LHC experiment will prove the existence of the elusive Higgs boson (the so-called "God particle") and provide a new understanding of the mysteries of both dark matter and antimatter. Stephen Hawking is hopeful that the LHC will create miniature black holes. There is even the possibility of discovering extra dimensions of space.

Can any this be of interest to anyone other than eggheads? Well, yes.

It was at CERN that the World Wide Web was invented in the early 1990s; it now affects the lives of over a billion people. Here too the next generation super-fast internet, to be known as The Grid, is a work in progress.

CERN scientists are improving all our lives through advanced technology transfer - in micro-electronics, vacuum technology, superconductivity and cryogenics (experience gained from cooling 1,700 huge super-magnets to within a couple of degrees of absolute zero). Advances in imaging and scanning processes have produced tangible benefits in the field of medical diagnostics, especially in cancer diagnosis and therapies.

Individual Irish physicists work at CERN. Indeed, one of the most senior scientists on the LHC project is Belfast man Dr Steve Myers, who heads the key beams and accelerators department. But the Irish flag is not among the 20 flags fluttering outside the laboratory's main offices on the Franco-Swiss border.

CERN is controlled and financed by a council of 20 European states, each of whose delegates represents national science interests. Portugal, Bulgaria and the Slovak Republic are among the member-states. Why Ireland is not a member, out of self-interest if nothing else, perplexes CERN scientists I talked to as much as do the mystifying properties of antimatter.

Membership of CERN and a concomitant national involvement in these intensely exciting developments at the very frontiers of scientific knowledge would surely go a long way in inspiring bright students to major in physics.

Incidentally, I wonder how many TDs have even heard of CERN? - Yours, etc,

PAT CLOSE,

Ballymena,

Co Antrim.