The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. It was built by CERN, the European research organization that was also home to the creation of the World Wide Web. In fact, the sheer amount of data to analyze from the experiments that will be conducted with the LHC has required the creation of new data transmission networks to facilitate the collaboration of researchers around the globe.

But these aren’t the only links between the LHC and the Web, or between the Web and science more generally. In fact, just as the first tests are beginning (they started last Wednesday), Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the man credited with inventing the Web at CERN eighteen years ago, offered some interesting thoughts on the matter:

Sir Tim talked to the BBC in the week in which Cern, where he did
his pioneering work on the web, turned on the Large Hadron Collider for
the first time.

The use of the web to spread fears that flicking the switch on
the LHC could create a Black Hole that could swallow up the Earth
particularly concerned him, he said. In a similar vein was the spread
of rumours that the MMR vaccine given to children in Britain was
harmful.

Sir Tim told BBC News that there needed to be new systems that
would give websites a label for trustworthiness once they had been
proved reliable sources.

"On the web the thinking of cults can spread very rapidly and
suddenly a cult which was 12 people who had some deep personal issues
suddenly find a formula which is very believable," he said. "A sort of
conspiracy theory of sorts and which you can imagine spreading to
thousands of people and being deeply damaging." (BBC)

This is a fairly good example of a problem discussed in a book I mentioned last week, Farhad Manjoo’s True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society. It deals with the kind of relativism towards objective truth that the Web might promote, or at least facilitate.

It’s also been reproted that a group of hackers successfully breached the digital security of the LHC’s computer network a few days ago. Though no serious harm was done and there wasn’t really much potential for anything dangerous to result from the prank, it’s still a reminder that the Internet is a relatively ungoverned–and potentially ungovernable–space. This is true both with respect to how knowledge is created and disseminated and with respect to the metaphorical nuts-and-bolts of the technology. It’s easy to be in favor of openness and flexibility when it comes to things like social media, but in the context of more serious issues it’s hard to know where to draw lines.

Is it really a good idea to start subjecting online speech to official validity rankings? Do we really want to move further in the direction of heavily locking down any networks with security concerns? What things are important enough to justify more draconian measures than are taken on the rest of the digital frontier?