Summer 2009

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Feature: The day CERN was more popular than NASA

Feature: Biding time

Feature: The importance
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Feature: From around the world

Event Report: The
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Event Report: When lives are on the line

Event Report: The new media officers

Event Report: Achieving global coverage

Interview: Ian Sample,
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FEATURE: The day that CERN was more popular than NASA

On 10 September 2008, a particle physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, switched on a new research facility. Nothing particularly remarkable about that, you may think, but it was the top news story of the day around the world, even knocking the US election campaign off the top spot on American networks. CERN’s website crashed under the strain, but not before exceeding nasa.gov’s traffic, and TV coverage had an estimated reach of one billion people. What made this happen?

As head of communication for that laboratory, I’m interested to know the magic formula for scoring high in the public eye. Was it luck? Was it hard work? Probably a mixture of both. What we do know is that three factors roller-coastered public scrutiny towards the particle physics lab, and their net result was to make CERN stand out.

The luck came in the form of CERN being featured in a best-selling work of fiction. The hard work came in the form of a concerted campaign by the CERN press office over many years to raise the lab’s profile. And the third factor was an unprecedented level of doomsday hype generated by Web 2.0.

A feature in fiction

CERN is a pure research lab that asks the kind of questions about the nature of our universe that have the power to make people dream; the kind of questions that every child asks when they look at the stars. CERN’s researchers have also given us technologies like the world wide web and the underpinnings of some modern medical imaging technologies.

Perhaps that’s why Dan Brown chose to feature CERN in his novel, Angels and Demons, which came out in 2000. The first we knew of it at CERN was when a copy landed in the press office signed by the author and bearing the words ‘remember, it’s fiction’. I got the job of reading the book, and lost no time in recommending to the lab’s management that we get ready for questions should the book leap to the top of the bestseller list. It didn’t, but it alerted us to the fact that CERN was now being considered fair game for authors of fiction. Next came the BBC’s ‘End Day’ in 2003, a drama documentary culminating in the destruction of the Earth when a particle accelerator was switched on in New York. Our research is based on particle accelerators, and our flagship, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), is the most powerful on the planet. Science in fiction started to make its way into my presentations to the lab’s management.

Dan Brown’s next book, The Da Vinci Code, did rather better. Once people had had the time to digest that, Angels and Demons finally found its way to the top of the bestsellers list. Should CERN ignore it; should we criticise its fanciful treatment of science, or should we see it as free PR, a chance to get our own messages across by riding on the coat tails of a story that was bigger than us? We chose the latter. We had fun telling the world that we don’t really have a space plane, that some Nobel Prize winners would be up for a game of Frisbee (but not the one mentioned in the book), and if you wanted to make enough antimatter to blow up the Vatican you could…if you had the patience to wait a billion years.

Sony Pictures brought the stars of Angels and Demons to CERN in February this year; the week that we announced the 2009 schedule for the LHC. That week, the LHC made more headlines than the movie – our own story had got even bigger.

Pushing the frontiers

In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee made a proposal for an information management system for CERN, his boss scribbled the words ‘vague, but exciting’ on the cover, and the lab switched on a big and powerful particle accelerator that was poised to take our understanding of the universe to new levels. Somewhere in the world, a small group of people was fretting that the end of the world was nigh because of what this new machine might do. Nobody paid them any attention. The following year, Berners-Lee’s vague but exciting idea had become the world wide web, and LEP was running smoothly. It went on to do so for 11 years, fulfilling its scientific potential, and posing no threat whatsoever to the world.

A decade later, the Web had become a part of everyone’s life, the way people share and access information had changed forever as a result of Tim Berners-Lee’s vague but exciting proposal, and a laboratory at Brookhaven in New York state switched on a big and powerful particle accelerator that was poised to take our understanding of the universe to new levels. A handful of people shouted ‘the end of the world is nigh’, and some media outlets took notice. Again, the new accelerator is fulfilling its scientific destiny, with no threat to the world.

By the time CERN was ready to switch on the LHC, however, the web had evolved into Web 2.0, revolutionising the way that people share information. Traditional news media were reinventing themselves simply to survive in a world of social networks and blogs. Broadcasting was becoming passé, giving way to narrowcasting to special interest groups. And communication departments were rapidly trying to figure out how best to adapt to this brave new world. In such an environment, the handful of people proclaiming the end of the world found traction for their message in the blogosphere. Traditional media picked up the story from Web 2.0, and ordinary people started to wonder if there might be anything in such claims. There isn’t. Like its predecessors, the LHC has a scientific destiny to fulfil, and it is poised to make an even bigger impact on our understanding of the universe than either LEP or the accelerator at Brookhaven. There is no risk whatsoever, but there’s no doubt that the doom merchants generated interest in the LHC project.

Meanwhile, back in the press office…

In 2004, CERN turned 50. It gave us the excuse to tell the world’s media that something exciting was about to happen, and invite them to see our visually spectacular installations before they closed up for operation. At the same time, we worked on convincing the lab to switch on the machine in the full glare of the media spotlight. Both strategies were successful. From 2004 to 2007, the number of journalists visiting CERN increased nearly fourfold, and CERN’s management agreed to a public switch-on.

Switching on any particle accelerator is a long and complex process, prone to setbacks. Switching on the world’s most complex scientific instrument, the LHC, was all the more so. Every aspect of the LHC is new, and it was all being operated for the first time in public. Some 300 journalists came to CERN that day to see, and many more participated in the occasion at parallel events around the world. CERN’s communication group works closely with communication professionals in all the labs’ member states and partner laboratories. Without them, the impact would undoubtedly have been smaller. On the day itself, problems were overcome, and there were moments of triumph as the first beam was threaded around the gargantuan machine. And all the world was watching – the lows as well as the highs. At the end of the day, the statistics were mind-boggling. CERN was the new NASA, for a day at least.

A week later, the LHC suffered a major setback from which we’re still recovering, We’re telling the story of how we’re recovering and what we’ve learned from the incident. That’s how progress is made. Later this year, the LHC will be up and running again, and CERN will be telling the story as loudly as it can. CERN is not the new NASA, and the LHC is not Apollo. But if the LHC can have half the impact that the moon shots did, you can bet that we’ll be working on it.

James Gillies
Head of Communication, CERN
james.gillies@cern.ch
 

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