As the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was started on Wednesday 10 September, the world held its breath. The massive particle accelerator at European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) on the Swiss-French border is the biggest experiment humanity has yet devised to delve into the basic constituents of matter. That morning at 8.33am, the first attempt to send a beam of protons around the full 27km long tunnel was carried out successfully. But what captivated the world’s media was not the success of the experiment so much as the possibility we could be facing the imminent annihilation of the Earth, which might have been sucked into a black hole created by the LHC.

As I arrived at my school for work that day, I found a number of staff who had been waiting to see if the head of physics would turn up in the morning, and who gave an audible sigh of relief when I strolled in, as if that somehow meant the world was still OK. Throughout the day I was accosted by children tugging on my arms asking me ‘Will the world end, sir?’

You could be forgiven for thinking that this was ‘all a joke’ as Simon Jenkins suggesting in The Times, an effort on the part of CERN’s public relations office to get the media talking. But given that at least two scientists, one in the US and one in Germany, had logged separate court cases against CERN, trying to get them to halt the LHC switch on. In fact, CERN felt compelled to press-release a health and safety report five days before the switch on.

The hostility towards the LHC reached such a peak in the run up to ‘first beam on’ that scientists working there began to receive death threats. Professor Brian Cox, the normally unflappable and ebullient scientist in charge of upgrading two of the big detector experiments in the LHC, was so frustrated about the whole thing he was quoted in the Daily Telegraph declaring, ‘Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a t—-’. Tempting as it maybe to let off steam at some of the more irrational decriers of scientific advance, however, the reaction to the LHC is a bit more deep-seated than either teenage end-of-the-world fantasies or media over reaction would lead us to believe.

The ease with which crackpot theories about black holes eating the Earth from the inside have found a purchase on our collective psyche tell us we are very uneasy about the use of science to explore nature. In fact, we are all too ready to attack the hubris of scientists for trying to delve too far into nature’s secrets. In a bizarre mirroring of Philip Pullman’s fantasy novel The Subtle Knife, we fear that if we open up the secrets of the atom, demons will be released.

Prophesying the end of the world has become respectable even among scientists, who seem to believe this is the way to secure public support for science – or at least ’useful’ science. Sir David King, the former chief scientific adviser to the government, recently lambasted the scientific establishment for funding pure research, arguing that instead they should ‘pull people towards perhaps the bigger challenges where the outcome for our civilisation is really crucial’. In a thinly disguised attack on the funding of projects like the LHC, he made it clear that all our scientific research should be targeted at problems like saving the world from climate change.

I asked a class of 15-year-olds how many of them thought climate change could spell the end for the human race. About 75% said yes, with 4 preferring to think the claims were over exaggerated and 3 unsure what to think. If top scientists are spooking us into such nightmare scenarios it is hardly surprising that the response to big science experiments is less than enthusiastic. The arguments for funding projects like the £4.5 billion LHC in the future seem hopeless. Not only is there immense pressure on science to guarantee direct and immediate social benefits from research before it is carried out, but now it would seem science has to promise to save the world. The future for particle physics and other fields of pure research looks bleak indeed.

Now, more than at any time in the recent past, scientists and the supporters of fundamental science need to stand up and be counted. If we fail to counter the arguments of the doom-mongers then fundamental research will be wiped out. Do we really want to see scientists parading around in sandwich boards proclaiming ‘the end is nigh’ just to get a hearing. After all, when the end does not come no one wants to listen to you.

David Perks is the author of What Is Science Education For?, and will be speaking on The Battle for Intelligence at the Battle of Ideas festival in London, 1-2 November 2008