Salon

The startup this week of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the international physics institute, was enlivened by the fear that the launch might lead to the end of the world. As usual, speculation that the physicists themselves instigated such rumors was widespread. After all, the experiment -- massive but purely scientific and incomprehensible to the public -- made the front pages of all newspapers and was featured in Google's logo.

CERN came into the spotlight after Dan Brown's "Angels and Demons," where the antimatter produced there was an important plot vehicle. CERN's reply was a delightfully humorous interview with one of its leading researchers, who explained that yes, CERN indeed produced antimatter, no, it could not be used for terrorist purposes, and no, CERN did not possess a fighter jet. One of the best exchanges went: "Does [CERN] consist of red brick buildings with white-frocked scientists running around carrying files? -- No, that is rather far from reality; we have mostly white buildings made of concrete, and the scientists wear everyday clothes and mostly do not carry files."

Not so long ago, physicists were in vogue -- not just in science fiction, but in mainstream art as well. The 1960s were especially fruitful: Daniil Granin, a former scientist himself, wrote several novels on the topic, including "Someone Must," which looks at the hard moral choices physicists face. In 1962, one of the best Soviet movies of all time, "Nine Days of a Year," also celebrated nuclear physicists' work.

A humorous echo of this popularity was "Monday Begins on Saturday," a fairy tale by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. It described the idealistic and elated atmosphere of a Soviet research institute whose loss had since been lamented in countless interviews and memoirs.

Today, physicists don't usually make it onto the pages of Russian novels. If they do, their scientific careers are in the past. This is not surprising, since in the last 20 years, most scientists have been forced into the most pressing choice of their lives: to continue research abroad, to starve, or to use their intellect for something more profitable. The main characters of several recent books, such as Alexander Arkhangelsky's "Cut-Off Price" or Alexander Ilichevsky's "Matisse" (which won the author the Russian Booker prize), are both former scientists -- though their lives are as dissimilar as could be.

But the lack of scientists and their problems in current literature is not just an economic phenomenon, it is also a symptom of the general anti-intellectualism of our time. With that in mind, even the misguided fears about the collider are, from a media standpoint, a good thing: They remind people that there are scientists out there, doing something important.