Tuesday 9 September 2008

The End of the World?

h
The blogosphere is going crazy about this so I thought I might as well jump on the bandwagon too.

Apparently... the world is going to end tomorrow. This would mean that all of my marathon preparation would have been for nothing. And that would be rubbish.

This massive disaster is imminent because the world's most brilliant minds have assembled in Geneva and built the Large Hadron Collider - a ridiculously advanced particle accelerator that can recreate the conditions that existed just after the Big Bang occurred. And it achieves this by smashing parts of atoms together at high speeds.

The reason for doing this is because the Collider might be able to show us one of the most elusive particles in the Universe: the Higgs boson - otherwise known as the 'God particle'. This observation is supposedly worthwhile because it will confirm the Standard Model of Physics by unifying three of the four known fundamental forces - electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force. It only leaves out gravity. Bless.

High speeds? Smashing? The Big Bang? God? Is this really necessary just to confirm stuff that we already know happens? And it only confirms 75% of these fundamental forces anyway. Pretty big risk for a half-assed job.

The primary reason people are panicking however is that a side-effect of this little experiment is that the Collider could produce a frickin' Black Hole. Error Geneva.

Admittedly, this is only a one-in-a-billion chance... but considering it could swallow the planet in less than a second, I really don't like those odds.

And unsurprisingly, everybody is looking back to see what old Nostradamus was talking about all those many years ago. Amongst his many ramblings you will find this:

"Leave, leave Geneva every last one of you,
Saturn will be converted from gold to iron,
'Raypoz' will exterminate all who oppose him,
Before the coming the sky will show signs."

Well, Geneva gets a mention. The sky will show signs? Well, it's been raining non-stop. And Sky News will no doubt be covering the event. Not too sure who this Raypoz character is though.

Either way, we won't know if the world ends so why worry?

See you tomorrow - hopefully.
h

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