Particle Research Points to Dumb Universe

Scientists with the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Switzerland will finally begin experiments next week using the highly anticipated and moderately expensive Large Hadron Collider. After several delays and costs reaching as high as two weeks of the American occupation of Iraq, the LHC will finally help in mankind's most pressing question: why are there so many stupid people in the world? Scientists expect to flick the switch on Sept. 10, but already they've been making startling progress in showing people are dumb-asses, especially among those who think the black holes the LHC might create would swallow the Earth.

So what's all this shit about? First off, I like to think of the LHC as a 1970s disaster/adventure movie. It's the story of a 17-mile long magnetic railroad where two trains of protons ride the same track loop in opposite directions almost at the speed of light. They carry a lot of momentum and their collision is a disgusting mash that only scientists can interpret. Passengers--the quarks (with George Kennedy as "Strong Quark") and the leptons (a sizzling Joan Collins as "Ms Gluon") and other bit players--get strewn about the place in a bloody mess of back-story and overacting. A physicist (Paul Newman, from his death bed) rushes to the scene and, ascertaining the trajectories taken by the bodies upon impact, deduces the composition of the train and perhaps even confirms a theory he had that his ex-wife, Ms. Gluon had been cheating on him with his best friend, Erwin Schrödinger.

Well, so much for attenuating one of the dumbest metaphors I've ever thought up. The LHC really isn't all that; in the grand scheme of things, it's a big-ass laboratory instrument that will be used to try to demonstrate the existence of the Higgs boson which might help explain how particles gain mass. Biologists spin cells in autoclaves, particle physicists have smash-up derbies and they've been doing it since the 1930's, with good results.

Some people are concerned that if tiny black holes should form during one of the experiments, the black holes would have the potential to destroy the Earth, even though they would entail minute quantities of mass. But do you know what happens to people who get sucked into a black hole? They get attenuated, like a metaphor. And as we've seen, that's pretty ugly. Maybe it's not surprising that some people are worried enough to make death threats against the scientists, according to the Telegraph.

But I doubt the scientists have anything to worry about. Writes one concerned citizen on an anti-LHC Website,"wtf. . . thats actually not fARE I BET THIS WILL ALL GO WRONG AND WERE SCREWED SUPPORT THESE PEOPLE!!!!!!!!!" Experts are still trying to figure out what language that is, but considering the brain behind the message, could people capable of such a sentence possibly locate Switzerland on a map of Switzerland, let alone make good on a death threat against someone in Switzerland?

As Professor Brian Cox of Manchester University said, with obvious good reason, "Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a twat."