So there's this club of uber-nerds called CERN. I'm not sure why it's called CERN, because such an acronym cannot be derived from its full name; which is the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire in pig latin. But I digress.

Anyways. This Coalition of European Research Nerds has built this thing called a Large Hadron Collider. If particle acceleration was NASCAR, the LHC would be the Texas Motor Speedway. A pretty good metaphor, since the LHC's main purpose is to act as a track around which nerds can watch subatomic particles smash into each other.

Well, they powered it up last night; and that was supposed to be the beginning of the end. The whole deal with this thing, according to the Chicken Littles, is that the experiments performed at the LHC will create black holes. Think of a black hole as the Michael Moore of gravitational pulls; it consumes matter at such a high rate that the vaccuum it creates as it gets larger and larger becomes inescapable. So you can see how the idea of such a thing being created at CERN would be cause for the Chicken Littles to worry.

However, the good news is two fold:
1) They won't start actually running the LHC until this weekend, so we have plenty of time to run up huge debts on Ferraris and mansions that we'll never have to pay for once the rift between matter and anti-matter is breached. Or something.
2) Since the LHC is located in Europe, we'll enjoy the sight of watching all of them get sucked in first. Hell, it should be televised. Maybe we can get ESPN to drop one of the college games and carry The LHC's Black Hole vs. The Known Universe.

Posted by: shank at 11:35 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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