At 9.30pm CET yesterday, a bunch of white lab-coated wonks buried in a super-secret compound deep under the Swiss Alps, switched on a machine designed to generate a black hole and destroy the world. It didn't work, so they're trying again next week.
Well, the doomsday device - the CERN Large Hadron Collider (as distinct from the Large Hadrian Collider, which was a truck which ran off the road in northern England and crashed into an old Roman wall - what, too obscure?) - worked pretty well, actually. About all the particle physics punishers in question actually did was to switch the thing on, align the beams, fire a few "lasers" around the track, then knocked off for beers. Despite the clamouring, embarrassing straw-man-a-thon of the media (i.e. breathlessly claiming 'World About To End In Nuclear Physics Experiment' then immediately afterwards declaring 'World Disappointingly Fails To End In Nuclear Physics Experiment'), CERN's best, brightest and deservedly single-est haven't actually smashed anything into anything yet. So there's hope yet for doomsday cults worldwide who are still trying to get over the public humiliation of that whole Y2K lead balloon, the biggest anticlimax since Jason Biggs tried to bang that exchange chick in American Pie 1.
Personally, I welcome Switzerland being turned into a black hole, a bottomless non-existant non-entity from which no light can excape and in which no life can be possible. And by 'welcome' I obviously mean 'would not actually be able to tell the difference'. And there'd bound to be pluses - Roger Federer would need a new place to hang his shingle, and since Llittle Lleyton's ggone to sshit we've been short of a decent tennis number one. Of course we'd have to stipulate on grounds of national pride that he'd be contractually prohibited from appearing in any more of those fucking punishing Gillette Mach Turbo Fusion Vibraslap Extreme Bollocks commercials with one-legged Tiger and that haughty Terry Henry git who used to play for Arsenal.
The actual point of the exercise, allegedly, is to smash tiny shit into each other at ferociously high speeds, much as most of us used to do with our Matchbox cars in kindy, in order to try and get at the most fundamental unsolved questions of the universe, like the mechanism of how gravity acts on mass, what dark matter is (other than the stuff which is used to make the griddle marks on chicken burgers), whether the Higgs Boson is truly a 'God particle' or just a highly obscure snowboarding manouevre, and why noone at CERN can manage to pull a root.
The Doctor is OUT.
