No Need To Be ConCERNed.....It's French !!

As it seems every man and his blog are (or is) writing about this Large Hadron Collider gizmo, I thought I'd better get my two cents worth in before they flick the switch or pull the plug or put a couple of Euros into the meter sometime tomorrow.   

Believe it or not, I usually do some research before spouting about things on here as my mind is like a one photo camera card - each new photo, or in my case each new piece of information, simply overwrites the previous one. I suspect I was dropped on my head a lot as a baby.

So I go the the CERN site, which as everyone knows stands for Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire (add your own accents to make it look more Frenchy) but it's as dull and uninteresting as one of my home made omelettes. I mean wouldn't you think, with all this talk about the end of the world, that they'd at least have a countdown clock on the site ?  

Don't you just hate a scientist without a sence of humour ?

So I donno when this event is due to take place tomorrow but as long at it's not during the England game in Croatia, I don't care.  Well unless we're losing at about 9:40pm and then by all means send a few little black holes towards the stadium and wipe out a few of their players. They're foreign so it won't matter.

So what's it all about then ?   What does this LHC thingymagig do ?  In an effort to get up to speed (ha-ha), I went to the font of all knowledge.  Wikipedia !  

I'm none the wiser.

I never did physics at school.  Or chemistry.  Or biology.  I know the last 2 have nothing to do with CERN but I'm trying to paint you a picture here.  I'm no scientist.  I know a bit about rocketry and 'space' in a sort of NASAesque way, but that's it.  The only particles I know about are the ones that always end up on my t-shirt when I eat my supper in front of the tv.  A bad habit but at least I'm not likely to bring about Armageddon if I do it again tomorrow.

I think they've built a very long tube thing 100 meters underground somewhere on the French/Swiss border and at some time tomorrow, they'll send a light beam down it.  I'm not impressed.  I did something similar with a torch and an empty loo roll when I was a kid.  If I'd been better funded (more pocket money) I could've lit up half the street.  That's all they're doing tomorrow so don't expect anything spectacular. If the man wearing goggles at the other end raises his thumb to say he's seen the light, we can all rest easy that the world hasn't ended.

Of course if said man lowers his thumb in classic Nero style, then bend over, grab your legs and wait for the big bang.  Yes I realise for some of you this won't be your first time !  TMI.

Speaking of funding, I'm sure squillions of Euros have gone the way of these light particles over the years, namely into a large black hole.  Wikipedia reports that $1billion was spent this year alone. And what have we, the European taxpayer got for OUR money ?   A chance to forget our financial woes it seems.

Yes it's such a clever idea.  Build some doomsday machine costing the proverbial arm and a leg and then when the highly accelerated shit hits the fan and it all goes belly up, there is a good chance that no one will be around to say "well what a fucking waste of money THAT was !!"

And even if it all goes swimmingly and we see lots of white coated boffins jumping around and hugging each other like they're at a cricket umpires convention, what will we actually see ?  

Bugger all I should think.  It's just not that sort of event.  Even the Chinese would be hard pushed to make it exciting.  No fireworks.  No men suspended from wires.  No cute little schoolgirl miming La Marseillaise.

See if we (being the British) had this LHC device, we'd put on a bit of a show tomorrow.  We'd put on a 'bit of a do' for the millions who are sure to be tuned in for the event.  There would be a cock-a-knee street party with a pearly King and Queen (oh go google it !), lots of iron brew and jaffa cakes for the assembled celebs that aren't currently in Celebair and when Gordon Brown (oh google him too !) flicked the switch, he'd be the first to be vapourised and a loud cheer would go up.......and then we'd all follow him.  

Cut to the Queen standing unsteadily on the balcony of Buck Palace with her crown looking a bit sku wiff and holding onto a couple of slightly smouldering corgis.  We'd hear the unmistakable sounds of the national anthem coming from a lone piper off to one side and the image would slowly fade out with the voice of a BBC announcer telling us that we'll all try and meet up in 4 years time to do it all over again.

Oh shit, that's the Olympics.  

Oh and we'd have a bleedin' countdown clock on OUR web site.