It's true! The CERN Laboratory of Denmark or something is going to switch on its Doomsday Device and annihilate the world to smithereens, despite all the warnings from the presses and the medias, and even some other science types. They will do this on Wednesday of next week, so set your death-watches. The Large Hadron Collider, which is buried a thousand feet underground because it is so dangerous, cost literally tons of money to make, even though it uses almost entirely off-the-shelf parts.
It works by firing already incredibly dangerous (and fantastically expensive) exotic particles known only as "hadrons" at each other at sub-atomic speeds. The Large Hadron Collider, or L.H.C. (as it is called by most scientists) does this by placing a hadron on one side of a tiny (50 nanometers across at its widest point) see-saw-like device, and firing another hadron at the other side. The first hadron is catapulted to the other side of the room where a third hadron is suspended from a clothesline-like magnetic field. If the two hadrons collide there is a 25% chance that the two hadrons will combine to form a super-massive black hole the size of the sun, or make supernova or something equally bad, right there in the room. If they miss, it is very difficult to reset the experiment because the hadrons are so small and very hard to find. Nevertheless, reset it they will, and try again and again until we are all dead.
Needless to say, this is a very very very very bad idea. Haven't scientists had enough of playing at God at this point? Between the twin arrogancies of nuclear bomb, stem cells, and cancer research, when do we say to ourselves, look, scientists--what do you say we grow ourselves a collective conscience and call it a day?
Even Japanese Science Physicist Michio Kaku (a well-known figure in the field of space physics) was quoted as saying that the L.H.C. might even create a fire-breathing dragon. How long must regular people like you and I be subjected to the insane whims of evil, amoral, evil scientists? When will the madness end? When the universe is destroyed? Because that, my friends, is too late.
12 comments:
...whut...
I think I see a typo in there somewhere.
Dude, don't you realize that hadrons colliding both cures cancer and solves our energy problems? Like forever?
Sure, if they make us die in a fiery fireball of fire.
While I love being happy and angry about the sheer audacity of the scientific front to build something like this, I love the idea of a particle accelerator summoning a dragon into our universe even better.
whoa, "Last Friday, Wagner and another critic of the LHC's safety measures, Luis Sancho, filed a lawsuit in Hawaii's U.S. District Court. The suit calls on the U.S. Department of Energy, Fermilab, the National Science Foundation and CERN to ease up on their LHC preparations for several months while the collider's safety was reassessed."
FUCKING HAWAII.
You know...Kaku's really not helping his side what with the condescending attitude. That's why people don't believe in climate change you realize. All the "I'm gonna be the one to say I told you so" 'tude doesn't sit well with the masses. People hate that guy in Hollywood. He always gets eaten by the black hole spawned dragon. He's almost always played by someone who looks like William Atherton, or Wayne Knight.
That Times editorial is interesting. Mostly because of the irony involved with criticizing the press—of which he belongs to—of perpetuating sensationalist bullshit from fear-mongering dickwits—which, ultimately, he's doing—while not writing about the actual story, which, ironically (see above), he is also doing.
But overall, I like it:
"It is of a piece with other media-led panics in which expert opinion has been ignored, from the MMR vaccine to GM crops. In short, it's demeaning to science, and insulting to scientists."
-----------------> ^_^
Via Cory Doctorow and boingboing:
"as one physicist told me when I asked about this last month while researching my Petacentres article for Nature, 'Look, it's a 10^-19 chance, and you've got a 10^-11 chance of suddenly evaporating while shaving.'"
Dudes I'm never fucking shaving again.
Consider C3PO and all the statistical jibber-jabber he was spouting. How great would it be If the emperor had a protocol droid standing behind him, stating the odds of a rag tag group of rebels assisted by furry, and fishy people of varying levels of technology being able to find and negotiate a way into a vastly superior space station and destroy it, not once, but twice.
I imagine the emperor saying "piffle" with a small fleck of spit flying out of his mouth and onto Luke Skywalker's shoulder. At which point Darth Vader suddenly spontaneously combusts.
HAW!
"Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a twat." --Professor Brian Cox, Manchester University (formerly keyboardist of D:Ream).
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