More on Al-Collider

Terrorist bird shuts down particle accelerator with aerial bombardment.

Unless it just wanted a bit of Marmite on it?

Death to the Higgs boson!

Police foil Al-Collider plot to blow up sub-atomic particle.

Return of the Mighty Marmite Machine

They've put a new fuse in the Large Hadron Collider and found a few more shillings to run it on off-peak through the coming winter. Ex-D:Ream bandmember and nucular scientist Brian Cox has said "Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a twat".

I've often suspected that those who employ the ad hominem strategy do so because they are on dodgy ground. I'm not a fan of logical proof by abuse, but it has its adherents.

Nevertheless, surely handsome, trendy Cox has heard of the possibility of a "Vacuum metastability event", explained thusly in Wikipedia:

"If our universe is in a very long-lived false vacuum, it is possible that the universe will tunnel into a lower energy state. If this happens, all structures will be destroyed instantaneously, without any forewarning."

How could this happen? A further link in the infallible Wiki universe considers the possibility of cosmic annihilation by particle accelerator:

One scenario is that, rather than quantum tunnelling, a particle accelerator, which produces very high energies in a very small area, could create sufficiently high energy density as to penetrate the barrier and stimulate the decay of the false vacuum to the lower energy vacuum. Hut and Rees,[3] however, have determined that because we have observed cosmic ray collisions at much higher energies than those produced in terrestrial particle accelerators, that these experiments will not, at least for the foreseeable future, pose a threat to our vacuum.

"...at least for the foreseeable future": a phrase to treasure, when set beside the earlier phrase, "...without any forewarning."

Not that I'd mind. After all, we'd know nothing about it. And it'd end the debate about global cooling / global warming / climate change - no guilt, either. And it'd make the Bible a nice bookend for both ends of the history of the universe, starting with "Let there be light" and ending "the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night."

Throw that switch, Twatfinder General.

LHC update

Two days after the Mighty Marmite Machine was switched on, and no news. Did they run out of shillings?

Or is this proton recycling thing one of those EU subsidy scams? * At 11,000 circuits a second, the turnover would much quicker.

But I still think it's really a bunker and escape tunnel to Switzerland (geographically the sane eye in the mad mask of Europe). The elite have something to flee from, as Tony Sharp points out - this is the 14th consecutive year of accounts rejected by their own Court of Auditors.

So how WAS the £4.4 billion spent, exactly?

I don't care; I'm off to look for the Great Wine Lake. If they'll tell me where it is, I'll sign the bl**dy accounts myself. **

* "In 2003 German authorities combined isotopic evidence with paper-trail analysis to put a stop to a sophisticated scam, known as "carousel fraud". A group of German companies had been illegally claiming subsidies by trading EU-made butter to and from Estonia (then not a member of the EU). Each time a butter lorry crossed the border from Germany to Poland the companies were given EU export subsidies. Once in Estonia the butter was repackaged and labelled to make it look like it had originated in Estonia, heaved back on a lorry and hauled back to Germany. This time, the importers took advantage of a tax break on foreign imports aimed at increasing trade with prospective EU member countries, as Estonia then was. The investigation revealed that 22 out of 25 butter samples taken from Estonian-labelled butter imported into the EU were not Estonian. In at least one case, the isotopic ratios of hydrogen and oxygen in a butter sample indicated it could only have come from Ireland."

** Wasn't a Chinese emperor deposed for excessive taxation, which he used to create an artificial lake and fill it with wine so that ships could sail on it and have mock battles for his entertainment?

Large Hadron Collusion

It came to me in a flash. How would you or I know the difference between decay products in a particle accelerator, and a sparkler in a steam bath? We've been had, Ron.

17 miles of construction deep below ground... It's a bunker! When the EU project finally and inevitably collapses, taking the economy of Western Europe with it, the corrupt, incompetent and eye-poppingly expensive politicians and bureaucrats are going to need a hidey-hole.

But what about the pipes and cables?

We saw them as Professor Brian Cox tootled along through the circular cavern, didn't we? D:Ream on. What we saw was a CGI loop, entirely familiar to computer games players. Beneath this illusory overlay is footage of working, sleeping and recreational facilities, water filters, air recycling machinery, food stores and all the rest. Like Slartibartfast on his planet-constructing world of Magarathea, the Euro elite will be able to sleep through the coming recession and return in time to impose fresh taxes and regulations.

Meanwhile, the border-straddling tunnel is a convenient way for them to pop across to Switzerland and check their bank accounts.

His Dark Materials don't exist

My theory: there is no such thing as dark matter, so the Large Hadron Collider won't find it.

Albert Einstein found a better way to describe observable phenomena, and another Einstein will one day improve the theory to include the effects for which the existence of dark matter has been postulated.