Wednesday, September 10, 2008

And now for the BIG question

CERN, who in their wisdom brought us the Web and therefore hallowed be their funding, switched on the Large Hadron Collider yesterday. If you did not hear about this, you are not even peripherally a geek, don't listen to the news, or both, since there was a tiny but non-zero chance that the experiment held in the 17-mile apparatus would, er, destroy the space-time continuum, generate a black hole somewhere in the vicinity of Switzerland, and generally make life as we know it a little hairy. On the up side, it would also spare us further Sarah Palin and that old dude who keeps hugging her before she repeats her convention speech, so that might've been a plus.

But since CERN was, as I mentioned, the originator of the Web, they're On It. We will know if anything bad is happening. We can keep up with subatomic quantum life-devastating events, because now there is a site: http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/. Please note that the source code (Ctrl+U to all my Firefox buds, and who cares what in IE) covers all contingencies.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Heh. As my dad, the scientist to the core, told me when I sent him that site yesterday: They haven't actually done any of the tests that may, actually, result in a Big Whoops, yet--no collisions or attempts at collisions have happened yet. They're just happy the thing turned on. *g*

3pennyjane said...

Fortunately, the Has the LHC Et Cetera site is available as an RSS feed. Stay abreast of breaking news!