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September 10, 2008 6:20 PM PDT

Why the Large Hadron Collider must be stopped

by Chris Matyszczyk
  • 564 comments

I am not an intelligent designer. Nor am I a resident of France or Switzerland.

But this Large Hadron Collider experiment, in which particles are breaking the speed limit somewhere beneath the French/Swiss border and then crashing into each other like teenage drunks in fairground bumper cars scares the semi-comatose bejaysus out of me.

These scientists claim to know what they are doing. But scientists always claim to know what they are doing. Then they discover, while doing the thing that they claim to know they are doing, that they are doing something entirely different.

Is any government monitoring these people? What if the Alps are suddenly sent into orbit by two particularly control-free particles and land square on top of, I don't know, Cleveland?

This is a clear admission of their intent. And it's in French too.

(Credit: CC Robert Scoble)

Alright, sometimes experiments do have excellent unintended consequences. But not often enough. Yugoslavia was an experiment. Look what happened to that.

The subatomic particles in their long tubes will be going at just this side of the speed of light and no one, but no one, knows what will happen when they enjoy their protonic fender-bender. It's all very well for Stephen Hawking to bet $100 that the supposed "God Particle' will not be found by this experiment. It's all very well for scientists to mock Professor Otto Rossler, who says that black holes will be created that will suck the earth away.

But let me tell you this. I have proof these scientists may be several wires short of a working plug. Before they began their descent into scientific instability, these people actually made a rap video.

In this rap they declare that this madness of theirs will "rock you in the head." They rumble on about anti-matter being "matter's evil twin." And in some twisted way, they seem to want to recreate the Big Bang that made everything other than the Partridge Family and the Palin Family.

These people are clearly on an insane quest for anti-matter, the so-called evil twin. They are like the antagonists in ConAir or A Beautiful Mind, the sort of folks who want to blow up the whole world and deny Russell Crowe an award.

Is no one prepared to put a leash on this crazyfest? The first collision is due in around thirty days. Please, look at that video. Don't they look like mad people to you? They're not a day over 25 and if you're telling me they're compos mentis, I'm telling you that Amy Winehouse is taking tea with Richard Dawkins next week.

Will someone not put a stop to this? I don't care if I'm made up of tiny little bits of string. I just want to be in one piece to watch the next Superbowl, the next series of Entourage and, although this is very ambitious, the Olympics live on the West Coast.

Techies, please help me here. Well, the sane ones amongst you, anyway.

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About Technically Incorrect

Chris Matyszczyk brings a fresh and irreverent perspective to the tech world in his CNET blog, Technically Incorrect. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET.

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