News

Well, it's been a pretty crazy week: banks collapsing, package holiday firms disappearing, the PM in trouble, and Microsoft confusing the hell out of everyone. Ironically enough, the only place where good things are happening is Zimbabwe.

Between out of work city boys, stranded holidaymakers and everyone generally running around tearing their hair out, the remaining few investment banks have come up with a plan to keep themselves safe. They are forming an intricate series of mergers, handshakes and loans that may or may not be to themselves in order to create a situation in which no government could possibly let them go under, lest the entirety of the British Isles is dragged down with them, sinking into the North Sea until the Japanese come along and reclaim the land as their own.

Meanwhile, 5000 people turned up at Lehman's on Monday to find themselves out of work and 400,000 people are fearing redundancy with the Lloyds HBOS merger (or takeover, or Pac-Man-eating-Ghost-thing, I don't get M&A). Not to mention jobs lost when all manner of other companies disappearing amid the chaos...like when you're in a hurry and lose your keys. And what headline did I see on BBC News on Wednesday?

"UK Unemployment Rises"

No shit, Sherlock!

Today was a big day for science, after 30 years, everyone's favourite looped underground tube was powered up for the first time. I'm talking of course, about the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, rather than the Circle Line, which would be lucky to be in the top 100 (and I'm not even sure I could name 100 subterranean loops).

The news channels were dominated by stories about this marvel of technology, from breakfast till...right about lunchtime. The media seemed to be clamouring to get any experts they could in front of a camera for comment, anyone with a PhD and even a passing interest in Physics would do. Competition was no doubt fierce, and yet nobody was willing to speak to Brian Cox, just in case he said the "t" word again.

The BBC's man of choice (at least by 10ish) was Simon Singh, who was forced to dust off his background in particle physics and contacts at CERN to reassure the public that we weren't about to die in a swarm of tiny black holes. This of course left young geeks around the country confused, seeing as his fame in recent years has been based primarily on being That Guy With an Enigma Machine.

Tragically, while some tried to shoe-horn in their views on what amazing benefits any discoveries made using the LHC might have for the world (everything from a marginally faster Internet to winning Hawking some money), all the media wanted was reassurance that the world wasn't about to end. No matter how many scientist explain exactly why these experiments are safe, somehow the media gives illiterate whack-jobs more credibility, and parents have to try and calm their children's fears at bedtime. That said, kids have always had irrational fears: bogeymen, cupboard monsters, nuclear war from 1945-1989...I myself was once convinced that ET and Gilbert the Alien were in cahoots and up to no good. Still, somehow people (probably with similar irrational hatred of liberals) are convinced that CERN is evil incarnate and determined to destroy everything we hold dear, regardless of how ridiculous that sounds.

But that's the beauty of it. These experiments would never have gotten that much media coverate if there wasn't this sense of foreboding amongst the tabloid-reading masses. Without headlines like "Are We All Going to Die On Wednesday?" perhaps nobody would care, and perhaps some kids have now been spurred on to pursue a career in science, just so they can say "Nope, we're not".

Maybe some other famous experiments might have benefitted from a little scaremongering:

• "Pitch Drop May Cause Widespread Flood"
• "Are Pavlov's dogs conditioned to kill?"
• "Feather and Cannon Ball Plot to Overflow Human Civilisation After Repeated Abuse At The Hands of Galileo Galilei SHOCK"

And so on. However, I believe that everything aside, we may never be able to answer the true question out there, a question that may change the very nature of human understanding, that has baffled human minds since time immemorial. Is it a Collider of Large Hadrons, or a Hadron Collider that is Large?