eep! – a blog

Today, the scientists at Cern have succeeded in circulating two beams in the LHC and have achieved the first collision. As a confirmed physics geek, this pleases me immensely, particularly after the whole startup and almost immediate shutdown last autumn, when the refrigeration units packed up.

Anyway, the only thing possibly greater than the feats of science going on, are the hoardes of crazy that appear whenever the LHC is in the news. Today, I present my pick of the comments from The ‘MySun’ pages of The Sun online, from JT_Cro, pasted below for your analysis (complete with original spelling+grammar):

i dont like the closeness and trusting these bumbling fools to destroy this planet we live on just for some thoery that has no basis leading back to square one. if you ask me, i would have this machine shut down and disassembled to be honest, i would rather be ignorant and scared of this machine then dead because these fools miscalculated and caused a catastropic disaster that led to countless deaths of every lifeform, i maybe overexaggerating but with enough protons, it could disstabilize the earths magnetic core and possibly cause a massive earth quake that could shake the planet to pieces.

Well thank goodness for the voice of common sense – JT_Cro, clearly has done a far more thorough risk assessment than the teams of scientists at Cern. Quick unplug it. Then take it apart in case anyone is tempted to come back and restart it. Yeah, that’ll learn ‘em.

The thing that upsets me the most here (and I am ranting, I realise) is the statement “I would rather be ignorant and scared of this machine then (sic) dead”. How can that be any sort of way to live? I don’t have a death wish, but seriously, surely, nothing ventured, nothing gained?

On a lighter note, imagine 10,000 years from now, there are no records of the Cern experiments left in the world and TimeTeam find the LHC’s 26km main collider tubes?

“Tony. TONY! I think we’re going to need a bigger JCB…”