Very occasional GrodsContributor, Bookmanoldstyle, was last night considering the end of the world and wondering whether it was worth washing her hair*, when she remembered that the Large Hadron Collider featured in Dan Brown’s novel Angels & Demons. So a-Googling she went and up pops a whole page on the CERN website devoted to a FAQ about the book. These are her favourite bits and they should be yours too.

Q: Does it consist of red brick buildings with white-frocked scientists running around carrying files?
No, that is rather far from reality; we have mostly white buildings made of concrete and the scientists wear everyday clothes and they mostly do not carry files.

Q: Can we make antimatter bombs?
No. It would take billions of years to produce enough antimatter for a bomb having the same destructiveness as ‘typical’ hydrogen bombs, of which there exist more than ten thousand already.

Sociological note: scientists realized that the atom bomb was a real possibility many years before one was actually built and exploded, and then the public was totally surprised and amazed. On the other hand, the public somehow anticipates the antimatter bomb, but we have known for a long time that it cannot be realized in practice.

That sure puts my mind at rest.

* This last bit is probably not true. It’s probably made up by The Editor.

Some people say that the Large Hadron Collider is later today going to end the world by sucking the planet up its own arse. Most scientists say we’re perfectly safe, and Bruce is so confident the world’s not ending that he’s not having sex today. Not even a blow job.

But John Surname is not so sure. Even though he’s trying to look all casual by making lame jokes about giant krill and stuff, he has recorded his last words in this world for posterity just in case the world does end. And how fine the words are.

Seriously, U2, just fuck off.

So what will you do or say today to mark the end of the world?

Scientists from around the world have gone into public relations overdrive in an attempt to allay public fears about tomorrow’s inaugural operation of the Leon Bertrand Collider (LBC). After decades of planning, construction and testing, the LBC will tomorrow accelerate negatively charged strawman particles to near-light speed, in counter-intuitive directions, and cause them to smash into each other at predetermined points around a 27km circular tunnel. A handful of rogue theorists have predicted that the collision of these strawman particles will result in the creation of microscopic irony black holes that will grow larger over time until they eventually cause the entire planet to implode.

“There is absolutely no concrete evidence that any irony black holes created in the LBC will exist for longer than a few nanoseconds,” said Dr Andrew Landerhall of the University Of Life. “It is mathematically impossible for irony black holes in the LBC to be of greater strength than the strawman particles used to create them — and they’re pretty fucken pissweak.”

– AP

Science nerds around the world are currently wetting their pants over the imminent first tests of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. Here’s how Wikipedia explains exactly what a LHC does.

The collider tunnel contains two adjacent beam pipes, each containing a proton beam (a proton is one type of hadron). The two beams travel in opposite directions around the ring. Some 1232 bending magnets keep the beams on their circular path, while an additional 392 focusing magnets are used to keep the beams focused, in order to maximize the chances of interaction between the particles in the four intersection points, where the two beams will cross. In total, over 1600 superconducting magnets are installed, with most weighing over 27 tonnes. Approximately 96 tonnes of liquid helium is needed to keep the magnets at the operating temperature, making the LHC the largest cryogenic facility in the world at liquid helium temperature[10].

The protons will each have an energy of 7 TeV, giving a total collision energy of 14 TeV. It will take less than 90 microseconds for a proton to travel once around the main ring. Rather than continuous beams, the protons will be “bunched” together, into 2,808 bunches, so that interactions between the two beams will take place at discrete intervals never shorter than 25 ns apart. When the collider is first commissioned, it will be operated with fewer bunches, to give a bunch crossing interval of 75 ns. The number of bunches will later be increased to give a final bunch crossing interval of 25 ns.

Geddit? No? Well, here is the LHC in a hip hop nutshell.

(Cheers, Romany!)