Paul Kuliniewicz

Damn you, Jamie, for planting the idea in my head. This is all your fault. The LHC won’t create a black whole and swallow the planet, but the following, a lyrical fanfic of an obscure parody song crossed with particle physics is so dorky it may collapse upon itself, forming a dork singularity from which nothing can escape.

I hope you’re pleased with yourself.

Well everyone hails
All their stories and tales
And Geneva now is a provider
Of stories that might
Tell of the epic fight
Of Mick Faldo and the large collider.

‘Twas a supercooled ring
Through which protons would zing
In hopes of maybe detecting Higgs bosons.
But a few people thought
It would turn all to naught
‘Cause they listened to credulous morons.

The scientists heard
Of these fears, quite absurd,
And explained that the worries were baseless.
But the fear-mongers told
About mini black holes
And reality-consuming strangelets.

Those fears and concerns
Failed to discourage CERN
And their plans to probe energies larger.
The opponents screamed “no!”
And they turned to the bow
Of Mick Faldo, the world-famous archer.

They asked, “If you have the time –
It won’t cost you a dime –
Could you stop it before things get much worse?
It packs far more power
Than a meteor shower
And it might destroy the whole universe!”

Mick Faldo replied,
“How would I get inside?
My success I could never guarantee.
And please done be miffed –
Though my arrows are swift,
They’re slower than .999c.”

But he tried nonetheless,
Aiming towards the ATLAS
And adjusting for underground weather.
But did his arrow trick work?
…
…
…
…
No, he felt like a jerk
When his shot pushed two hadrons together.

Still everyone hails
All their stories and tales
And Geneva is still a provider.
The story lacks harm
But it has a strange charm:
It’s Mick Faldo and the large collider.

In case for some unfathomable reason you’re one of those people who thinks the Large Hadron Collider is going to destroy the planet (as though such a thing were that easy), there are no less than two websites you can check to see if the unthinkable (and impossible) has happened:

• hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com
• hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com

It always good to have multiple sources for this sort of thing, since there is some misinformation floating around out there. Plus, both of the two sites above have RSS or Atom feeds you can subscribe to, so that you’ll be notified in case the current status of the planet changes.

WARNING: Those prone to worrying about things like the end of the universe might want to avoid reading the HTML source of the first of those two links, lest they should see this:

The possibility that we are living in a false vacuum has never been a cheering one to contemplate. Vacuum decay is the ultimate ecological catastrophe; in the new vacuum there are new constants of nature; after vacuum decay, not only is life as we know it impossible, so is chemistry as we know it. However, one could always draw stoic comfort from the possibility that perhaps in the course of time the new vacuum would sustain, if not life as we know it, at least some structures capable of knowing joy. This possibility has now been eliminated.

The second special case … applies if we are now living in the debris of a false vacuum … This case presents us with less interesting physics and with fewer occasions for rhetorical excess than the preceding one.

S. Coleman and F. De Luccia (1980). “Gravitational effects on and of vacuum decay”. Physical Review D21: 3305.

Those prone to worrying about such things should probably also refrain from reading the above quote.