Previously on The Wire – I mean, the LHC...
...Discoveries would include the God Particle, a tiny entity also called the Higgs Boson, which is believed to give objects – including people – their mass.
Buuuuuuuuuut -
A hole was punched in the protective pipe that surrounds the cable and released helium, cooled to minus 271C, into a section of the collider tunnel. Pressure valves failed to vent the gas and a shock wave ran through the tunnel. A 400-metre chunk of the £2.5bn device had been wrecked, it was discovered.
To reiterate the point of all this -
The LHC will accelerate bunches of protons, kept in two beams, each less than a hair's breadth in diameter, at speeds close to the speed of light.
One beam will circulate clockwise, the other anti-clockwise. Then, at four points along the collider's tunnel, the beams will cross.
These explosive interactions will form the operation and will generate new types of particle, including the Higgs, that will pop fleetingly into existence before disintegrating into a trail of other sub-atomic entities.
Sceptics argue that miniature black holes will be created and one of these could eventually grow to swallow up the Earth. This fear has led protesters to make legal attempts to close down the LHC, one even making it to the European Court of Human Rights.
Even stranger is the claim by another group of physicists who say the production of Higgs bosons may be so abhorrent to nature that their creation would ripple backwards through time to stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveller trying to halt his own birth.
So, with my scientific knowledge and calculations, I predict that around 11.59pm on Dec 24th 2009, this dude -
will come flying out in this -
...nothing's impossible, only improbable.