Happy Island Updates

The mishap was the latest in a series of setbacks to have blighted the project – problems that came as no surprise to Holger Bech Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya, reports Time magazine. These respected physicists believe the attempt to create large numbers of the God particle – also known as the Higgs boson, a subatomic particle believed to be responsible for giving everything mass – is so abhorrent to the universe that the universe is sabotaging the experiment from the future.

The collider does seem cursed. Originally intended to start bashing atoms together in 2006, the experiment has been delayed by exploding magnets, electrical faults, vacuum leaks, the death of a technician when a crane load was dropped on him, the arrest of a physicist on suspicion of working for al-Qaeda and now a rogue baguette. The creation of Higgs sends ripples back in time to destroy itself, Nielsen and Ninomiya have speculated.

Scientists have assured worried members of the public that, contrary to media speculation, the world won’t go down the tube with it. While there is a possibility that the collider will create a black hole or two, the organisation insists the holes would be microscopic and short-lived, and highly unlikely to suck the Earth into oblivion. Likewise, the organisation has played down the risk of the machine creating dangerous “strangelets”, which sound like a sub-group of emos, but are in fact hypothetical microscopic lumps of “strange matter” that could theoretically attach to normal matter and make it “strange” too. Nor is the collider likely to turn the currently unstable universe into a more stable form known as a “vacuum bubble”, in which we could not exist. But nothing’s certain in the collider business.