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Baby got bang

Finally Switzerland has another claim to fame besides delicious chocolate and its cowardly neutrality during World Wars: the eradicator of mankind, the Earth, the Universe and perhaps even cockroaches. I say this because this November, scientists in Switzerland are "turning on" (scientific jargon for "starting") the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a particle accelerator and collider. This means the machine will bash together bits of an atom so small you can't even see them with the naked eye, at a speed close to the speed of light, which is the same velocity needed to get through the D.C. beltway rush-hour traffic in only 10 minutes. The hope is the machine will produce tiny black holes, will reveal the relationship between matter and antimatter, and will hopefully brew the finest batch of Colombian coffee this side of Saturn.

I know what you're thinking: Why did you choose Saturn as your dividing mark? Why not Uranus? That's a funnier sounding planet. YOUR ANUS. He-he. To which I reply that my humor is much, much more sophisticated than dirty puns, and, anyway, we should not be worrying about trivial points when this machine could easily obliterate all life in the universe, including Uranus. He-he.

Safety concerns include the potential for the creation of a stable black hole or (and I am not making this up) the opening of different dimensions that could potentially suck ours in. Is this actually possible, you sticklers for living might ask as you rush to Wal-Mart to pick up a lifetime supply of baby powder? The answer is probably not. There is only a one-in-four-times-10-to-the-negative-40 chance that one day this November, upon waking up only to discover our damn roommate is in the bathroom when we really need to go, the world will implode as we pee in his dirty laundry basket.

The scientists over at the LHC recognize and admit the dangerous potential of their baby. This got me thinking, unfortunately. I don't like thinking. It usually leads to a headache or -- God forbid -- political activism. But at that particular moment I thought, "How can these scientists still follow through with the process, knowing that it could potentially destroy the universe?" I mean, we're not talking about a pill whose possible side effect is an itchy and burning neon blue rash in those places you don't even allow your wife or doctor to look at. No, we're talking about a machine with a much worse warning label: "Ingestion of machine will kill you." You can't eat metal, silly.

But chances are nothing will happen. According to untested theories, tiny black holes cannot actually sustain themselves. Of course, we've never tested these theories. Nor do we know what exactly a black hole is or what it is capable of. We don't even know if a black hole is actually black, or just a really dark blue. Talk about ignorance! Yet within a few months, the LHC could very easily verify or disprove these theories, providing the scientific community with plenty of important information about the makeup of the universe, information 99.93 percent of the population will think is less important than in which briefcase, in the show Deal or No Deal, the one million dollars is in. I can just see how most people would react:

Average Joe: Hey, did you hear a black hole is not black, but rather a very dark purple?

Average Sally: What the hell is a black hole?

Average Joe: I think it's a type of fish.

My advice to you is not to worry. Supposedly there's something called the RHIC that's been doing a similar thing for years, and, to the best of my knowledge, the universe still exists. But if it does appear the world will implode, and you don't have a black hole shelter, I advise moving to Switzerland, whose neutrality stance in times of war will no doubt protect it from extinction. It might not be a happy life from there on -- living with cockroaches and the Swiss amid a world without time and shape -- but, hey, it beats having an itchy and burning neon blue rash any day.

Chris's column runs bi-weekly on Mondays. He can be reached at shuptrine@cavalierdaily.com.

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