Issue date: 9/24/08 Section: Opinion

MCT Photo [Click to enlarge]

Science, tyrant to good people the world over, has claimed another victim. A 16-year-old girl from the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh drank pesticide in an apparent suicide attempt, driven to the act by the constant doomsday prognostication put forth by Indian news programming. I guess it would be fair to say that the liberal Indian media conspiracy shares some of the blame for this young woman's untimely death.

The newest agent for global fear is the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, an atom-smashing, 17-mile-long donut of peril buried deep under the Swiss-French border. This machine propels protons directly at each other at more than 99.99 percent of light speed.

The primary goal of this monstrosity is to hopefully recreate the condition of the universe in the first few microseconds immediately following the Big Bang.

The hope is that so doing will reveal what's come to be known as the "God Particle," the long-theoretical Higgs boson, a subatomic particle which is thought to explain why the universe has mass.

All this isn't without its risk. Miniature black holes are the biggest threat. Black holes. While imperceptibly small, these mini black holes could potentially be created on the order of one per second. I don't have to tell you what black holes do.

And there's the small - no pun intended - matter of strangelets. These tiny collections of subatomic particles are thought to be the result of protons and electrons fusing into neutrons before collapsing into a mess of quarks. These strangelets catalyze the conversion of a normal nucleus to "strange matter," releasing a mound of energy and producing a more stable particle - they get more stable as they get bigger! In turn, it hits another nucleus until all the atoms of the Earth have been engulfed. Our beloved planet would become a neutron star.

As if we, the people of Earth, were without small-scale causes for concern. Job insecurity, planes crashing, war, bird droppings falling from the sky - these are just a portion of the litany of Thems to provide fear and loathing for us. These things are seamlessly integrated into our daily lives. Small-scale fears of the ultra-banal variety are vital for day-to-day motivation.

When a carrot fails to manifest in front of us, there are always predators bringing up the rear and keeping our asses in line. More valuable, even, is the infighting we're granted by fears, especially manufactured ones. Hatred and xenophobia are the greasy gears that make the global village work so - well, it works, anyway.

This LHC, however, threatens each and every denizen of the Earth equally. What the Olympics does for, I don't know, sportsmanship, the LHC does for terror. The world is brought together in a worldwide sharing of sentiment, driven by individual concerns.

Thankfully, this evil scheme is not going unnoticed. Back in March, a lawsuit was filed in Honolulu to block the LHC from firing up until a "comprehensive safety report" had been filed. A German chemist filed suit last month, indicating that the LHC poses grave risks for the European Union and all of humanity besides. LHCDefense.org, a group founded by one of the initial Hawaiian litigants and touting itself as "the official site for citizens against the Large Hadron Collider" encourages all concerned parties to write their congressperson about this unprecedented threat. These brave souls who stand up to the tyranny of science have had their arguments fall on deaf ears.

They are routinely dismissed by so-called "experts" and alleged "particle physicists" as without legitimate threat.

One researcher of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN, the European research group responsible for the project, went so far as to claim that the likelihood of spontaneously disintegrating during a morning shave was a few powers of 10 more likely than any black hole scenario. Others indicated that more potentially destructive high-energy collisions bombard the Earth from space routinely.

But with a tremendous and villainous scheme as reminiscent of a Bond film as the LHC, can we really trust the conspirators to ease our misgivings with anything but lies and doublespeak? As I knew instinctively not to trust Dr. No or Goldfinger, so too I know that CERN is up to no good, driven mad by ambition and possibility, searching for the "God Particle."
The God Particle. Everything about this rings evil. Science has been on a campaign to destroy the lives of so-called regular citizens for centuries, and this $8 billion proton-smashing loop 300 feet below the base of the Swiss Alps may do just what Nikola Tesla's famed death ray failed to accomplish. We of Earth would be wise to begin raising funds now for the upcoming ransom.

Cody Bishop can be reached at cbishop@statehornet.com

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