The Point of The Large Hadron Collider

It got switched on today. The big giant tube thing that somehow is going to redefine science for ever has been activated, and as scientists attempt to work out what dark matter is and how particles hit each other and all that, the rest of the world has been united in saying “huh”? Nobody knows what a Hadron is, you see, or why it is so important that we make them collide regularly. All we do know is that now it’s been switched on, there is a chance we might all be sucked into a black hole and killed, or something.

We’ve been researching the project to find out what the heck is going on, exactly. The LHC, as we shall evermore call it, fires particles down a 17km tunnel (can’t they translate that into metres for people who don’t speak ‘crap measurement scales’?) which is buried underground somewhere underneath France and Switzerland. These particles get sped up by giant magnets and start moving at such incredible speeds that when they smash into each other – as hoped – they will disintegrate and scientists can analyse what’s inside them. That’s about as much as we can understand about the whole thing.... and that’s what the man wants you to understand about it.

In reality the whole thing makes no sense. Why would anyone want to analyse particles when we still can’t make a loaf of bread last two weeks without getting mouldy? As a representative of the common student – not the posh ones, nobody likes an Oxbridge kid – Wilftonville cannot understand why science isn’t working to improve things for those people who suffer from having no money. As it turns out, the answer was simpler than we realised.

Go back to the second paragraph and look to see if there’s anything unusual there that bears analysis. I’ll wait.

Right, so hopefully you’ve now realised that for some reason this massive project has been located in France and Switzerland, instead of somewhere where the locals aren’t inbred, stunted smokers with a keen interest in vineyards and cheeses. That’s what’s going on here. The LHC causes black holes. The LHC is located in France and Switzerland.

The LHC is designed to destroy France.

Finally: science we can all get behind! There’s no need to fear about what this does to religion anymore, or about if the LHC will cause us to realise new and more terrifying things about the world we live in. Because it’s sole purpose is to destroy France. God speed, LHC! One other thing we noticed today which interested us: they’ve finally built a vacuum cleaner than can go in more than one direction. James Dyson has realised that by using a ball instead of fixed wheels, the common vacuum cleaner suddenly becomes much more useful. Truly, this is the best day for science since they discovered that monkeys were sort of like humans but not quite.