DisCERNing few will be eating up our pink broccoli
If you’re one of those people who are counting your blessings that the planet didn’t get sucked into a seething vortex of nothingness this week, I’m sorry to say that we’re not out of the woods yet.
In fact we’re not even in the woods.
The unholy shenanigans in the underground bunker in Switzerland have only just begun.
My colleague, Richard McComb, covered the science behind the CERN Big Bang trials admirably on Tuesday. You can read his words at Birminghampost.net. However, my own detailed research has uncovered a few points he didn’t have space to mention.
Wednesday’s first firing of a proton around a subterranean tunnel was just a mere warm-up for the big event. In layman’s terms, it was taking the lid off the popcorn jar before the real fun of sticking the kernels in a hot pan.
The objective of creating a head-on collision between two of these little nuggets of creation won’t be achieved for a while yet. And the plan to shake-up a metaphorical fizzy pop bottle of loads of these things won’t kick off until the pasty-faced boffins are sure that it won’t break the kit they’ve been saving for years.
It will happen within the year since CERN opted not to go for the extended guarantee because everyone knows this is a rip-off.
Stephen Hawkins, fresh from auditions for the role of the next Doctor Who, believes that the world won’t end because the black holes created, unlike the big buggers in outer space, will be very tiny.
Maybe big enough to fit a Krankie through, but not your average human.
That’s all right then.
However, hippies and conspiracy theorists, still grumpy because they weren’t consulted about the end of the world in the first place, say that the ambition of the scientists will only escalate once the technology has been proven.
They see a world littered with black holes, like open manhole covers, into which we are likely to fall on the way back from the pub. These cosmic potholes are actually portals to parallel universes in which anything may happen.
I’ll return to this soon but the creation of ickle black holes needs to be dealt with first.
I believe, and I have circumstantial evidence to support this theory, that these tiny rips in the space/time continuum already exist. That’s where all the bees have gone.
In fact, anything that’s small and can’t be found is not down the side of the sofa but languishing on the other side of the galaxy in a state of confusion.
There’s a mountain of the old half pence pieces somewhere to the left of Alpha Centauri being weighed by clangers.
Theoretically, that’s perfectly possible.
As the Hadron atom smasher gets into its stride, so the number of black holes will increase, both in size and in number.
Gardeners will be able to poke snails through them rather than cracking their shells under-foot and kids will be able to palm their sprouts off into another dimension.
Like most revolutionary leaps forward in science, we’re being sold it as something good.
Cloning, now seen as being rather spooky, was touted at birth as being a way for us to go out and work while stopping in and having loads of sex.
Genetic engineering of food was launched at supermarkets with bags of frozen broccoli that tasted like chocolate; a way to get the kids to eat their greens, or pinks if they found pink broccoli more appetising than green.
We have entered an age where science fiction is starting to become fact with increasing credibility.
So what will happen when the atom smasher picks up speed and the black holes get bigger?
If you ever wake up in the morning with the feeling that everything in your life has been taken and replaced with an exact replica, you’re already living in a parallel universe.
Black holes could become the gateways to a different reality and who’s to say that reality won’t be better than this one?
There are things out there we can’t even begin to imagine. Like worlds without Posh and Becks or Simon Cowell.
Worlds in which there is just one religion and one God. Who cares if that god is David Icke if everyone loves each other and wears purple?
We’re venturing into Star Trek territory here, that camp hinterland of idealism and naivety, but, again, it has to be preferable to a culture in which the most powerful figure in showbusiness is a rapper who changes his name as often as Nick Berry changes his pants or a woman called Madonna can convince the majority that she’s not getting any older.
Imagine a world without America!
Once you start to see the possibilities of alternative realities then anything and everything is possible.
Everyone, everywhere, from China to Sierra Leone, could speak with a Birmingham accent. Houses in Glasgow could have three taps: hot, cold and heavy.
It could be an offence for women to wear shoes bigger than size seven. After all, it’s not natural is it?
Schools could teach subjects that are actually vocational like lorry driving, sheep-shearing and witchcraft.
And what a wonderful world that would be.
