The Wallflower Report

So apparently a lot of people were like worried that the world was gonna end or something last night, because some scientists in Switzerland dug a tunnel to France and exploded the universe inside it, for science.

Wait, that didn’t come out right. Let me try again.

For science!

Yeah. Apparently they’re looking for something called the “Higgs boson”, a tiny particle which a guy named Higgs swears he saw one time but which nobody has ever caught on tape. Now like most people probably don’t know a lot about this kind of thing, so I’ll try to explain it. You see a boson (or “boatswain”) is a tiny little particle whose existence can explain some of the mysteries of the universe, like why scientists needed nine billion dollars to dig a seventeen mile tunnel under France and fire a bunch of disintegrator rays and stuff through it.

While the benefits of digging a giant tunnel under France and zapping a bunch of particles may seem obvious, some people have imagined all kinds of nightmare scenarios coming from this experiment, like everything from a black hole to weird new kinds of matter to the plot of Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons.

I have to admit, it does sound like the start of a lot of sci-fi/horror movies and video games. The world hasn’t ended yet, but I guess they’re still getting the particles warmed up so there’s still time for something to happen. I know I’d feel a lot better if I knew they had a squad of grizzled space marines or a guy with a crowbar standing by, in case reality breaks or something.

Anyway, just in case they accidentally open up like a rift in time and space and another dimension full of unspeakable monsters comes pouring into ours, we should all remember the important moral lesson of The Mist (movie version):

Always Wait Five Minutes Before Putting Your Unspoken Murder-Suicide Pact Into Effect When You Run Out Of Gas While Driving Through A Hellish Interdimensional Fog.

These words are as true today as they were when I wrote them last December.

~Ariella Rasputin Wallflower

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 10th, 2008 at 9:43 am and is filed under Science!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.