Not quite the end of the world...

The Large Hadron Collider has just been turned on! I should probably be slightly more excited by this, but I am slightly upset today due to the devistating discovery that our mutant DNA isn't. We have lots of lovely wild-type DNA and no mutant strains at all. *sigh*

But anyway, the Hadron Collider. As yet, no black holes have opened, and no aleins or stragelets have appeared. Not particularly surprising though, as as far as I can understand, switching it on was never the issue, the problem was with the actual collisions. Which haven't started yet. So far, they've just been shooting protons around the circit, in a clockwise direction. Later, they're going to start sending them anticlockwise as well. The actual high-energy collisions aren't due to start until the 21st October.

For the record, I'm fairly sure nothing particularly bad will happen when they do start the collisions. Hopefully they'll find something interesting, they may even find something useful. And if it all does go horrendously wrong, it is a slightly comforting thought that we won't actually know about it.

(Although if it creates a black hole that sucks the whole universe up my tentative plans for reincarnation might end up severly scuppered).