sometimes life gets you like that

This was going to be quite a long soul-searching post about the general usefulness of science, based on a conversation held the other evening about whether the Large Hadron Collider was actually worth it. Huge amounts of time, money and energy (and a slight amount of danger) all for ... what? The Higgs partical? Why? Seriously, is there any point to finding this thing except just ... because?

But I am tired, and vaguely upset, and really not in the mood to spend a goodly amount of time talking about how the subject I ended up doing (and will keep on doing) is a mighty large pile of intellectual w*nk. It is starting to look very definitely like science is going to constitute a large part of my life, and I need to be a lot more awake and cheerful before pulling my life apart like that.

So I'm going to read firefly fanfiction instead.

Literature degree? Should'a could'a would'a.

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).