Stop Worrying

Many people are worrying about the end of the world tomorrow, so let me put your minds at rest. On Wednesday, all that is happening is that the Large Hadron Collider will begin its atom-smashing activities when two parallel beams of particles will be blasted around the 27 kilometre-long underground ring in opposite directions. The collisions – when superconducting magnets will bend the beams so that groups of protons smash into each other - are not expected to begin until October 21st and only then will there be a risk of a black hole forming. So everyone planning a “grand final all-out goodbye” party tonight is going to wake up tomorrow with sore heads and egg on their faces.

So, panic not – we’ve at least six weeks left. But even though we are told that the risks are negligible (Professor Stephen Hawking, for instance, tells us that the risk is zero), if the world does end on October 21st, who cares? None of us will, that’s for sure. It’s not as if we will be standing around saying: “Bugger, the world has ended – those damned wacky scientists at CERN have a lot to answer for. Can we sue?” No, we won’t even know any longer that there ever was a world to care about. And there’s the paradox about this whole conundrum – we hardly show much concern for our world as it is, so why are we all bleating on about it ending? Maybe the scientists at CERN are doing us a favour by speeding up a process that the rest of us are pretty hell-bent on executing anyway. After all, it’s often said that the world (as we know it) won’t be a very nice place to be in fifty years time (don’t get me started on that – rising water levels, dwindling food supplies, Russian aggression, Chinese economic domination etc.), so does it really matter if we are to be spared further misery sooner, rather than later?

Stay calm everyone, and accept your fate. One rather quirky fact surrounding this whole furore is that Professor Brian Cox of Manchester University – a great enthusiast for this latest experiment – is the ex-keyboardist of the 1990s group D:Ream. Hmm... things can only get better?

I, for one, am greatly encouraged by the fact that the world won’t end tomorrow anyway – after all, I wouldn’t want my last week on earth to be spent as a tee-totalist. At least I'll have time before the 21st October to get in a bottle of cider and a bag of crisps in readiness for the big party. Yay!