ThinkingSkull.com

As the midnight hour draws near on the East Coast, I am reminded by the visible clock at LHCountdown that on 12am Tuesday the Eighth of July, 2008, the Large Hadron Collider will be activated.

Now, for all you non-comic book reading, unintellectual sheep who have no idea what’s going on in your world (in which case it’s bloody unlikely you’re reading this anyway), start-up sequences are nearly complete on an underground ring about 17 miles in circumference at a location where France borders Switzerland. Using super-cooled electromagnetic rings, the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator will race subatomic particles, protons in this case, and smash them into one another (hence the term “atom smasher”) in the hopes of releasing energy and discovering new or previously undiscovered theoretical particles (that all sound just like those big words they use on “Star Trek”). Detection of such things could provide insight into the origins of the universe… or rip a hole in the space-time continuum that may swallow the known universe right after letting in a bunch of extra-dimensional critters to knock humans down one step on the food chain (have you rented Stephen King’s The Mist yet?)

So, while my own clock on the right is counting down the days to the end of the Mayan calendar, remember this: if you suddenly find yourself living next Monday over and over again or realize that your spirit is no longer contained by a body of flesh, at least now you’ll have some idea what happened.