Friday 20 November 2009

Will light dawn in CERN's tunnels as they switch on the HADRON collider once more?

As I came back from the bakery this evening I was having problems just seeing to the other side of the road - the Genevan fog is out tonight with a vengeance. Some of our neighbours work as physicists at CERN and I nearly bumped into one as she was leaving in a hurry and great excitement to get to the laboratory - the fog really is bad.
Here's hoping that the scientists will not be in the fog as they turn on and test the Hadron collider in the tunnels beneath us tonight and over the weekend. Perhaps some glimmerings of understanding will begin to shine through the fog of information, figures and results that the experiments will generate. Anyway I hope it's not another big switch off because of over-heating magnets. Perhaps someone will be bringing home news of the elusive Higgs boson through the above-ground fog.
I do wonder though whether all this underground high tech activity and overload on the local electricity and commications infrastructure might not be the reason for our rather flaky high-speed broadband connection at the moment. Probably not. The real reason for that is the non-service agreement any internet provider seems to write in invisible yet indellible ink into all contracts - "No we won't sort out any problems but we will go on charging you. Merci!" In this household at least the future is certainly not france telecom Orange. I really want a sort of organic, wind-generated and fairly traded broadband connection - or maybe generated by the heat from my compost bin, or driven by the enzymes the worms in it produce - is it too much to ask scientists to look into this?
Not sure that finding the Higgs boson would even resolve the crazy issues I have! But hey let's focus on the meaning of life, the dawn of time and the God particle. After all we need some relief from the post-service economy global monopoly capitalism seems to offer. Maybe that's all religion can try to do too!

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