KEY POINTS:
There is, apparently, no chance at all that by the time this column graces the pages of Canvas, that we, the entire human race, will have been consumed by a black hole of our own making. Zero chance. Not going to happen.
At least this is what the egghead scientists at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) have assured us - just before they turned on their giant particle accelerator, buried deep underneath Switzerland and possibly encased in chocolate.
CERN's giant particle accelerator is a Large Hadron Collider (LHC) which, if we understand everything correctly (which none of us do, but more on that later) is this massive, massive thing designed to do exactly as its name suggests - to get hadrons to collide. A hadron is an atomic particle, made of quarks which, I believe, are really, really tiny things that are apparently up or down - depending on what day you run into them, I suppose. Or they run into each other. Or not.
Look, if this is making no sense to you, that's because it makes no sense to me. And, as far as I can figure out, it makes sense only to the few physicists who have managed to wangle many billions of euros to build the LHC - and even they admit they don't really understand it.
Think of it as being like trying to understand New Zealand First finances, only on an infinitely massive scale, and I think we're getting close to how genuinely confusing all this really is. But the point is, the physicists are really excited by it - and not just because they scored all that cash to build their giant toy.
Now I say "toy" for a very good reason, because the LHC, as far as I can figure (which, as I've just said, isn't very far at all), is like the super-ginormous version of when little boys get a couple of Matchbox or Hot Wheels cars and try to ram them into each other, as fast as possible, just to see what cool stuff happens. Maybe the cars will fly up into the air and do somersaults. Maybe they'll spin off across the kitchen lino and one will end up under the fridge and the other under the oven.
Or maybe they'll open up a black hole or something called a strangelet, which would turn the Earth and everything on it into a large hot lump of strange matter.
But the CERN people assure us this will not happen. Mind you, they assert this in the same way they admit that they're not sure what will happen - and that's the exciting thing, as far as they're concerned. So what is it called and what is the end result when certainty and uncertainty collide?
In the most laymanlike of layman's terms, my understanding of the LHC is that for years physicists have sat around theorising about stuff like "strange matter" and "dark matter" and many other things that sound like they're straight out of Harry Potter. They've talked and talked about it in a language that no else understands, to the point where they're now sick of talking about it and it's time to test some of these theories, just to check that they weren't barking up the wrong tree, in the physics sense.
Now I have a theory about theories. It goes something like: quite often theories are wrong.
Which is okay if your theory is to do with why jockeys wearing green silks on grey horses will always win; but when it comes to tinkering with the building blocks of the universe just to see what happens, I'm a tad concerned and a tad worried. And when two tads collide, in my experience, there are significant grounds for concern.
So if, on Wednesday, everyday life suddenly turned into an episode of Doctor Who, we'll all know who to point the finger at and why - if we haven't all been sucked into a black hole, that is.
If you were a CERN physicist, how would you go about apologising for something clearly as catastrophic as the end of the world? It's not like New Zealand electoral law, where, apparently, a "whoops, sorry we broke the law, we're bad" is all it takes.
So if this weekend there is no weekend and no one is reading this column because somewhere deep under Switzerland someone pushed a button, then I, for one, will be supremely ticked off. I had things planned for this weekend.
Of that much, I can be certain. The rest is science.
