|
|
|
|
|
|
Do you ever wonder if news organizations are concentrating all our attention on issues that don't matter very much, in order to distract us from those that do?
Back in the summer of '99, some friends of mine and I would go out of a Friday night and drink melon beer until we were, as you might say, South of the Border. We would then careen out (on foot -- we were slightly responsible, and besides, could not afford cars) to an abandoned accelerator on the edge of the Cavendish laboratory site. Nobody seemed to know it was there, which may have been why it had unmetered electrical power and an enormous pile of squirrel droppings by the front entrance. Anyway, one night, after a particularly vicious game of strip monopoly (my skin was raw from duct tape for days afterwards) we decided to try colliding things in the accelerator.
It powered up fine, its suspiciously clean panel lights winking in the dusk. A squirrel raced out of an unseen hole in the skirting board, as if in silent warning. We pressed on nonetheless.
We started small: I found an old penny and chucked it into the beam. An eighth of a second later, the accelerator spat it out at Mach 7; the laundry farm near the M11 took the brunt of the blast, but frankly anyone idiotic enough to farm laundry probably deserves everything they get.
We worked our way up through spiders, beer cans, pinecones, but oddly no squirrels. They, wise beyond their size, had scarpered into the deepening night.
And so we came to the climax of the evening.
Bob-Jimbo (I forget his real name, if indeed he ever told it me) put an antelope in one end of the tube. I put an elope in the other.
We set the machine going.
I don't know if you've ever experienced a particle accelerator colliding an elope with an antelope at 98% of the speed of light. If you have, like me, you won't ever forget.
A particle emerged from that accelerator. It was big, it was khaki-coloured, and it was a mean drunk. It swiped our stash of meths and spooled across the countryside, and we never saw it again.
Fifteen minutes later, almost to the day, the news organizations of the world started reporting complete hooey.
No-one will ever really know what happened (unless someone gets Dan Rather drunk and asks him) but I think we all know, deep down, how it must have been. The particle made a circuit of the world's news organizations and instructed them to stop reporting news and start providing people with an endless supply of rabidly debatable issues of minimal importance. This ensured that anyone likely to care was busy, forever. It then went on to steal all the world's money and molasses, which it continues to do -- unreported -- to this day.
Never trust anyone with a particle of sense.