A sigh of relief

Well we're all still here, the world hasn't ended (or at least if it did it rebooted very quickly) so we can all breathe a sigh of relief, the media can stop mangling the physics, and CERN staff can stop pretending to be rap artists.

If we're really lucky none of the media have bothered to look behind the short synopsis they were all given and realise that all that happened was that they switched on the Large Hadron Collider and ran some test streams in one direction then the other. The actual collisions that has everyone (i.e. the media and people with high school knowledge of physics) worried won't occur until the 10th October.

As I explained to a worried woman yesterday - "Think of it as a reverse nuclear bomb. Instead of releasing energy from matter, they're trying to get matter from energy." Surprisingly this helped.

Likewise pointing out the amount of energy being used is the equivalent of that being used by 14 flying mosquitoes (7 TeV for each stream) helped someone else. For another comparison the energy used is that produced by the fission of 70,000 atoms of U-235 or approximately 0.[17 noughts]2 grams of U-235 while The Little Boy bomb converted 0.6g about a 20 quadrillion degree of difference.

But hey let's say I'm wrong and the world does end in the middle of October... the drinks will be on me ;-)

Oh and because it's rattling in my head from the Ciaphus Cain novels:

When in deadly danger
When beset by doubt
Run in little circles
Wave your arms and shout.