Two days ago, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN performed its first high-energy collision of proton beams, and scientists were excited to finally be doing real physics with the fifteen year old project. PhD Candidate Yvonne Spitzer of CERN said: “I was really excited to be doing collisions. Until now, we’d just been trying to blow pigeons out of the sky with the single beam test runs.”
But the celebration and excitement quickly turned to confusion Tuesday as unexpected results quickly emerged from the first experiment. Dr. Linus Franklin, a senior administrator at the collider, held a press conference Wednesday morning:
We were expecting maybe small black holes, or perhaps even the god particle, the Higg’s Bosun, but what we got instead was something completely different.
What the researchers found was a large particle, many times larger than a proton, that was unlike anything they had ever seen. Dr. Franklin went on to say, “We knew something was wrong when we noticed tiny little horns on it, and it was flourishing a small red cape.”
The exact impact to the scientific community of this find has not even begun to be speculated on, although CERN is at a high state of alert. Dr. Franklin declined to give any specifics of the moments that followed the discovery of the “Devil Particle” as the media is already calling it, but one researcher, who requested to remain anonymous, said it was utter pandemonium in the observation stations.
One of the prime observers suddenly had two large bags of money in his hands, and another was holding a Nobel Prize. I was further away, at a tertiary station myself, but I swore I heard George Burns cracking one-liners.
For now, CERN’s official stance is that there is no true cause for alarm, but further collisions have been postponed indefinitely. Dr. Franklin closed his press conference with these reassuring words:
These types of particle interactions happen all the time in nature. There is absolutely nothing to worry about. The world is not going to end, nor are scientists losing their immortal souls in exchange for material gains. Everything is perfectly fine, trust me. I’m a high profile scientist, would I lie?
Richard Fife is a writer, blogger, and can neither confirm nor deny if he has had direct contact with the Devil Particle, although his mattress is suddenly made of large sums of cash money. More of his ramblings and some of his short stories can be found at http://RichardFife.com.
