Day 1089 – “Black Mesa” on the French/Swiss Border

A slice of the ATLAS detector of the LHC
Here’s something you don’t read ever day: the Large Hadron Collider has sparked “doomsday” lawsuits.

As a veteran of “Half Life 2” i know all too well what can happen when humans start mucking about with quarks and bosons and whatnot. If i even hear the word “cascade” once the LHC powers up i’m going to have nightmares.

I’m not a gamer. I’m just not. Not even a “casual” gamer. However a while back i was absolutely sucked in (as in up all night, ‘what, i have to go to work now?’) to the first-person-shooter/use-your-brain-or-die world of Half Life 2.

HL2 had (and continues to have since it is still wildly popular) everything: a wonderful backstory, spectacular art, excellent sound, professional voice actors, kick-ass music, eerie silences… and zombies. What hooked me was the remarkably realistic physics of the game; the world of Half Life 2 felt, looked, sounded and reacted very, very real.

So… do i believe the LHC is going to spawn “strangelets” that will get out of control and convert all matter they touch into similar strangelets that are quite incompatible with life as we know it? No. But then i bet the scientists of Black Mesa (Half Life 1) didn’t exactly plan for what happened when they powered up their, uh, large colorful spinny-thing.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *