This piece came out after the Large Hadron Collider came online for the first time . . . and then blew a fuse and was offline again for a long time. Having visited the RHIC in Brookhaven recently, I thought it appropriate to revisit.
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Well, Armageddon seems to be at hand, but it wasn’t caused by the Large Hadron Collider in Europe, as predicted. Apparently, the Large Hadron Collider worked wonderfully for all of an hour before it blew up and became inoperable until next spring.

But fear not, end-of-days-junkies. We still have the largest collapse of a bank ever in the history of the United States (mine, as it happens), a firesale of another asset firm, and the inability of the nation’s top money minds to solve this whole mess. As the failed bank would say, Who-hoo!
As if all of that weren’t bad enough, I’ve just been through my own personal Seventh Circle of Hell: I just moved.

I'm celebrating the New Year by looking back on times when we all thought the world would end.

Enjoy this piece about the scientifically-plausible destruction we worried would be wrought right before the Large Hadron Collider came online.
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I’m sure you’ve all heard about the collapse of the financial market, but I’m sorry to report that may be the least of our problems. If you haven’t heard the distressing news by now, I recommend you sit down immediately before reading the next sentence. (Seriously, grab a seat.)

According to some of the most brilliant scientific minds, the world might actually end in a matter of months.

I kid you not. Here’s why. Scientists in Europe (of course) have built an underground machine shaped like a racetrack that is almost 17 miles long and straddles the border between France and Switzerland. The scientists built this machine, called the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, in order to re-create what they think the world was like a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. It is now the world’s largest atom-smasher.

So, aside from the comical effects of repeating the phrase “atom smasher” over and over again, why did the scientists build this machine? It’s quite simple. The LHC will help to better our (meaning their) understanding of how the universe works.

Unfortunately, in their attempt to better their understanding of how the universe works, they might accidentally obliterate it.