World fails to end

Congratulations to the folks at CERN, who earlier today successfully sent protons on a full lap of the Large Hadron Collider. With a bit of luck, they’ll get the LHC running on full power (and with two beams, so they can smash one into the other) sometime next year. And that, of course, is when the world will end. Something to look forward to!

One of the particles the LHC is designed to hunt for is the Higgs Boson, the so-called ‘God Particle’. Sadly for atheists and theists alike, finding it won’t solve that particular mystery. Apparently, Leon Ledermen, the Nobel-prize winner who gave the Higgs Boson its nickname, wanted to call the elusive beast the ‘god-damned particle’. But his publisher suggested an alternative that might help drive book sales…