Wednesday 24 September 2008

TWA Joke

A businessman got onto a TWA flight and sat down. After take off, a stewardess in TWA uniform came over and said "would you like anything to drink sir, we have wonderful TWA champagne, very good TWA wine, delicious TWA coffee..". Lacking the patience to listen to her go through the entire TWA drinks menu, he interrupts and says "I'd just like some of your TWA Tea please".

She slaps him.

Tuesday 9 September 2008

Good bye cruel world?

A lot of people with little or no knowledge of particle physics are terrified that the world will end tomorrow when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is activated.

Ignoring the evidence from numerous other tests, the opinion of experts in the field, and the fact that far more powerful collisions regularly occur in the atmosphere anyway, the ignorami fear the LHC will produce a black hole capable of destroying the entire world.

If it does, I am of, course, more than willing to offer my most sincere apologies to the ignorami ;-)

It's a safe bet that the LHC won't destroy the Earth (if you bet that way and turn out to be wrong, no-one will be around to say anything), but its not quite so certain that the experiments will confirm the existence of the Higgs Boson, the elusive particle that, if it exists, would explain why certain other particles have mass.

Here's hoping that the LHC produces some good insights into the nature of our universe!