At 12.30 pm today — that’s 9 am Central European Summer Time — try to be close to a near and dear one. Otherwise, prepare to see the last of life-as-has-been-for-all-this-while with the boss or, even worse, a fellow office kiosk rat.
With scientists at CERN near Geneva switching on the most expensive and biggest lab experiment ever at that very moment, the world could end, if, as some scientists have it, the mini-black holes created could gobble up the world. The fact of the matter is that whether we make it alive or not, we haven’t had such existential fun since the Y2K scare in 1999-2000. And that was only about the end of lifestyle. The Large Hadron Collider experiment is about the end of life.
So purely as a philosophical act, it’s thrilling to think of us being able to be part of a global wipe-out. All this while, we’ve been besotted with other mysteries of the universe. For instance, how does the acronym CERN apply to the Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire? (Well, since ‘CERN’ rolls off the tongue better than OERN, the super-geeks decided to keep the acronym of the old name Conseil Européan pour la Recherche Nucléaire.) What is neat about today is that this is no doomsday prediction from tantrik babas or fat Ganesha-swearing astrologers. This warning comes from scientists. And, thank the lord, it’s not a global warming warning. So whether we meet again or not after 12.30 today, we’ll be history.
Look at the brightest side, a long holiday could start from today.