7 down, 9,105 to go -- plus how scientists almost blew up the world!

There was a week or two ago a lot of concern over the start-up of the Large Hadron Collider and whether it would create a massive black hole that would swallow up the earth and we would all be either crushed or transported to a new dimension where we would finally meet V.I.N.CENT and the rest of the crew of the U.S.S. Palomino , which sounds cool except that I think we would also run into Maximillian and Dr. Reinhardt, and they were evil, so it wouldn't be a paradise or anything.

As it turns out, we were not swallowed by a black hole-- yet -- but that doesn't mean that the public didn't have reason to fear, given that "scientists" in the 1940s detonated the first atomic bomb despite worrying that doing so might ignite the entire atmosphere and destroy the world. They just went ahead and did that, without even warning us -- so would you expect them to tell you that the world just may be swallowed up by a black hole? Of course not. They're too busy pretending velociraptors exist.

Plus, consider the quality of the "scientist" that is working on the Large Hadron Collider. On the day it was turned on, CNN interviewed John Ellis, described as a "CERN Physicist" and asked John Ellis whether the public had anything to worry about.

Of course not, John Ellis responded. The collider, he explained, would be smashing together particles and releasing that energy. The public had no need to worry, he went on to say, because these particles were like mosquitos, so there was "no more energy than a mosquito." That is a direct quote of John Ellis.

What John Ellis was saying, then, is that the Large Hadron Collider would release no more energy than if two mosquitos ran into each other.

What John Ellis is not understanding, then, is Einstein's equation, one every single person in the world except John Ellis knows: E=mc(squared.)

E= mc(squared) is not just the name of a Mariah Carey album, John Ellis -- although you may very well think so, given that for a CERN physicist you are alarmingly unfamiliar with the formula. E=mc(squared) also is the equation Einstein (you may have heard of him) created to explain the relationship between matter and energy, and particularly how much energy is stored in matter and ready to explode.

In the equation,

E= energy
M= the mass of an object.
C = the speed of light in a vacuum.

So the Energy contained inside any given object is equal to that object's Mass times the Speed of Light, squared.

A mosquito weighs, typically, 2.5 milligrams. The speed of light in a vacuum is 299,792, 458 meters per second. Let's round that down to 299 meters per second to make the math easier. That means that the energy contained in a single mosquito is:

E= 2.5 mg * (299,000,000 * 299,000,000) or 2,235,025,000,000,000,000 joules.

Two mosquitos collided together and exploding like a nuclear reaction would therefore release 447,005,000,000,000,000 joules of energy.

One joule = the energy of one textbook dropped on the floor.

The Hiroshima bomb released 80,000,000,000,000 joules of energy.

So, what John Ellis should have said is that the energy produced by the Large Hadron Collider would certainly not be as great as that of two mosquitoes colliding and exploding, since if two mosquitos collided and exploded in a nuclear reaction, basic principles of physics tell us that the resulting energy released would be 5,587 times the destructive force of Hiroshima.

I, for one, was not reassured by either (a) John Ellis' deliberate misleading of the public, or (b) John Ellis' terrible misunderstanding of phyics or (c) the possibility that John Ellis was telling the truth and understood physics and that at any moment that day, a force equal to 5,587 nuclear weapons might be detonated.

That's why "scientists" should stick to making up dinosaurs and pretending they existed, and leave the real science to indie rock groups like Modest Mouse, which is the artist responsible for today's song, a song which accurately explains how the universe can be both infinite and finite. I give you song 7 of 9,105, "3rd Planet" by Modest Mouse:




Down... to go... is my attempt to out Wowbagger Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged -- by counting down all the songs on my iPod, one at a time.

"Science" is worthless; all it does is add oxidants to food and make up the velociraptor. Click here to read about my misadventures with science-ified food; or click here read about how I finally proved that velociraptors never existed.