My Big Bang Machine

We are all extremely excited here at Homeward because on Wednesday my Big Bang Machine will be switched on. It has taken Cowgill 20 years to build it, in his spare time, far below Homeward and encircling it. He has had the assistance of a large number of dwarfs who are, of course, very skilled at digging and tunneling. The technical term for it is a Large Hadron Collider and it will smash together matter at speeds never before seen. Enough energy will be produced to recreate the conditions that existed one trillionth of a second after the big bang. 13.7 billion years after it all began we are about to go back in time. Mine is the largest particle accelerator in the world - many times the size of the little one the Europeans have built at Cern. Cowgill is hoping to glimpse exotic objects like Higgs bosons that have a profound role to play in the structure of our everyday world by giving everything mass. Thats what he says anyway. But I am a little uneasy - will the world end on Wednesday? What if this atom-smasher creates mini unstable black holes that grow exponentially and swallow up Homeward and eventually the planet? This would be extremely annoying as I have only had one holiday this year. Cowgill assures me that the chances of us producing black holes are minuscule and even if we did, they could not swallow up the earth - they would disintegrate immediately. Are we about to answer the most profound questions about the universe? Hopefully, I shall be able to tell you the results of our experiment on Wednesday - if we are all still here.