The Internet… it’s mental I mean sure there’s lots of mental stuff on there, and lots of mental people too! But the really mental thing is how it works at all. Billions of machines all over the world somehow talking too each other, truly mental! Take your computer for example, it lets you do all this funky internet browsing, helps you fix up a date or two, keeps you in touch with your mates, lets you buy your groceries, and all sorts of groovy stuff like that but how does it work? What kind of clever stuff is going on in there that lets us all enjoy the fun of toyboywarehouse.com? Apparently it all comes down to the action of subatomic particles. For example your humble monitor is firing a beam of electrons which through some incredible technological genius results in the image you see!! truly truly mental…..
Now I’m not a scientist, but I do find science just about the coolest thing ever! I went to the science museum recently and quite frankly it was awesome! So why am I blathering about my geeky love of science? Well I got to thinking, what has science done for the world of dating? Without science there’d be no internet, and without the internet, there’d be no internet dating, but also no websites to recommend cool bars and restaurants to take your dates, no MSN, and no flirty texting either, all these things we take for granted come down to the hard work of lots of science geeks all over the world. Now granted, I don’t think Max Plank or Enrico Fermi saw dating as a high priority when they were laying the foundations of quantum mechanics, but without them we might not have TBW so I think we all owe Max, Enrico and the world science a great debt
As if science hadn’t done enough for us already, they’re planning something really special for next month …..something so epic, so mind numbingly mega that it could change the world for ever! They’re going to switch on a machine so big and so expensive it boggles the mind. So head smackingly clever it could open up new spacial dimensions, unravel the secrets of the universe, even allow us to see whether time travel is possible. It’s the most complicated thing ever conceived by humanity, and it’s implications for your dating life are almost too spectacular to believe…. Plus for added excitement there’s a very slim chance it could destroy the World and pretty much end existence as we know it….. who’d have though it would be in Switzerland?
Now you’re probably thinking, what the hell is the monstrous contraption? And more importantly who the hell gave it to the Swiss?! If there’s one place you never saw then end of the world coming from, it’s Switzerland! But before I tell you more, I thought it’d tell you a story about I date I had a couple of years ago, one of my very first experiences of internet dating and very nearly my last!!
At the time, I was fairly new to big city life and a friend had suggested I try internet dating… “great idea” I thought “what could possible go wrong?” As it turns out the answer was that I could meet Michelle. Michelle was a lovely girl, except for one minor personality defect…. the fact that she was clearly insane!! I don’t mean a little kooky or a little crazy, I mean properly insane, mad as a box of frogs! Sadly her insanity did not come across online nor on the phone, and we arranged a date… dinner actually in a rather nice restaurant. to which I, unfortunately, can now never return.
Things began fine, we met at the bar got seated and ordered our food. I opted for seared tuna for my starter followed by a nice rare steak, Michelle had a salad, and a main course of lamb accompanied by a bubbling psychological disorder!
“well here’s to a nice evening”i ventured once the wine had been poured,
It turns out that ship had sailed.
The spectre of Michelle’s insanity burst forth with terrifying regularity throughout what I can only describe as a surreal dining experience. The full extent of that date’s weirdness is really an article in itself, but this should give you a bit of a flavour of the evening. As we were waiting for the food to arrive, I asked our (male) waiter if we could have a bottle of water. Michelle shot me an indignant glance
“everything okay?” I inquired
the look vanished, and she assured me she was fine… “oh good” I thought, must have been nothing. Just then I caught sight of our middle aged, male waiter returning with the water. I smiled and thanked him as he approached our table and poured us a glass of water each. As he left I caught Michelle’s eye, indignation seemed to have been replaced by utter hatred and rage.
“I know what’s going on” she spat, “you’re fucking him aren’t you?!”
I’m not sure exactly my reply was but I think it was something like “whahuhhmeh???”
“I’m not some stupid bitch, I saw the way you were looking at each other…. the only reason you brought me here is so you can shag your boyfriend isn’t it?”
I understandably I was struggling to get a handle on exactly what the hell was going on, and to make matters worse the commotion was now attracting the attention of other tables!
“err what are you talking about? Of course not, I’m not even gay for a start” I managed to jabber in my defense. When suddenly her rage seemed to pass, and with a smile she announced
“well I just had to make sure…. I know what you’re like”
What the hell? And that is just a tiny fraction of the night’s insanity, which included a bone chilling, banshee wail from a cab window as our thankfully brief encounter came to a close.
So, bizarre as all the sounds, what the freaking hell has it got to do with a gigantic ‘doomsday’ machine in Switzerland? That’s a bloody good question, and the answer is weird, wonderful, involves time travel and the enviable ability to be in a ‘superposition’ – several places at the same time – still awake? Good! Okay now pay attention coz here comes the science part… and it’s fun I promise!
So what is this machine anyway? Well it’s snappily entitled the Large Hadron Collider or LHC for short , and by large I mean massive, it inhabits a 27 kilometer circular tunnel just outside Geneva at an institution called CERN. There, all sorts of extremely clever people from all over the world will smash very tiny sub-atomic particles called Hadrons, into each other at the speed of light…. incidentally I don’t know why they’re called Hadrons, and not called, say, Dave But then smashing Daves into each other at the speed of light does sound a tad gruesome.
So anyway they’re gonna be smashing very small things into each other at very high speed… “so what?” I hear you cry. Well after these collisions all sorts of exciting junk will come spewing out of these Hadrons, some of it might whoosh off into other dimensions, another bit might shoot back a million years into the past, or into next Tuesday, and just when you think things couldn’t get any stranger….all these parts wouldn’t just be in one place, they would be in lots of places….. at the same time!!!! Arrrgghh it’s crazy but its true!!
Now just take a moment and think of the implications of that…. Think of my predicament with poor old ‘troubled’ Michelle, imagine if I could have nipped off into another dimension, how great would that have been? Even better, imagine I could have zipped back 2 hours in time, and canceled the date. What if I could be in more than one place, I could have been there and sitting at home with my feet up and on another date with a less crazy girl as well!
Think of all the things you could accomplish if you had that power… you could date everyone you fancied simultaneously, although what if you and a date bumped into your other self with another date??! and what if all your dates were dating loads of other people simultaneously too?? I mean things could get seriously tricky, maybe it’s a good thing that only subatomic particles can behave in this spooky manner, but still it would be fun to try it just once or twice… wouldn’t it?
But there’s far more that the Large Hadron Collider could do…. it might find something called a Higgs Boson, and while that might sound like a posh double barrel surname (Lord and Lady Higgs-Boson perhaps) it’s actually the particle that causes you to have weight (well more precisely mass but who cares, this is a dating website not New Scientist)… Think about that, sod diets just figure out this Higgs Boson business and you could lose pounds just like that, by changing the way the atoms of your body interact with the Universe! Sure it sounds a bit more tricky than building flat pack furniture, but one day thanks to the science being done in Switzerland, we may able to manipulate the mass of object here on earth.
And in a strange way all this fills me with a dizzying optimism about humanity. Okay it’s never really gonna be useful for dating, but in a world where everyone thinks the worst of mankind, a world where we clear the rainforests, invade other countries and we destroy the environment… The fact that an army of ‘geeks’ in Geneva is trying to unravel the mysteries of the universe, reassures me that we can still do the truly amazing too, and I hope my enthusiasm for it has been worth a few moments of your time as well.
And just inc ase you’re wondering if any of this expensive smashing of particles actually ever leads to anything useful in the ‘real’ world, it’s worth remembering it was while working at CERN (on the Large Hadron Collider’s predecessor) that on the 25th December 1990, a young British scientist named Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web! Really, without this army of ‘geeks’ we really wouldn’t have this wonderful website… So keep an eye on the news in May, if you see something about a ten billion dollar physics machine in Switzerland, you’ll know the next dating revolution is just over the horizon!
By Dan
