A growing number of stupid people are becoming nervous about the imminent opening of the Large Hadron Collider at Geneva, claiming that the world’s largest particle accelerator may ‘create or big black hole that will suck us all in or mess up our DNA or something’.

The LHC which is funded and built in collaboration with over two thousand physicists from thirty-four countries will be switched on in August. It will collide opposing beams of 7 TeV protons, revealing hitherto unknown information about what the world is made of, potentially including the existence of the so-called ‘God Particle’, the Higgs boson.

‘That’s all very well…’ said one leading stupid person. ‘But I don’t like the sound of it… What if, like matter meets anti-matter and stuff, and we all flip over into an alternative dimension like in that film?’ Walter Wagner is now leading a coalition of stupid people opposed to the opening of the LHC, gathered from radio phone-ins and letters to the local newspaper. ‘I’ve heard that it could create a time vacuum, creating nuclear fission in the protein particles of our lymph nodes. Or something…’ asserted Wagner, who does not own a mobile phone in case its cancer rays give him brain AIDS.’

His Stupid Alliance has now filed a lawsuit against the scientists behind the LHC, claiming that they are about to unleash a micro-black hole, or a wave of dangerous particles called ‘strangelets’, or maybe a resonance cascade or a reality bomb, or some other overblown sciencey-sounding doomsday scenario that he’s read about on the internet or seen in a film or whatever.’

Lyn Evans of CERN has dismissed his fears as impossible, and the consensus of all credible scientists is that the collider poses no threat to mankind. Wagner, however, insists that they are all wrong, and that he knows more than them about science because he saw every episode of Star Trek up to 2003, when he learned that his television had something called a ‘cathode ray tube’ inside it, and immediately ripped out the plug and now refuses to go near it.

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One of the disgraced pair told a friend ‘We thought there would be a clear winner, with one conker smashed and the other carrying on going round and round the accelerator. However, all that happened was that they both shattered into a big conkery mess. We spent a few minutes trying to clean the lumps off the detector. But it’s quite difficult to clean a Large Hardon Collider in the dark.’ The young researchers’ case was not helped by them repeatedly calling the billion dollar construction ‘the Hard-on’ collider, and then giggling at the innuendo.

However the research notes of the young scientists showed that they had at least taken some trouble to prepare properly for their experiment, soaking the conkers in vinegar and baking them in the oven. ‘The conkers selected weren’t just ordinary ‘one-ers’ but had beaten many other conkers on the way to this ultimate encounter. Simon claimed his conker was actually a ‘sixty-two-er’’. Previous experiments had included putting conkers in the middle of the road and seeing whose got run over first.

With the world’s press gathered in Cern, the leader’s of the ground-breaking research project were forced to explain that there would be no major scientific breakthrough today. ‘We had hoped with the near-light speed collision of particles we might have found a Higgs-boson, creating the material that holds the universe together’ he said. Journalists stared blankly before asking if they could see some more conkers smashing into each other.