Wednesday, September 24, 2008

BBC Has Atomic Kittens As Big Bang Breaks Down

It was billed by the BBC as the answer to life, the universe and everything and given star billing across the corporation, as boffins in Geneva showed how they could waste billions of pounds firing bits of atoms round a big underground doughnut, the size of a starving third world township. 


8.30am September 10, 2008 was set to go down in history - and it certainly did as the Big Bang turned into a small whimper. 

Now the leaking Large Hadron Collider (LHC) as it is known in scientific circles is to be shut down until next year, to save on electricity.

No surprise there. If the BBC had just taken the trouble with a little light reading on Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and Kolmogorov's Theory of Probability, they could have predicted that would happen, probably. 

It was the BBC who went into nuclear overdrive with blanket coverage of the "Big Bang Day". Even Andrew Marr was left gasping in amazement when at 8.30am a flick of a switch produced a blurred blip on a computer screen.

Unlike the switch-on, the shut-down has merited only a tiny mention by the BBC.

Still the media had a field day during the silly season predicting it could mean the end of the world or the biggest scientific breakthrough since sliced atoms, depending on their point of view. And it gave this blog the opportunity to file a spoof story of the non-event, hailing it as Brown's Big Bang day. 

In journalism, nothing is wasted, not even a silly story for the silly season. 

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