Teen suicide over LHC Apocalypse fears; let's rename the beast

Sadly, an 16-year-old Indian girl took the fears of an all-encompassing black hole being formed by the Large Hadron Collider, and took her life instead of carrying on as normal as the rest of us have.

On the scheme of things, if there was even the remotest possibility of being annihilated by a lethal black hole sucking, I’d rather die that way than fairly unpleasantly by drinking pesticide. I guess the girl believed that suicide is painless.

In related news, the Royal Society of Chemistry has launched a competition to find a new, more meaningful, name for the LHC. Dr Richard Pike said that it “fails to reflect the drama of its mission, or the inspiration it should be conveying to the wider public.”

If you can come up with an alternative name that “effectively captures the imagination of both young and old, whether interested in science, or merely sceptical onlookers” then you could win £500. Cheaper than getting a team of consultants to do it for you, even though this is totally unofficial.

It’s interesting that the first BBC News report I watched on the experiments didn’t mention the name of the machine once during the five minute piece. Perhaps that’s because there was a danger of mispronouncing it? Who knows.

(Via Telegraph and WIRED)

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