Life imitating art?

Sounds like we can expect a Combine invasion then.

I'm off to buy a HEV suit if they have any left in Argos.

Alien icon obviously.

Come on!

Who is going to be the first to welcome our new demonic soul-reaping, parallel globo-Nazi, hyperspherical juggernaut-dinosaur overlords?

May I be the first...

...to welcome back our ancient overlords from beyond space?

Cthulhu ftaghn, etc...

Ahh...you mean Hellboy

Mines the coat with the horns

It is, of course, a known and proven fact...

...that whatever we see through the warp portal wormhole will be humanoid, with only intricate cranial ridges and perhaps an unusual skin colour differentiating it from human life.

Quality

"Various eccentric nutballs", "cack-handed boffins" and "the button marked "Call Black Hole Into Being""

Hats off to Lewis and The Reg, you just don't get this quality of journalism anywhere else. Long may you lead us in the forthcoming struggle against the Nazi supermen that will march out of the rent in time & space deep under Switzerland (where the clocks come from)

@AC 12:17

Spoilsport. Or basement dwelling agrophobic mummys boy. I'm not sure which.

What will come though?

A Post-It note saying "for Cthulhu's sake, shut that thing off NOW!"

well

I just hope Gordon Freeman is on hand to deal with anything that comes through, should it be nasty that is.

H2G2

<q>

hyperdimensional "doors" out of which might come unspecified "somethings".

</q>

I'm expecting them to look like little white mices, singing "How many roads.....?"

Stood too close?

I'll have whatever he's on!

What if its the other way around.

Maybe they know exactly what they are going to create and we have an invasion force ready and waiting to go in hard on some unsuspecting alternative dimensional species.

you never know! however, the chances are we are we are doomed!

Can you say resonance cascade?

I can't believe these idiot scientists harking on about opening doors to alternate dimensions, stranglet soups and black holes are flatly refuting even the merest possibility of monumentally screwing the planet. The unknowns and improbables are possible but no one know the odds. Would anyone reading this wander blindly into a bookies and bet the farm on a funny named horse whose odds of winnning aren't known?

I'm all for scientific progress but a) at what cost? and b) without condecending to the masses without astrophysics degrees and letters after our names thank you. For all their knowledge and suffixes they can't seem to grasp the fact that most people only hear about these things in sci-fi flicks and perhaps a little more education on the secret underground is on order, what we had so far? An alarmist documentary and a catastrophic failure when attempting to boot it up, makes the unknown odds look bad doesn't it?

I vote for Combine

"There's no maths in it," added Lamont encouragingly, having assessed the intellectual level of the Reg news team with disconcerting percipience.

That line made me laugh so hard. Excellent!

Looking forward to the switch on of the LHC.

Maybe I should buy a crowbar just in case.

Nah, not at Argos!

Ace hardware though does have a special online, comes with free Crowbar!

Why fight them...???

I for one welcome our new insect overloads..

G Man

Meet Gordon.

Gordon meet G Man...

*applause*

Orlowski should do an anti-global-warming story with this level of self-deprecation

Probably safer

to relocate the whole thing to Phobos.

"countless aeons"?

What's wrong with "13-14 billion years"? Too sciency? Excessive factiness?

There's enough ill-educated hogwash being bandied about in relation to the LHC already, ta.

Where's me crowbar?

Or, obviously, the more up to date Zero-Point Energy Field Manipulator

"Call black hole into existence" button

Surely this doesn't have a cover ... its black with black writing on it but displays "don't press this again" when pressed

I'll get my towel

Two things.

"Calling Dr Freeman. Dr Freeman to the red emergency phone please."

Second, don't you just love this stuff. Seriously, portals into other dimensions, you just couldn't make this shit up. Alright, you can, and have, but we're talking real life here people! Real life!

Bring on the end of the world! Mwuahahahaha.

Yeah, I'm done now.

errr...

if there's is an unknown unknown event or otherwise, how can we be sure we'll know anything about it?

Oh dear.

Where's Gordon Freeman when you need him

Resonance Cascade

I never thought I'd see a resonance cascade.....

Ah... crazy predictions

I think the earth might fall into the sun tomorrow. Scientists strongly disagree with me, but who ya gonna believe??

Shurley Not......

"someone living on a single 2D plane-space - that is as a mysterious circle suddenly blossoming into existence, growing, perhaps moving about and then shrinking down and vanishing again."

Surely for somebody to see the circle they would have to be living in 3d plane-space. Somebody living in 2D plane-space would just see an object (possibly like a line or wall) pop into existance, move about, grow wider, move nearer or further away and would curve away from them on either side.

Paris - Because she likes things that pop up, get bigger and move towards her!

Which item of the User Requirement Specification

has the requirement

"Capability to generate local black hole"

or

"Provide N Dimensional opening when button B is pressed and held for Time = t nanoseconds"?

Sounds like the Users are "big-ing" the (w)hole thing up to gain interest?

I wish them good luck in their enterprise but I hope/doubt they'll create anything more life threatening other than ideas. But that is startling enough for some to want to run back into their religious order and shout "Nay, deity protect me....".

I love it

Talk about giving the media what they want! I'd bullshit my ass off doing that job :-) The only limitation is imagination!

Well

To the naysayers, I say:

There's an entire universe out there. The human race occupies approximately nothing of it. Seriously, so small as to be completely, entirely insignificant. And in terms of mass/energy, we really are using *nothing*.

Even if we could harness the power of the entire planet, or even solar system, and focus it onto warping space and doing other tricks, we aren't going to destroy the world accidentally. There might be a big bang at the LHC in the conventional sense (smoke, flames, loud noise) but we're not going to be kick-starting the second Big Bang from the Starbug's engines.

If we could, we'd be witnessing Big Bangs and self-created black hole all over the cosmos and they would be our primary indicator of "intelligent life". And if we could do that, we'd still be an insignificant speck compared to the civilisations that manage to survive *their* "LHC era" and move on to the next "theoretically-safe" experiment. But if we don't at least try, we might as well have stayed in caves eating cold veggies because we had no tools to hunt or cook with.

It's actually a factor in things like the Drake equations if you do it properly - scientists take account of the fact that any intelligent civilisation might well do something daft and blow itself to pieces. Personally, I think the sword or bullet would prove to be a much more devastating invention to help that along without the need for advanced scientific research on it.

LOL@LHC

Register writing stype top-notch as ever, keep it up!

@ First AC

Glad I'm not the only one who suddenly thought of Black Mesa....

What caused the big bang?

Perhaps it was someone in the previous universe turning on their LHC and sucking it all through in zero time to create this one.

Haven't these people

seen Event Horizon? That'd make 'em think twice.