My Dad Says

“Oh” said the little boy. “You want to smash things together to find out what they are made of then?”

“Yes, that’s it exactly. We want to discover the building bricks of the Universe.”

“My dad says you’ve already done that once and all you did was to build nuclear bombs and then nuclear power stations to make bigger, better nuclear bombs.”

“Yes, well, not all of us thought that was a good idea but we have to get our money from somewhere.
However, once we unlock the secrets of the Universe we will be able to provide unlimited power for all!”

“My dad says you said that about nuclear power stations but they are still not very efficient and produce a lot of harmful waste that gets dumped into the sea.”

“That’s precisely why we need to smash things together - so we can find a new, clean, power source.”

“My dad says that if you really wanted to do that then you would have used all the money you spent on the LHC to find a way of making nuclear fusion work.”

“Yes, exactly! That IS one of the things we are working on. Fusion needs a very strong bag to keep all the bits together and the bags we have at the moment need more power to hold everything together than we get from the fusion process itself. Now once we find the God particle we hope to be able to build gravity bags that, like the sun, hold everything together without needing lots of power themselves. Containers that will automatically get stronger as the power output increases.”

“My dad says that if you are not careful you will create a Black Hole and it will suck us all in.”

“Well, of course, your dad’s right in a way… in some respects they will be like very tiny, carefully controlled, mini Black Holes but the gravity gradient will be low enough so that most of the energy created will radiated outwards rather than get sucked in - so perhaps you could call them mini White Holes.”

“Could you use them to make bombs?”

“Ha ha ha. Why on Earth would anyone want to make bombs so powerful they would destroy the planet?”

“My dad says that whatever you discover that a way will be found to make a weapon with it!”

“Yes, well, maybe it would be useful to have something to deal with stray asteroids and, err…
troublesome suns." ;O)