Dear readers, it is with great sadness that I inform you that this will be the final issue of The Polytechnic due to circumstances beyond our control. I regret to make this announcement on the eve of our 125th anniversary, and am deeply sorry to report that our Ice Cream Social at 6 pm next Wednesday in the Union’s Phalanx Room is canceled.
The reason for this dire announcement is that on September 10, the European Organization for Nuclear Research will power up its Large Hadron Collider, a 27-kilometer-long particle collider that carves out a circular tunnel underneath Switzerland and France. During the First Beam event, as it has been cavalierly labeled, CERN scientists will inject a proton beam with 450 billion electron volts of energy into the Collider.
According to CERN’s press release, “once stable circulating beams have been established, they will be brought into collision.” Top scientists agree that such a high-energy collision will catastrophically destroy Earth and certainly rend the fabric of space irreparably. The danger of disaster is two-fold:
First, as the energized protons tear through the underground tunnel at the speed of light, they will leave behind numerous microscopic black holes. According to Conservapedia, a black hole is “a mass with an escape velocity greater than the speed of light… [from] which nothing can escape.” Otto Rössler, professor of theoretical biochemistry at the University of Tübingen in Germany, has provided irrefutable evidence that such micro black holes grow exponentially, rapidly consuming Earth in an inexorable implosion.
Second, the high-energy collision of proton beams will produce particles known as “strangelets.” Our readers who have taken physics will recall that when a strangelet comes into contact with a nucleus, it catalyzes a reaction which irreversibly alters the matter and produces a second, larger strangelet. This process repeats ad infinitum until the Earth has been entirely converted into so-called “strange matter,” which you may be familiar with as the putrid substance stored in a plastic container outside Russell Sage Dining Hall last semester.
The combination of exponentially expanding black holes and exponentially multiplying strangelets suggests a pretty regrettable Wednesday morning. At 3:30 am, as we Poly staff fruitlessly slave away at an issue that will never reach your hands, the inconsiderate CERN administrators will be throwing the switch that reduces the Earth to a heap of molten rubble, and in doing so, rudely interrupts our publishing schedule.
From all of us in the Staff Box to the left, we at The Rensselaer Polytechnic thank you for your readership over the last 124 years.
