
The star of ‘Turner and Hooch’ may soon kill us all
Perenially-cheery Oscar-winning Hollywood personality Tom Hanks is all set to become death, the destroyer of worlds, when he flips the switch on the second iteration of the Large Hadron Collider.
Constructed by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the massive LHC project was designed to explore little-known elements of high-energy physics. The Collider’s primary objective is to prove the existence of the so-far hypothetical Higgs boson, more colorfully known as the God Particle. In essence, the experiment seeks to recreate the events scientists believe led to the Big Bang.
Now, I’m not against playing God, not by any means. As a lifelong atheist, I don’t even slightly believe in the old dude up in the clouds. But even I can see the LHC is a risky prospect. These guys ain’t splitting atoms here- they’re toying with the fabric of time and space, the basic building blocks of our existence. In theory, their experiment could end all life in the known Universe.
And now Mr. Hanks has been chosen as poster boy for their self-engineered Apocalypse.
Hanks visited CERN in mid February as part of his new project, an adaptation of renowned hack Dan Brown’s follow-up to The Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons. The (wholly implausible) plot concerns the weaponized use of the Large Hadron Collider against the Vatican. Despite this less-than-positive publicity, those wacky world destroyers at CERN decided Hanks would be the ideal choice for the coveted position of ‘ON’ switch flipper.
Happily, the world has some time in which to get it’s affairs in order. The LHC is not scheduled to function until sometime in September of this year. Perhaps we’ll all luck out and the Collider will fail again, like it did last year, after only ten days of successful operation. Or perhaps this time they’ll prove the existence of the Higgs boson particle once and for all, shattering the Universe into a billion pieces in the process.
There are now only 1393 days left until the End of the World… unless Tom Hanks kills us all before then, of course.






