From our good friends at CERN, who brought us the Large Hadron Collider, and thereby a glimpse at the origins of the Universe, comes some very exciting news.
Researchers at the esteemed facility have succeeded in confirming the existence of the hitherto mythical “Force.”
Yes…that “Force.”
“The Force is what gives a particle physicist his powers,” said CERN theorist Ben Kenobi of the University of Mos Eisley, Tatooine. “It’s an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us; and penetrates us; it binds the galaxy together.”
But, as has been true with all consensus-shattering breakthroughs, this one was not without its fair share of politics and controversy:
Kenobi’s seminal paper “May the Force be with EU” – a strong argument that his experiment should be built in Europe – persuaded the CERN Council to finance the installation of dozens of new R2 units for the CERN data centre.
As if this thumb in the eye of North American and Asian research facilities was not enough to cast a shadow over the discovery, ominous rumblings from rival projects threaten trouble ahead.
But the research community is divided over the discovery. Dark-matter researcher Dave Vader was unimpressed, breathing heavily in disgust throughout the press conference announcing the results, and dismissing the cosmological implications of the Force with the quip “Asteroids do not concern me”.
Details of the discovery and of what it might mean for the future of science as we know it, are far beyond my simple technical comprehension; so I invite my informed readers to visit Cern’s website and learn more about it from the researchers’ own words.