Thursday, September 11, 2008

The Darwin Particle

My father works with the particle accelerator at Fermilab in Illinois. As a child, when I would visit him at work and we would walk through the underground tunnels where the beam-control equipment was kept, the towering machines on each side of the walkway would terrify me: they thundered, blinked, screamed "Warning: Radiation" to me at every turn.

Now CERN has built an even bigger, scarier accelerator. And all I have in my lab is jars of termites.

Fortunately, we biologists now have our own accelerator to terrify our progeny with. At last, the final secrets of evolution are within our reach.

1 comment:

Susan Johnson said...

(postscript: mwaahahahahahaaa!!)