Good God in Govan!

Columnist

Sunday 8 July 2012

I AM not quite up to speed with the God particle that has been found, especially the nuances of the lepton, the gluon and the muon.

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Tom Shields

But I am immensely proud that it is Scottish; the whole business having been started by a Professor Higgs of Edinburgh.

Equally, I am disappointed at our failure to take ownership. That £6 billion of research work in a subterranean laboratory in Switzerland should surely have been done in Scotland by engineers like Scottie out of Star Trek.

Not in Edinburgh, of course, where they can't even dig a few feet down in Princes Street to build a tram system. Glasgow already has an underground ring thing ideal for whizzing atoms around until they collide. The underground could have been used at night time when the trains don't run. And where better than Glasgow to conduct research into mysterious dark matter that comprises 96% of the known universe. I can visualise two remote-controlled subway trains heading towards each other at speed on the Inner Circle and collide somewhere near Copland Road. Skilled Glasgow technicians would give sage advice such as: "Move it a ba' hair towards Cessnock."In a fusion of matter and anti-matter, the leptons and muons of a discarded Irn-Bru can and a half-eaten pizza merge to reveal the Higgs Boson. Or the Govan Particle as it would be known. Residents across the river will claim the research should have been done on their bit of the underground to create the Partick Particle.The whole shebang could have been brought in well under the £6bn budget, including total refurbishment of the subway. It would have been the biggest Scottish engineering success story since that North Lanarkshire company got the contract from Nasa to fake the moon landings on a coal bing near Shotts.

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Good God in Govan!

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