Like many people, I have been preoccupied all week with a large hadron. Titter ye not, missus. This is not a Frankie Howerd moment. We are talking about the Large Hadron Collider that 10,000 scientists have been playing with over in Switzerland.

As all of youse particle physicists know, a hadron (from the Greek word hadros, meaning thick) is a wee bundle of quarks. There are various types of hadrons, including the lepton and the boson, which takes us back into Frankie Howerd territory.

The scientists in Switzerland are looking for a particular boson. Not the Z boson or the W boson, nor even my favourite, the DD boson. They hope to find the Higgs boson, named after the Edinburgh University professor who invented it.

The problem is that the Higgs boson may not exist. No-one said this particle physics stuff was going to be easy.

The civil engineering is easier to understand. To house the Large Hadron Collider, the scientists built a 27-kilometre circular tunnel deep in the bowels of the earth. It is the same size as the Circle line on the London Underground.

Which made me think that they could have saved a lot of the £5 billion budget by using an existing structure, such as the Glasgow subway. Our dear little Tube is only 10 kilometres in length. But it has an inner and an outer circle, and one of them could easily be handed over to the physicists for their investigations.

By an eerie coincidence, this thought also occurred to a colleague.

In a parallel universe, known as the Sunday Herald Magazine, there is an article about Scottish scientists hurtling charged particles of shortbread around the subway.

We take our science much more seriously in this column. The Buffer not only got through first-year physics and techie drawing at Strathclyde Uni, but also won the science prize at Lourdes Secondary in 1966 - or was it 1965? Anyway, it was obviously a bad year for science at Lourdes.

All I recall of my Nobel Prizewinning year was an experiment where the teacher, Mr McGuigan, poured water into some kind of copper sulphate and it turned blue. But when he poured pure alcohol in, it remained white.

In a further experiment, conducted after class, we discovered that a small amount from the flask of 96% alcohol (borrowed for the purpose from the chemistry store cupboard), added to a bottle of Barr's cola from the tuck shop, made a most acceptable cocktail.

Meanwhile, back to our not-so-large hadron collider experiment on the Glasgow subway. The Kelvinbridge station would be an ideal HQ for the scientists, given that Lord Kelvin of blessed memory was one of the world's greatest physicists. Maybe.

Kelvin, or William Thomson as he was known before he became a baron, came up with the concept of absolute zero temperature. That's minus 273 degrees centigrade, which seems appropriately freezing for a Glasgow-based scientist. Kelvin also had a make of fridge named after him, which is cool.

Having the world's physicists congregate in Glasgow would obviously be good for the local economy. About 10,000 staff have been involved in the Large Hadron Collider project.

The Glasgow subway version would be smaller but we could maintain the staffing levels of thousands of scientific bods. In the best tradition of the subway, half the chaps could actually be at their work, colliding protons, while the other half are sitting at the back of the ticket office reading the Daily Record.

Having the boffins working away in the subway seeking answers to the origin of the universe and the meaning of life would make commuting much more interesting.

Travelling on the clockwork orange is normally quite boring. You sit and stare at other people's shoes. As Chic Murray famously pointed out, none of the trains have buffet cars.

You have to be careful you don't sit on a discarded poke of chips. An empty Irn-Bru tin will roll back and forward like tumbleweed in a deserted gold rush town.

It would be much more exciting to turn up at Hillhead station to find one of those hand-written notices stating: "The outer circle is temporarily out of use due to experiments on the large hadron collider."

As you stand waiting for the inner circle to take you the long way round to St Enoch, there is an announcement: "Would passengers please stand clear of the platform as approximately 100 billion protons are currently passing round the outer circle 11,245 times per second, except for Cowcaddens, where there is a slight delay."

It would be nice if Professor Stephen Hawking could be brought in to do the Tannoy. The physics sounds much more convincing delivered in his far-side-of-the-solar-system twang.

We look forward to the historic declaration: "Strathclyde Passenger Transport, in association avec the Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire is happy to announce that the secret of life and the key to the universe has been discovered at Cessnock.

"There will be no further services on the subway system, as all the staff have taken the rest of the day off to join the particle physicists in a celebration in Ashton Lane."

The great underground hadron collider initiative is not without risks. You will have heard that black holes might be created. But if these are located near the Shields Road and West Street stations, no-one will notice the difference.

We have to return briefly to some of the science. One variety of hadron is called a wino. This is a hypothetical particle which is a super-partner of the W and Z bosons. It is thought winos are most likely to be located at or near the Govan subway station.

There is a type of composite boson called a meson. Scientists based at the Ibrox underground station will be concentrating on the age-old question: "Who's the meson in the black?"

It is expected that investigations at St George's Cross will bring solutions to some of the big mysteries in science, such as the nature of dark matter and what the universe was like just after the big bang.

The station's proximity to Maryhill will be useful in this respect.

One hoped-for spin-off from all this proton-colliding is that physicists might open the door to travel through extra dimensions. This could mean that passengers will be able to board the subway at Partick and seconds later arrive at the Gare du Nord in Paris. Anyone wishing to travel to Nitshill will still have to get off at Bridge Street and take the 57A bus. As the scientists say, the south side of Glasgow is a dimension too far.

As a result of a previous atom-smashing exercise, the world wide web was invented. The Glasgow subway hadron collider exercise is expected to bring similar benefits in the field of information technology.

Physicists will have to store 2.2 petabytes (or 2,200,000 gigabytes) of data every year. As part of its funding for the project, Glasgow City Council has promised to get the wi-fi system at Hillhead Library fixed.