Excitement at CERN

E-Mail from the office of Dr Gödel, Leader of the SPTRH project (Smashing Particles Together Really Hard) CERN, Switzerland.

Hallo Mary!

Thank you for your most interesting e-mail. I printed out all your suggestions for modifications to our equipment and took them into work for the team. Some of our younger postdoctoral interns were left scratching their heads as they tried to puzzle out the sixteen-dimensional equations! I don't know what they are teaching them at university these days!

There is no doubt that your theory is quite correct, and a polarity inversion switch with a resonance dampener circuit in the positron stream feed would greatly increase the power as well as the functionality of the Large Hadron Collider. It may even become possible to create a bidirectional, traversible wormhole! You don't need me to tell you that that could make travel to the farthest limits of this and other universes, also travel in time within our local area of space, reality instead of something out of a Doctor Who story!

The Collider is out of commission currently due to a fault in the electrical circuit containing the supercooling magnets. Alice was at the Collider on the day that it broke down (it was Bore Your Daughter At Work Day in Switzerland), and she saw it all happen. But I'm sure she had nothing to do with the break-down. Accidents happen even in the most expensive and dangerous experiments!

But every cloud has a silver lining! Now we can include your design modifications to the Collider without causing fuss or bother. To shut down the experiment while it was working would have needed approval from the Central Steering Committee, which could have taken years! But as it is already shut down, it will only take a few days. We will give the work to the interns, it will be a good education for them!

I have to say (I hope you don't mind it!) that your suggestions for practical implementation are not so good and we will need to rework them. We no longer use electrical valves or open tanks of mercury in our electrical circuitry. Perhaps your scientific dictionary is out of date? We also won't use cardboard, meccano or string to make repairs in the supercooled sector. I think the Chair of the Health and Safety Commitee would have a heart attack! We already have had to reassure the world media that we will probably not be destroying the universe before Christmas, and we do not need any more bad publicity.

In response to your questions, yes, we do watch a lot of Doctor Who here (although the TV reception is terrible so far underground, we watch DVDs in our lunch-breaks). And yes, we are big fans of the Nintendo Wii. We have a room for the use of the Nintendo Wii Fit in our free time!

I am glad that your son James is writing to my daughter Alice. I am sure they can learn much from each other and have a lot of fun.

Bis bald,

Deine Lieserl.