Woomf! Plunggg! Protons collide with doomsday fanaticism

On October 22, 1844, about 20 families assembled on the banks of the Schuylkill River at Phoenixville to watch the second coming of Christ and be drawn joyfully up into Heaven. His failure to show up cast all into deepest gloom and darkened the lives of many of them forever.

And so on. The desire for and expectation of a triumphant, cataclysmic or enlightening resolution has surfaced regularly for as long as men and women have wondered what on earth (!) they are here for.

The Large Hadron Collider is the 21st century's way of pursuing the age-old question of where we came from and why we are here, but for those of chiliastic persuasion, it becomes simply another, if technologically cutting-edge, risky and astonishing, occasion for speculations, forecasts and doomsaying which are as old as history.

Characteristically, as tensions and expectations rose during the final years of the 20th century, satirists posed the power of custom and age-old routines against the pull of millenarianism.

“The world is about to end,” proclaimed Monty Python's Flying Circus. “Mountains will split open; seas will overflow their shores; the air will be sucked out of the heavens, the planets flung from their orbits. In the afternoon, however, conditions will moderate, rain will contract to the east and temperatures should be average for the time of year.”