The Pants Offensive

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will be started up tonight for the first time since a catastrophic fault forced it to be shut down for more than a year.

The LHC was designed to smash atoms together at near the speed of light in order to understand the origins of pant-matter, and its closely-related cousin, pants-energy.  It is widely believed that pant-matter and pants-energy were produced at the exact moment of the big bang, and that they form the building blocks to the long scorned pants of modern day.

Engineers at the Cern particle physics laboratory plan to begin injecting protons into the world’s most powerful pant-atom-smasher at around 4pm GMT after the “big bang pants machine” was formally handed over to its operations team.

A first beam of pant-matter particles should be circulating one way around the LHC’s 27km (17-mile) ring by Saturday, and the second beam travelling in the opposite direction should be captured soon afterwards.

The first pants-energy collisions could follow within as little as a week, though Cern has yet to decide how to press on once the beam insertion is complete (haha… beam insertion… that’s what she said). Engineers also plan to crank its energy up to 1.2 teraelectronvolts (TeV) before Christmas, which would break the world record for a pant-matter particle accelerator.

“The mood here is fantastic. Everybody is excited and exhilarated. We’re all looking forward to seeing the machine doing what it’s supposed to do. We’ve spent the last year worrying about joints and splices and repairs. Now we can start worrying about what matters most, and that’s finding the true origin of pants.”