Of Quarks and Berks

Young Keith has been taking a great interest in the aims and problems of the Large Hadron Collider.  His comment that the scientists concerned obviously just aren't very practical led to a great deal of shouting around the place, and he's now gone off and built his very own "Big Bang Machine".

At first glance the Large Bozo Collider looks like two giant catapults set at approximate right angles.  Late at night when he can find willing volunteers walking back from the White Horse, Keith loads up the catapults with a Beaker Person each, and fires them across one another's path at high speeds.  Keith believes that when two Large Bozos travelling at near-relativistic speeds crash at 90 degrees, there is a chance that what will result is what is known as the "Huge Bozo".  It took some fine tuning.  Early on Keith took no account of the different inertias of differently-sized Bozos, resulting in some people landing up in the pond while Luna's progress across the Meadow was only stopped by a barbed-wire fence.  But Young Keith now reckons he has a 100% hit rate.  

So far, you will not be surprised to hear, no Huge Bozo has been observed.  Keith has come up with a number of possible explanations for this - these include:

• God is stopping the Large Bozo Collider from working until he is ready to reveal the secrets of the universe.
  
• The Large Bozo Collider is sabotaging itself from the future.  The Huge Bozo would be a particle so abhorrent to nature that even the Westboro Baptist Church wouldn't let it be a  member.  Therefore the space-time continuum itself intervenes to stop the device working.
  
• The Bozos are not reaching the speeds necessary for the quantum effects to kick in.  So he needs to buy some stronger elastic.
• The Bozos aren't large enough, and he has in fact only built a medium-sized Moron collider.

Whatever the reason for Keith's failures, the fact is we now have a number of bruised Beaker Folk wandering around the community.  Please can you all ensure you wear proper safety equipment when being loaded into the Large Bozo Collider.  In the event of the world coming to an end, it may save you from a nasty bump on the head.