Great Start to the Week...

Well it's been a great start to the week. Today, the recently 'pumped up' Hadron Collider starts to deliver data and yesterday Sepp Blatter resigned as FIFA president.

There was better opposition to his appointment this time around but presumably it was the continued allegations of corruption, culminating in the FBI's investigation, that finally told. One thing is for sure, he didn't do it out of honour - he would have been left with no option.

You have to wonder who was voting for him in the first place...Probably those trying to preserve their 'Christmas bonuses'. Anyway this has been about sixteen years overdue.

Blatter said: "Fifa needs profound restructuring." (er...hello?) He also stated that 'he would continue in his current post until an extraordinary congress is called to elect a new president'. No dates have been set, but any 'election' is expected to take place between December 2015 and March 2016.. By that stage he'll probably have forgotten that he ever resigned.


That's right Sepp, off you go - for the game, for the world...and don't forget your water.

Let's get the accountants in and find out where all the money has gone. After the investigations by the Americans and the Swiss have been concluded, I'd be very surprised if we don't have a good degree of evidence to show that Russia and / or Qatar 'bought' their World Cups.

On a more cheerful note, the Hadron Collider resumes it's search for Dark Matter, now with actual data popping out of the machine. Physicists probably won't actually see the Dark Matter - just its impact on other protons. This will just tell them that 'something' is there - but they may never know 'what' exactly.

So why is this beautiful machine buried 100m below Cern, Switzerland. Ok you need space, security, peace and quiet...but you also have to be careful when you are playing with things that you don't fully understand. In theory machines like this can cause damage - although it is unlikely that 100m will make any difference if things 'kick off'.


Careful mate, the stuff in that thing collides with the energy of 13 trillion electron volts..

We have to acknowledge that Einstein's best work might now only explain 5% of the laws of the universe - so there is a lot of 'unexplained stuff' out there. Hadron might get us closer if it doesn't trigger some catastrophic event - what chance of a black hole being created that destroys the planet? One in a billion...probably.

On the positive side Blatter is Swiss and could possibly be one of the first to go.

Dark Matter...

The Hadron Collider is back online after an upgrade and hopefully scientists will soon discover more about one of the great mysteries of the universe...'Dark Matter' or as it used to be known, 'Missing Matter'.



Our disc-shaped galaxies are moving too quickly - thousands of kilometers per second - and in theory these systems should have been dispersed or flung out to the edge of space. So how do they stay intact? The theory is 'dark matter' which is essentially extra mass and gravity that allows the systems to stay bound together. The problem is that we can't see dark matter through the telescope - it's 'dark'.

Many theories have been put forward. Could dark matter just be 'ordinary matter' that isn't luminous; brown dwarfs, planets, gas clouds..? But ordinary matter in the 'necessary quantities' should give off some light or radiation that would be detectable. Could it be that in distant space a different set of physical laws apply?

Dark Matter is only 'theoretical evidence' as to why galaxies remain intact, without light, however, the existence of this 'invisible' matter is very hard to prove but it is thought to be central to everything in the universe. All we can do is look at the effect that dark matter has on its 'environment' and go from there. After all, we cannot see gravity, we are just aware of what it does.

The big problem is that Physicists can come up with the existence of all kinds of particles - Neutrinos for instance (the existence of which has been largely proven) WIMPS (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles) and MACHOS (Massive Astro-Physical Compact Halo Object) the latter two being touted as probable dark matter candidates, yet in the end it will be harder to show that this is actually the 'stuff' of dark matter, due to the fact that it rests in galaxies thousands of light years away.

If the Hadron Collider can prove the existence of dark matter, it would be one of the greatest scientific discoveries of our time. Physicists appear surprisingly bullish. I'm not holding my breath!