HOLD on to your hat. This column is going to get rather rough today. Every year in September, the most eminent scientists get together under the banner of the British Association and read lectures to one another about... well, science.

Now we all know, don't we, that fairy stories, poetry and religion are soppy and soft-headed, but science is clear, lucid and down to earth? Science doesn't go off at wild tangents talking the language of myths and fantasies. So here is an extract from a scientific paper read at this year's British Association conference by a research associate at CERN - the European Particle Laboratory where they keep the atom-smasher:

"The universe is perched on a terrible precipice. It could catastrophically tunnel to a new state, disintegrating every atom. And if that does not wipe out all known life anywhere in the universe, so-called killer strangelets could eat up the earth from the inside out. Should either of these doomsday scenarios occur, then the most likely starting point is the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a machine 2.4 miles long in Long Island, New York State.

"By colliding gold nuclei at huge energies, the RHIC is investigating quark-gluon plasma, a state of matter in which the fundamental sub-nuclear particles called quarks and gluons become unstuck and swill around in a kind of particle soup that should have been around shortly after the Big Bang. If these experiments with the RHIC go wrong, they could produce a new hypothetical kind of particle called the killer strangelet. In a catastrophic chain reaction, the killer strangelet would gobble up nuclei until it had eaten a million billion, when its weight would pull it to the centre of the earth.

"It would eventually be heavy enough to attract some of the earth's mass gravitationally. That way, it would eat our planet from the inside out, converting the whole earth into one giant strangelet and killing us all in the process".

I am not making this up. Just think, all those scientists gathered together listening to this claptrap will have been sponsored by their universities, expenses paid. And where do you think the universities get their money from? That's right, from our taxes. I don't know what you think, but I would rather pay taxes towards an experiment to discover whether moonbeams can be produced out of cucumbers than fund the British Association's ravings.

Better still, I shall found my own scientific institute which will demonstrate that the whole universe is an elephant standing on a peach. If the elephant should fall off the peach, then this would start a whole series of bizarre events. There would be an immediate universe-wide shower of green rain and little Toby jugs would fall out of the sky singing "Come On Baby, Light My Fire". In an alternative, benign, scenario, pop music, baseball caps and mobile phones would disappear altogether and Dr Who would win the Tory leadership contest. Finally, the whole of the British Association will be carried off on the elephant's back to the funny farm while the band plays, "Believe Me If You Like".

Published: Tuesday, September 11, 2001