As you might be aware, today is a bit special. In a huge underground bunker straddling the France-Switzerland border, a bunch of super-intelligent scientists are preparing to turn on the Large Hadron Collider atom-smasher. This huge machine will propel minuscule molecules around a 17km loop and make them crash into each other, causing reactions that, through a bunch of gobbledygook I should have listened to in school, may or may not rewrite the laws of physics.

However, there’s a bunch of scaremongers out there (that’d be London’s Daily Mail ) that claim that the world will be sucked into a giant black hole and that everybody will die and the seas will boil and that Satan will emerge and rule the world.

What could the Collider mean for games, though?

If the Large Hadron Collider experiments do re-write the laws of physics, then gaming physics models may no longer make any sense and we’ll all explode and die. Alternatively, they might work just fine as they do now and we can just rewrite them when we see fit. If they reveal more about how things should react in accordance with the laws of physics, we might even be able to improve the physics engines used in games, and some overly-imaginative writers can calm down and learn how to stop dreaming up nonsensical hypothesises.

Of course, what if something goes wrong? What if, as some people fear, a black hole is created and doesn’t shoot off into space and leave us alone but instead owns us as harshly as I was in my first night of the SOCOM: Confrontation beta? (I’m doing okay now, I learned that I can survive rounds by simply not moving from where I spawn as nobody comes looking for me there.)

Here’s my ideas of what might happen if something in the Large Hadron Collider goes wrong and the world ends up inside out, trapped inside a man-made black hole:

• Nintendo will develop a games console with 2160p high-definition graphics, the best joypad in the world and several highly-playable hardcore franchises for gamers to enjoy, along with an ever-growing, easy-to-use online gaming service
• Sony and Microsoft will compete to dominate the motion-sensing market, Microsoft promoting a traditional waggle controller and Sony giving theirs with an analogue stick which is immediately derided as “gimmicky” amid claims of plagiarism from the Nintendo community
• The world’s music will be created using instruments capable of producing any notes with the press of five colored buttons and a pluckable bar of plastic - rumors of a video game that emulates one of these instruments with six thinner pluckable bars and no buttons are unconfirmed
• Everybody will turn into an anti-social, mancave-residing couch potato, living on tea, soda, energy drinks, beer and water, except for a minority of people who find themselves rejected by the rest of the world for being too social and not having a lot of spare time on their hands.

Naturally, there’s irrefutable evidence to show that the Large Hadron Collider will not cause the end of the world and that the worst to come doesn’t happen until next month, or even the middle of next year. Of course, if I’m wrong and we all die, it’s been fun. Have a good End of the World!

For a jargon-free explanation of what the Large Hadron Collider is, check out the BBC page on the project here. Y’know, if we haven’t died yet or anything.

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