Science? Science!

(I'll point out that this is just a harmless rant. Just because I WAS BORED! )

The speed of light it roughly 300 million metres per second (299,792,458 m/s if Wikipedia is to be believed.) and, unless it is travelling through a translucent material, this remains constant.
This means I could circumnavigate the globe over 216 times before I'd finish writing this sentence. Now the question you must ask yourselves is this:

How BORED must I have been, to sit here and work that out?

And this is my general beef with science as a whole. That doesn't mean to say that I don't believe in sceince, on the contrary, I'm an athiest, and science is all I believe in, but I hate it when any new scientific creation is hailed as "unlocking the secrets of reality" or, "The next step in technological advancement".

Like hell.

Let's take, for example, the Large Hadron Collider.
Now when I first heard about this, it was in a magazine called BBC Focus, and it had an eighteen page spread glorifying this thing.
I mean, come on!
Sure, if the mystical Higgs Boson was discovered, and we did find out how realtiy works, what do you really think would change so drastically? Sure, scientists would now know how the fabric of reality is put together, but why do we assume they're going to be able to do anything with that information?

I know how a toaster works, but I can never fiddle with that without getting an explosion to the face.

I could never shake the feeling that this whole venture was dreamed up my two scientists, lazing about in a lab in the early 80s. I imagine the conversation probably went something like this:

"I'm so bored."
"Yeah."
"What do you wanna do?"
"Dunno."
"Wait -- I've got it! Let's try and figure out how reality works!"
"Uh... why?"
"Well, something to do."
"Will I have to do anything?"
"No, we just need to rope in a few governments and build a giant ring under Switzerland."

And this seems to be the thing with all science. All these experiments were dreamed up by someone, somewhere, who was extremely BORED.
However, I did love it when, in the lead up to the big "Switch on", there was a whole countdown thing and coverage all over the world.

The fateful day came, when humanity would unlock the fabric of reality itself,

The clock ticked down,

The world held its breath,

The switch was flicked,

And it broke.