You may have read about CERN, the experiment in Switzerland where a giant proton collider was built to, as I understand it (and I almost certainly misunderstand it), simulate the Big Bang on a small scale and create tiny universes. This could give us a lot of insight into our own universe, but its mostly gotten a lot of press for, you know, the fact that some people are worried they'll create a black hole that will suck us all in or rip a hole into some Lovecraftian tentacle-monster dimension.

Science doesn't make for the best headlines, so that's probably why it tends to be reported with that news-of-the-weird/we're-all-going-to-die angle. Well... the Wall Street Journal has found an even news-of-the-weirder angle on the story. Improv.

Apparently Charna and some other improv teachers flew to Switzerland to run the CERN physicists through some improv exercises. This isn't really all that new. Businesses hire improv training centers and groups to teach team-building and communication all the time. Still, it's weird to read a head particle physicist quoted as saying, "Improv has got to be more difficult than doing physics. You have to think in milliseconds." Weird and neat... but probably wrong. I mean, after a couple hours of classes I still wouldn't know how to begin to operate a, "17-mile circular tunnel designed to smash protons together at nearly the speed of light."

Then again, if you made a Venn diagram of physicists and improvisers, there would be some overlap, even if it were ever so slight. The article quotes one scientist as quipping, "Do my bosons give you a hadron?" I don't know what either of those scientific terms mean, but its nice to see that dirty puns are universal.

You can check out the Wall Street Journal article here.