While I was proofreading a book at work today, I noticed what is perhaps the funniest typo in the history of publishing.  This section of the book was discussing the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator.  Unfortunately, a fateful typographical error changed the tone of the discussion immensely.  You see, instead of discussing the Large Hadron Collider, this book had inadvertently been discussing the Large Hardon Collider.  The former obviously collides protons to help uncover the existence of fundamental theoretical particles.  The Large Hardon Collider, on the other hand, is some other experiment, one that probably is not suitable for the eyes of young children.  Where such an experiment would find willing test subjects is beyond me, as the last thing I would do with my hardon is send it shuttling toward another hardon in a high speed collision.

And what is the purpose of this Large Hardon Collider, anyway?  Are they searching for the Higgs bosom?

EDIT:  After a commenter directed me to the Large HardOn Collider’s official website, I felt as if I had to send the webmaster an email of apology.  Here is what I sent him:

Dear HardOn scientists,

Your large hardon experiments sound interesting.  I was not aware this was a real experiment.  You see, at work the other day, I was proofreading a textbook and corrected what I thought to be a typographical error, changing “Large Hardon Collider” to “Large Hadron Collider”.  Now I am worried that, perhaps, the author was referring to your hardon experiments.  Should I be worried?  Are a lot of college textbook writers taking interest in your hardons?  I am terrified that I will be fired as a proofreader as a result of this egregious error, and changing the spelling to Hadron when I should have queried the author if he really was talking about colliding hardons.

Also, sorry for making that correction, as now your tally of hardons will come up short.  And as we all know, when a hardon comes up short, that’s always a bad thing.

I’ve also uncovered, after a bit of research, how this Large Hardon Collider probably works.  The Large Hadron Collider, for instance, works by removing electrons from hydrogen atoms, leaving only protons, and then accelerating these protons around a ring by using oppositely charged magnets synchronized to turn on and off as the particles whoosh by.  In a similar manner, the Large Hardon Collider must start with penises in vaginas.  It then bombards these penis-vagina connections with baseball statistics to cause them to disengage.  At this point, with the penis free, the hardons are set into motion by repelling them with pictures of my naked grandmother, which universally repels large hardons.  Once in motion, more and more pictures of naked grandmas, becoming progressively more crusty and aged, are shown to these hardons, causing them to move faster and faster.  Once the hardons are moving at 99.9% the speed of light (at which point time slows down for the hardons to such a degree that a single ejaculation would take 200,000 years from the relative perspective of those of us watching from Earth), they are suddenly sent hurtling toward other large hardons, with the collision producing conditions that likely held less than a second after the Big Ejaculation that created our universe.  It is at this point that the Higgs bosom could manifest itself.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 24th, 2009 at 8:14 PM and is filed under Blog, Humor, Language. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.