So it turns out that if you fire up a Large Hadron Collider it doesn't create a black hole that envelops the Earth. What happens is that everyone in the world blacks out for two minutes and ten seconds. Gee!

 

Robert Sawyer's SF novel FlashForward is coming to TV this fall. According to this Wikipedia article it'll be on ABC in the US and something called "Five" in the UK.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlashForward

 

Might be good, though it's kinda sad to see these things come at the expense of good science. I'm a huge fan of Lost, which is also very cringe-worthy from time to time. I'm always happy to see new SF shows, though.

 

Anyway, I pasted a preview video below.

 

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Ha, from the thread title I thought you were talking about Lost.

 

The LHC is one of the main Big Scary Science Things of the moment, and decades of pop culture mad scientists (and a few actual sciencey "doomsday devices" in the form of nuclear weapons) have made it seem plausible to a lot of people that it could do basically anything. Like electricity originally, then radiation, then genetic engineering, etc. So basically, "a wizard did it."

 

Once it's fully operational, we'll probably move on to something else. Or maybe not. I can imagine plots where an evil scientist working at the LHC tweaks it for his own nefarious ends, by Reversing the Polarity or something, and creating a doomsday device. Maybe a "plasma beam!"

I'm in two minds on this.

 

I enjoy Sawyers books immensely and if they've changed the time frame from 20 odd years down to 6 months, I wonder what else gets butchered.

I'll check him out, I just grabbed a few free-first-chapters for Kindle. Thanks for the recommendation.