I liked Physics at school but it clashed with English so I had to give it up which was sad because if I’d learnt more about it then I would know more about the apparently amazing discovery reported yesterday from the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. One thing though was apparent even to me and that was that Peter Higgs’ show of emotion was justified after his life’s work was recognised on a public forum of his peers. Peter Higgs is the professor whose name is attached to the now revealed Higgs Boson, a subatomic particle (pay attention there at the back) that had only been a theory until work at the Large Hadron Collider proved that it really does exist.

We need brilliant people to tell us about such things and I’m as excited as anyone else with limited understanding that we now know that something exists that is an essential part in the creation of the universe and, incidentally, all our lives.

Put simply the Higgs Boson is a subatomic particle that acts as the glue that sticks, maybe randomly, to other subatomic particles and leading to their joining up to form everything else that we recognise in the Universe and a load of other things too.

It’s discovery, by forcing it to explode in miniscule high-powered explosions inside that Collider is as they say “a truly great moment in science.”

I liked Economic History at school too but I couldn’t do it at A level because it clashed with History which is sad because if I had learnt more about it then, maybe, I would have understood more about it now that another amazing discovery was revealed in London’s Parliament yesterday by Bob Diamond, the former chief executive of Barclays Bank, another brilliant man in a show of emotion now that his life work has also been revealed on a public forum. I had heard people talk about LIBOR, like the Higgs Boson but I didn’t really understand what it was until Mr Diamond revealed just how glutinous a substance it is too. LIBOR is an abbreviation for The London Interbank Offered Rate (pay attention there at the back, I won’t tell you again) It is the average interest rate charge estimated by leading banks in London if borrowing from other banks. Well I understood that but the revelation that exploded in my own internal Large Hadron Collider was that there was also a kind of Higgs Boson here too. It has now been proven that there is a sub-ethical particle in modern banking that acts as a glue that sticks together other sub-ethical particles in the banking system creating everything in the modern financial world that we recognise from our newspapers and by the economic chaos that has been created by this, shall we call it, the Diamond Boson. In simple non-scientific terms it can also be called fiddling interest rates. In economics as in public life, many of economics’ mysteries can be clarified by the realization that people cheat.

So I offer my thanks to Peter Higgs and Bob Diamond for enlightening me about the World’s realities – I just wish I kept my bank account with Professor Higgs – now my money feels like it is in Barclays’ Hadron Collider.

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