Some days in Syria that didn’t seem like such a bad idea. Like the day the men showed up at his family’s apartment. Their uniforms were haphazardly matched, and they spoke Arabic in the accents of Saudi Arabia and he didn’t know where else. But they had guns and they made their meaning clear—where was his brother? They had seen the antenna of the radio that was his, not his brother’s, that he had extended out the window to pick up broadcasts from Lebanon and even occasionally, Allah forgive him, Israel. The men didn’t know that; they just knew that radios brought in infidel news and music, both of which were forbidden, and were very conceivably the apparatus of a spy. They assumed the radio belonged to his brother, because he was only twelve and looked younger. He didn’t tell them that he liked the radio, not his brother, who preferred to read. He didn’t tell them anything, because his mouth didn’t work. He was frozen by fear, listening to their accents and staring at their guns. His only coherent, if not relevant, thought was that the guns were machines; he could see their working metal parts. People didn’t usually think of them that way.

When they found his brother hiding in the toilet, his brother didn’t say anything either, didn’t say the radio didn’t belong to him, didn’t say that it belonged to the scared little kid standing right there, not even when they dragged his brother outside. The shots that killed him came moments later.

When the Large Hadron Collider was finally launched, it did not create a black hole, and the world was not destroyed.

This was explained when he took the official CERN tour on his first visit there. The guide, a retired British physicist wearing baggy cargo shorts that circumnavigated his pot belly, said that even if the collider did create black holes, which it didn’t, they would be so tiny that their gravitational force would be negligible and they would rapidly swallow themselves up with no harm done.

He had to wonder if that was true or just propaganda put out to squelch opposition to CERN. On the other hand, he had to grant that he and the rest of the tour group were standing here in a bland white hallway, not squeezed into nothingness inside a tiny black hole. So there was that.