IT WASN'T immediately obvious at the time, but when my wife and I built a small extension to our house a while ago, we also created a scaled-down version of Cern's Large Hadron Collider, writes Frank McNally
Among other things, the extension opened up a second door between the L-shaped living room and the L-shaped kitchen, thereby creating a loop. The children quickly identified this as a potential running track.
Since when, the facility has hosted a daily series of experiments in which two tiny sub-adult particles known as "boys" accelerate around and around the house, sometimes in the same direction, sometimes in opposite ones, generating enormous amounts of energy while threatening to reduce each other to the basic building blocks of life.
Highly charged as they are, the particles do not travel at 99.9 per cent of the speed of light. But they go fast enough to raise concerns about what would happen if either of them collided with the corner of the sink, or any other objects en route.
And of course, as if there weren't enough obstacles already, being boys, they have to add to them. An exciting recent discovery was that, by placing certain items along the path - suitcases, boxes, the priceless crockery set we got as a wedding present, etc - the running-track could be transformed into an equestrian sports arena.
The eight-year-old show-jumper clears these fences easily enough. But his three-year-old stablemate would need to have several substances from the Olympic banned list rubbed into him to get around safely; and the results can make for scary viewing. Still, as I tell my wife, it's a lot cheaper than buying ponies.
NO DOUBT it was the risk of events in Switzerland triggering a catastrophic accident in the space-time continuum, but I spent much of yesterday morning thinking about my children. The actual switching on of the LHC coincided in our house with the school run. And apart from us being five minutes early, for a change, it was clear by 9am that nothing else strange had happened.
So I took to reflecting then on how crucial the kids have become to my concept of the meaning of life. This sounds pious, I know. Life can be just as meaningful for a singleton: I used to be one, after all, and I have a dim recollection that it was very rewarding. You could sleep in at weekends, I'm nearly sure. But that was in another dimension, before the Big Bang. Whatever happens now, I can't go back.
It was exactly 10 years recently since I first flicked the on-switch in the great parenthood experiment. And of course, I don't know where the years have gone since. That, in fact, is germane to one of my tentative findings to date.
Although the exact mechanism still escapes me, I have concluded that there must be some kind of time-transference phenomenon that means the longest years of your children's lives are the shortest of yours. Even five minutes can seem like an aeon to a child (especially when he or she is travelling anywhere). Clearly, parents are subsidising this in some way: which would explain why, to us, the summer just gone seems to have lasted only a week.
It's not just parents' time that contracts. Space does too. Children fill your house with an expanding universe of matter and anti-matter and, worst of all, dark matter (this is the stuff you can't see, but you know it must be there somewhere because you can smell it). And then, paradoxically, they also cause things to disappear.
Ever since ours arrived, small black holes have been opening and then closing in our living-room, having first swallowed everything in the vicinity. TV remotes and car keys are the most vulnerable, occasionally being regurgitated weeks or months later, when the hole reopens. But I have also lost letters, cheques, books - even a much-loved jumper, once - none of which has since returned from whatever corner of the universe it now inhabits.
Of course, black holes are not the only possible explanation. Just as scientists suspect the existence of a "God particle" - the Higgs Boson - so parents have noticed that the activities of children appear to be complemented by a powerful but invisible force called "Mr Nobody". His existence, if proven, would explain many things that are now a mystery. The inquiries in our house continue.
So, yes, many questions remain to be answered about parenthood. And it's true that the experiment is as ruinously expensive as the critics warned. But even so, I would argue that it has provided me with valuable insights into the workings of the universe. I just can't put any of them into words yet.
Certainly, I feel much wiser now than I did 10 years ago. And it's early days yet. The fraught but potentially exciting teenage years lie ahead. Which is why I'm reasonably confident that, by the end of the next decade, I may finally be able to publish a Theory of Everything.
fmcnally@irish-times.ie