Some time between the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the US Government’s bailout of AIG I began asking myself: where’s Professor Stephen Hawking when you need him?

Last week, when the opening of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN had the more excitable among us wondering if we were all about to disappear into a large black hole, the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge was a very useful fellow to have around, patiently explaining that the black holes were only very small and that we really shouldn’t worry ourselves.

This week we face being destroyed by another black hole. The global financial crisis is swallowing up banks, insurance giants, pensions and a host of financial instruments that I wouldn’t recognise if they popped up on the next desk, and all I want is for some reassuring boffin to explain what’s going on and tell us that it’s all going to be all right.

It is one thing having a crisis; quite another having a crisis when you don’t have the foggiest idea what it’s all about. Last week set the bar for perplexing news stories: even the more scientifically literate among us (I’ve got physics O level, you know) developed a dull headache as we tried to grapple with proton beams, dark matter and, of course, the Higgs boson. Now, just as we have got over that one, along comes the impending collapse of the world’s banking system. It certainly matches the CERN story for brain-numbing complexity. What is short-selling? Who thought it was a good idea to give mortgages to people who were never going to pay them back? And if Lehman has lost billions of dollars, where has the money gone?

The more I understand, the more I realise I don’t understand. Take securitisation, for instance. I looked it up: apparently it’s when you package up a whole number of mortgages, then sell the debt to someone else. Why would anyone want to do that?

There are crucial difference between the Large Hadron Collider and the banking crisis. They are both the province of people who speak a language that no one else understands. But in the case of the CERN brigade, we don’t hate them. We don’t hate them because they don’t spend their bonuses on a second Maserati, we don’t hate them because they don’t go round exuding insufferable superiority, and most of all we don’t hate them because they haven’t brought about the collapse of the whole tottering edifice by their own greed.

The other difference is that while both phenomena are immensely important, the financial meltdown has an immediacy that CERN could never manage. If all those scientists discover the secrets of the big bang, or work out the fundamental nature of matter, well I dare say we would all be the better off for it. But my pension is going up in smoke, the few shares I own are worthless and thousands of people are wondering whether they will have a job next week.

I wish I knew why.

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