Seems the guys over at CERN have successfully fired up the LHC. That’s the Large Hadron Collider for those of you that are acronymically challenged, or really don’t pay much attention to the world of particle physics.

If you care about particle physics you can check out the official press release. If you don’t care, it’s ok. It should be about 6 weeks before they fire up the massive particle accelerator with particle beams going in both directions, aimed directly at each other.

Why would they want to accelerate a bunch of particles around a huge underground tunnel at the speed of light and crash them into each other? To see what happens of course. They are looking for the “God particle”, amongst other things. Yes, that’s the elusive theoretical stuff that actually gives mass to particles. That’s what I have read anyhow.

You can search for Higgs Boson or LHC today and find all you might want to know about the whole concept…I won’t get into it here. Oh, and don’t be scared. If they do happen to recreate the Big Bang, as they intend to it will either only create a microscopic black hole (or 5000 they don’t know) that should probably die out on its/their own before it/they grow big enough to destroy the earth (current estimate is about 50+ months). Or, everything will be wiped out instantaneously and it won’t really matter.

These guys are scientists, though. So, it should probably be ok. Hey, this is CERN where they invented the WWW so that they could trade supercomputer data amongst labs, or link data amongst documents. Or was it so they could monitor the coffee pot remotely? I don’t remember which, now… but I do remember there were some Archie searches involved before that. Luckily Gopher and Veronica came around to bridge that whole gap prior to the people at CERN (Tim Berners-Lee specifically) stepped up and brought us a good way to access porn and music, I mean find useful information quickly.

Anyhow, we’ve got at least 6 weeks before they Big Bang us…and probably 50 months after that before the black hole engulfs us. I trust the guys at CERN to keep this whole thing under control. I’m sure it was a lot of work to invent the web…wouldn’t want that to go up in smoke would we?

I’m hoping that it all works out as planned. It has been 20 years in the making. If all goes well, who knows? We may get to create stuff from nothing, or make really tiny things really heavy. Or Big things really light? One way or another Discovery Channel will get some good footage. Who knows? Perhaps all these particles colliding will make a smelly mess and Mike Rowe will get to clean it up for us to watch!

~Author’s note:

This is an exact duplicate of my own wordpress blog. I used to submit the occasional article to Wisdomworld, and thought this was appropriate – when I clicked on submit after writing this blog, lo and behold I was back in a wordpress editor! Small world, Island.

~cyber5