Still Here (Or Are We?)
So, the LHC fired up this morning in a (completely expected) hail of non-event-ness. Early this morning, the first laps of protons around the 27km ring were made, ensuring that the systems in place are all functioning, and defining what, if anything, needs further tuning before real experimentation begins.
If you’re wondering what the heck the LHC is, in short, the largest particle accelerator built to date. It consists of a 27km ring that runs under the border between Switzerland and France. There are two paths, within which will be circulated bunches of small (to us) particles that will eventually be accelerated to 99.9999999999% of the speed of light (299,792,458 meters/second, or 670,616,629.4 Mph, in other words REALLY fast). The hope of the LHC (among other things) is to find the Higgs Boson, which is a particle that is suspected to be involved in giving things mass. I would get into the science of this, but I myself BARELY understand the surface of all of this, and to try to explain it would probably make my brain become teh brokun.
But anyway… Some of the other things that might be found/created (though not dangerous in any way, please shut up, doomsayers): Nano-black holes, these are super small black holes that (through Hawking radiation) evaporate and collapse into themselves over the period of a few femtoseconds (one billionth of one millionth of a second); Dark matter, believed to make up a huge portion of the bulk mass of the universe, dark matter is unique because it doesn’t interact with light, electromagnetism, or any other force that we can measure, except gravity; Conditions much like the creation of the universe, one of the detectors is in place to measure the collision of lead ions (which are REALLY heavy), which is predicted to give us a look at what it was like a few nanoseconds after the universe came into being.
So, there’s some interesting stuff going on over there at CERN. None of it is even remotely likely to do anything that would affect us in our daily basis. Least of all, nothing that will destroy the planet or the universe. I am a little leery, however, of strange looking men in blue suits, and particle physicists with glasses and goatees.