Party Time!
Starting sometime next summer if all goes to plan, subatomic particles will begin shooting around a 17-mile underground ring stretching from the European Center for Nuclear Research, or Cern, near Geneva, into France and back again — luckily without having to submit to customs inspections.
Crashing together in the bowels of Atlas and similar contraptions spaced around the ring, the particles will produce tiny fireballs of primordial energy, recreating conditions that last prevailed when the universe was less than a trillionth of a second old.
From The New York Times.
The Large Hadron Collider was just activated last night. It’s a big hairy deal basically because it will supposedly allow physicists to figure out how the world as we know it began. Experiments with the device will somehow shed light on the makeup of atoms.
People are freaking the hell out though, because some think that the atomic collisions the LHC creates will more or less turn the world into anti-matter. Others say that doomsday scenarios like that are impossible. Still, people are throwing end of the world parties and killing themselves as a result. Some are taking an indifferent stance since even if it were going to cause the end of the world, there isn’t much anyone can do about it at this point.
I’m definitely interested to know what comes of the experiments. I’m also interested in any excuse to celebrate by drinking large amounts of alcohol.