Happy LHC Day!

Just wanted to be one of the voices acknowledging day one of CERN's Large Hadron Collider. I know very little about it, but being a blogger I don't let that get in the way of talking about it!

You can read about it on Wikipedia, The Source of All That is Knowable.

Two interesting factoids I learned from a Science Friday podcast:
1. it shoots 100's of billions of protons at a time, thousands of times per second and accelerates them to 99.999999% o the speed of light! Sounds pretty fast.
2. it will not create something that swallows the earth or destroys the whole universe because the kind of collisions it is creating actually occur all the time as comic rays strike the earth (and I presume every other body in the universe). The difference is these are in a controlled and carefully observable environment.

Can't wait to find out where all that anti-matter's gone, but don't know if I care too much about gravity and all that...

Don't forget to watch the educational video I posted about it some weeks ago! : )

More like this

"Alas! must it ever be so? Do we stand in our own light, wherever we go, And fight our own shadows forever?" -Edward Bulwer-Lytton Ever since it was conjectured that the speed of light was the ultimate speed limit of the Universe, we have tried -- with the most powerful of our tools -- to push as…
Brain Greene had a useful op-ed in yesterday's New York Times. He's discussing all the fuss about the Large Hadron Collider: After more than a decade of development and construction, involving thousands of scientists from dozens of countries at a cost of some $8 billion, the "on" switch for the…
“You endure what is unbearable, and you bear it. That is all.” -Cassandra Clare Well, the cat's out of the bag. A little over a week ago, Scienceblogs announced to us writers that they no longer had the funds to keep the site operational, and so they would be shutting down. They asked us to keep…
"All our sweetest hours fly the fastest." -Virgil If you've been around the block once or twice, you know that the speed of light in a vacuum -- 299,792,458 meters-per-second -- is the absolute maximum speed that any form of energy in the Universe can travel at. In shorthand, this speed is known as…