The end of the world?

If this isn't news...I don't know what is. If this project goes wrong and the protons decide to go berserk (I don't know the term behind it) we're all going to be pretty much turned inside out! It was nice knowing you guys!

The end of the world?
Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 6:11 pm

Probably not.

Today (Wednesday, well it is for me anyway), we see the first beam test of the LHC, the Large Hadron Collider, in the CERN’s labs in Switzerland. The point of this, quite frankly, bloody huge experiment is to try and recreate the Big Bang on a small scale, to then see how the Universe was created.

Sounds a little dangerous and there has been much controversy over how safe this is, but we’ll get to that later. By creating a really tiny Big Bang, they’ll hopefully see how the Universe started and trace back to the very start, even before the biggest implosion/explosion the Universe has and probably will ever see.

Some background: we already have a “Standard Model” of physics, the basic core elements of everything we see and touch, including nuclei, atoms, photons, quarks, electrons and suchlike. However the problem these physicists face is knowing where these originally came from. They have this theory that they all came from one bigger particle, called the “Higgs boson”, named after Prof. Peter Higgs who first thought it up.


So after nearly a decade of work, construction, digging and thinking, they’ve created the biggest and most advanced particle accelerator the world has ever seen. Today, they’re turning it up to “11″.

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