A couple of days ago, one of the most extraordinary collections of instruments and magnets and computers and accelerators came to life. Cern - Europe's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) smashed together two stream of protons at an energy level of 3.5 times greater than ever achieved before, So?
Well they are looking for a particle amongst other things commonly known as the God particle - even if not religious a wee bit pretentious I think. It's actual name is the Higgs boson - not that that is shabby, just not as miraculous sounding as the 'God' particle and finding it would apparently help explain the origin of 'mass' in the universe. Ok, that is sounding a bit more 'god' like.
Cern is amazing even without the physics, a truly remarkable engineering feat. The LHC even more so.. Massive and complex, it can humble one quickly. What will they find? Personally I hope they find lots of questions, that it is not as we had imagined and that the answer to life, the universe and everything is 42 after all.
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