Large Hadron Collider fails to kill us all
The white coats did it. They flicked the switch to create the most powerful particle collisions ever moulded by man only this afternoon.
And, at least as I'm writing this, the world hasn't been sucked into a black hole. Phew!
Of course serious scientists would have told you the LHC never posed a threat but you know how the crazies are...
Anyway, shortly after noon UK time scientists managed to ram two protons into each other in a collision worth some 7 tera-electron-volts.
That's more energy than a classroom of toddlers fed with nothing but Sunny D and Skittles.
LHC will continue bashing up protons for around a year before taking a 12-month break for an upgrade to allow it create 14 tera-electron-volts smashes.
The hunt is on for the Higgs boson - the building blocks of matter - but there's something I think which would be even more exciting expected to be exposed by the LHC.
Top CERN fella Sergio Bertolucci has predicted the opening of some kind of portal into a bizarre extra-dimensional continuum of some kind. Alright!
Alas they will be too small and short-lived to allow us to go exploring. Boo!
Weird Science Factoid: The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History has the world's largest collection of shells. Some 15 million of them!
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Authors
Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
