On a day of remembrance and mourning, during a time of hyped-up election fervor and nationalism, it comforts me that over 8,000 scientists from around the world (mainly physicists I'm guessing) have been working together on the project below in order to find our (every person, living species, and rock) singular, unified, origin.
For anyone who missed this, it was perhaps one of the greatest physics undertakings of our time.
Yesterday in Geneva scientists began running experiments w/ the collider that could explain the existence of, well, us. Yup. How did mass get here? How did we get here? How did black holes get (or I guess since it's a hole - not get) here?
This thrills many and scares the crap out of some. I haven't figured out where I stand on the thrill vs. scared spectrum. If the Big Bang created our universe, it was a VERY big and VERY out of control deal. And the scientists who set up Hadron have created a VERY controlled environment. But. . . what if these little particles really do have more energy than we'd ever imagined? There had to be an awful lot of energy the day our universe was created.
Needless to say, check out some articles. The Big Bang didn't replicate (on a small, controlled scale) yesterday, nor were any new black holes created, and Europe wasn't blown to bits into the water.
See CNN and Wikipedia articles below:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/09/08/lhc.collider/index.html
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