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Wednesday, September 10, 2008

The End is Near!

Oh, wait, what?  Just turning on the Large Hadron Collider didn't create a black hole to gobble up the Earth?  And it didn't produce a strangelet that destroyed all matter?  Oh... well, huzzah for CERN then!
As you may have heard, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, better know by its French acronym "CERN," switched on it's new toy at about 2:36 a.m. Mountain time this morning -- And nothing bad happened.  Their new $5 billion, world's largest and most powerful (14 trillion electron volt) particle accelerator came online this morning without a hitch and sent a few partiles in a clockwise trip around it's 17-mile loop.  It won't get to do any smashin' for a few more weeks, but it will hopefully help physisicst a better understanding of the birth of the Universe by letting them see what the very first few nano-seconds of the Big Bang may have looked like.  

Cool.  More news at Wired and Google News, and of course, at CERN's site.  


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