World doesn’t end

After around twenty years of scribbling in notepads and scaring half of the planet, scientists finally got round to switching on the Large Hadron Collider.

Wednesday 10 September was touted as the day when mankind’s dabblings in science went one step too far and the whole planet was destroyed. Luckily, this hasn’t happened but a website has been made to help keep you up to date with the state of the planet.

The experiment involved firing two beams of protons along a 27km long tunnel – which has been 13 years in the making – with the aim of smashing them together really quickly to see what happened. It’s hoped that the collider will recreate similar conditions to those found just after the big bang which will help answer many of science’s unanswered questions.

Today’s run didn’t involve any actual collisions – which is the exciting/risky part – but was simply a test of the equipment.

It is hoped that the collision will create new particles in its debris which will help define the nature of physics more than ever before.

There are other possibilities – that we can discover other universes (or we could be in a parallel universe right now) or even that our universe is the only one.

There is the fear that this experiment will go horribly wrong and instead of helping understand the properties of protons and neutrons more fully, it could create a black hole that sucks up the earth and devours us all.

Stephen Hawking has, however, bet against the machine completing one of its major goals.

And, of course, there was that amazing rap video sent out by CERN. I know it’s already on this blog, but you can never get enough of it, can you?