13Sep LHC Doesnt Destroy World…Yet
Image via Wikipedia It was the week the world was supposed to end. Only it didn’t – or at least it hasn’t yet. Paul Rowland explains why we were right to be scared of the Large Hadron Collider – but only to a point…
So the world didn’t end then…
Not quite, no. Meaning that those of us who didn’t spend the first part of Wednesday morning frantically watching our clocks and panicking that we’d forgotten to bid farewell to some loved one were actually in the right.
So to say the Earth didn’t move would be to over-egg the pudding. You’d have struggled to detect so much as a murmur had you even been hiking across a Swiss alpine plateau directly above the vast tunnel where the Large Hadron Collider was activated – overseen by Aberdare-born project manager Dr Lyn Evans, above.
The what?
The Large Hadron Collider. Just one of a brilliant new set of jargon which most of us spent the middle part of the week bandying around as if we had any idea what it meant.
Other great examples include the Higgs Boson particle, quark-gluon plasma, and any combination of protons, neutrons and electrons.
So offices around the country were awash the sentences like: “What CERN are doing, see, is stripping all the electrons off particles so they’ve got naked protons. Then they’re super-cooling them and whacking them through the LHC at light speed, so they’ll all smash into each other, and, hopefully, then they can understand dark matter, the God particle and maybe even the quark-gluon plasma that was around at the dawn of time. It’s obvious, innit.”
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