I’m somewhat of an armchair physicist. I don’t play the game myself, but I read the easier books, and attend the more general public friendly lectures. Today is what one might consider the beginning of the play-offs for physicists (I can’t believe I just used a sports analogy).

Just hours ago, CERN successfully tested their Large Hadron Collider. This test consisted of shooting a bunch of Hadron particles down a -271°C, 27km tube at nearly the speed of light. In the next few weeks they will begin shooting particles down a tube in the opposite direction. These tubes intersect at four points in the circle. When particles reach these intersections they smash into each other. It’s not very much unlike Hot Wheels Criss Cross Crash, accept the Hot Wheels are very tiny, and they are much hotter, and much faster, and there are a whole lot of them.

The crashes are also more frequent and MUCH bigger. In fact, the point of the whole experiment is to recreate the conditions just trillionths of a second after the big bang occurred. Studying what happens to these particles when they smash into each other at such high rates of speed will shed much needed light on our fundamental ideas about the way the universe is and behaves. This research may lead to the discovery of a grand unifying theory for electromagnetism, strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force, and gravity. We may also be able to see dark matter, and discover additional dimensions to the universe. This is a big deal.

This morning, CERN successfully tested the machine in one direction. Next they will test the machine in the other direction, and in a couple of weeks, the collisions begin!

An interesting aside that attests to the infinite world changing possibilities in performing these experiments, CERN essentially created the World Wide Web to provide a more efficient way for scientists to communicate with each other on this project. This project has already changed our world, and they just turned on the machine this morning.