Tuesday, March 30, 2010

If You Can Read This, Thank A Particle Physicist

I told my wife to congratulate the German living next to me in Texas who (somehow) works on the Large Hadron Collider straddling Switzerland and France.

They fired that puppy up and smashed them some atoms real fast-like. I'm fairly certain it wasn't up to full power to-day, but they had her all the way up to 7TEV, which is 3x-ish higher-charged than the nearest competitor. That would be (particle collider enthusiasts will please excuse the simplification) something like 7,000,000,000 volts of atoms-go-fast power. Your computer is powered by just over 12 volts inside.

According to the radio news on the way home from work today, the world was not swallowed up in the black holes formed by two colliding atoms, and the stars were apparently not thrown so badly out of alignment that you would notice.

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