Physical Reality

Congratulations to all the particle physicists in the world! Some have been waiting 30 years to do their experiments on CERN's Large Hadron Collider, which was switched on for the first time September 10. The real party though, is for the many engineers who designed and built this incredibly large and complex machine in France and Switzerland over the last 10 years. It's the biggest, most ambitious and complex engineering project ever undertaken by humans.

"The LHC was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), and lies underneath the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland. It is funded by and built in collaboration with over eight thousand physicists from over eighty-five countries as well as hundreds of universities and laboratories. The LHC is already operational and is presently in the process of being prepared for collisions. The first beams were circulated through the collider on 10 September 2008, and the first high-energy collisions are planned to take place after the LHC is officially unveiled on 21 October."

The first video, above, explains why this machine is interesting, but you have to watch the whole 15 minutes to get the story. The second video is just silly, but it has footage from the inside of the LHC and it's bound to make you feel great about your own MC skills.

Physicists aim to explain how the universe works, and in the process, they ask some very interesting questions. A good book on the topic is A brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking, which lays it out in words and pictures for everyone to understand.