LHC, Yeah You Know Me!

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has beat its own record in energy production and is going to begin its attempts to detect the Higgs boson next week. The Higgs boson is the only yet-to-be-observed elementary particle in the Standard Model of quantum physics, and it's hoped that proving its existence will help explain the existence of mass in the universe. Being a details person who enjoys knowing the basics of how things work, I'm really excited to see what comes out of these upcoming experiments.

I'm also enormously entertained by doomsday predictions. So my favorite speculation surrounding the results of these experiments is the idea that the breakage of the magnets that put the experiments on hold for so long is due to the Higgs boson being "so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather."

I suppose we'll find out soon enough whether these predictions are accurate, but I'm not too worried that the world will be ending next week. Who knows though, I'm certainly not going to rule out that I could be wrong. But we did make it through Y2K unscathed...