|photo credit: Ethan Hein| Science definitely wasn’t sleeping
last night -in the very wee hours of the night, (2:30 a.m.
Central time to be exact) physicists at the world’s largest
particle physics laboratory – CERN – threw the switch on perhaps
the most massive physics experiment ever attempted. (The AP
confirms: we’re still here.) The eventual goal: find the Higgs-
Boson particle, also called the “God Particle.” In simple terms
(and they would have to be, for me to understand them)
physicists theorize that the Higgs-Boson particle is the
particle that gives all other particles mass. Without mass –
well, there wouldn’t be anything. So, physicists would like to
have a look at it – and CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, an $8
billion, 14-mile particle accelerator - was designed to help
them. Basically, they’re going to crash a bunch of tiny
particles together and see what comes out, in an effort to
create the conditions that existed just after the Big Bang.
(This is all happening in Switzerland, where CERN is locate