Stand back! I’m going to say Science!

I totally ripped that off from XKCD, but it still sounds cool.

My name is Joshua Boulding. I’m the sports editor for this wonderful paper.  And I’m in physics.

Let’s take a look at what’s going on in the world of science today!

The LHC (Large Hadron Collider) was turned on earlier today.  Guess it works, or doesn’t work in the capacity that some people were afraid of, since the earth hasn’t collapsed into a black hole.

What does it do?  Well, basically it makes small, positively-charged atomic particles known as protons go really, really fast around a 27km track, the largest of its kind ever.

Technically, there haven’t been any real collisions yet so the scientists don’t have any real data to work with.  Within a few days they hope to get some minor calibration tests in.  We won’t know if its the end of the world for a few weeks when major collisions occur and the chance for matter to combine into an object so massive it would mimic a Black Hole.

BTW a Black Hole is worse than your mother-in-law.  As far as we humans know, Black Holes are created after a super-massive star (read: 100 times larger than the sun or bigger) goes Supernova (really really big explosion).  These gravity-wells have such a strong pull that not even light can escape once it passes beyond a certain point (known as the “Event Horizon”).

Doomsayers say that in the attempt to recreate events like the Big Bang, we may inadvertently create miniature versions of these celestial objects (read: smaller than an electron).  Bad thing is that they don’t go away and would consume matter until they grow enough to suck in the entire planet and eventually the entire solar system.

That would kind of suck.

But luckily, it isn’t all that likely that anything like that could occur in the conditions that we can create.

Enough end-of-the-world stuff for today!  I’ll see you guys later with more cool science stuff!