New in Colliding

I know I go on and on about it but it looks like the Large Hadron Collider (LCH) is out of comish till at least Labor day. Or as Discover Magazine awesomely states:

Until Next Fall, LHC Smashes Only Hopes, Not Particles

See, I'm not the only one left naked and alone.
Uh, metaphorically.

OMG Higgs Boson!!!!

It's on like Donkey Kong people! The physicists at CERN (finally) flipped the switch on the Large Hadron Collider earlier this morning. Well earlier this morning Swiss time so last night.

Good news! Switzerland did not become a black hole, or a series of black holes, and nothing has been extruded through the fabric of time and space. YET.
Actually nothing has happened yet. They sent like 1 proton through the 17 mile course and they won't be up to 5 trillion electron volt speed till much later in the fall.

Once slash IF they end up turning the clock back to a trillionth of a second after the big bang I'll let you know. Though I'd be a lot more impressed if they could just explain the popularity of the Hills to me. I mean I watch a lot of shitty reality tv, but I just don't get that shit.

Related: Heidi and Spencer working with Mattel on their own Ken and Barbie dolls. Blech!

Totally Off Topic but...

One thing I'm super interested in that has nothing to do with weight loss surgery or crippling brain disorders or reality tv is particle and astro physics. Not interested as in, go get a degree, no, no, no. In fact I have a hard enough time wrapping my brain around articles and books that have been dumbed down for the general public.
I've been reading Death by Black Hole by Neil deGrasse Tyson for 3 months because I need to reread the chapters like Cosmic Plasma aprox 3 times. Unless you're retarded smart I'm sure you have to too, example:

Astrophysical plasmas are remarkable for their ubiquity, they they're hardly ever discussed in introductory textbooks or the popular press...A plasmas has freely moving atoms and molecules, just like a gas, but a plasma can conduct electricity as well as lock onto magnetic fields that pass through it. Most atoms within a plasma have had electrons stripped from them by one mechanism or another and the combination of high temperature and low density is such that the electrons only occasionally recombine with their host atoms. Taken as a whole, the plasma remains electrically neutral because the total number of (negatively charged) electrons equals the total number of (positively charged) protons. But inside, plasma seethes with electrical currents and magnetic fields...

Um, got that?
Anyway, I like to know what's going on, what forces are shaping my day to day, what I'm really looking at when I look up at the sky, what evs. Plus I like to read things that blow my mind.
There's also tons of mysteries left out there like what in the fuck is 'dark matter'? And is there a Higgs particle that can explain why fundamental particles weigh anything at all when they should should be massless?
(ps. How amazing is Neil deGrasse Tyson?? Why is he not my godfather?)

Wait! What? Why am I talking about this? Because this summer scientists at CERN (The European Organization for Nuclear Research) are going to flip the switch on the biggest, baddest super conductor EVER!!! It's stylishly named the Large Hadron Particle Collider and it's either going to prove some super real wizzbang theories of 'New Physics' or its going to cause the pulling of hair and rending of clothes of many an egghead. Or it's going to swallow Earth in a man made black hole. But probably not.

So to get you up to date here's a great article from last May's New Yorker called Crash Course because duh, it's about colliding particles and no one at the New Yorker has any imagination. There's a lot of info and a little back stabbing -

“If I occasionally neglect to cite a theorist, it’s not because I’ve forgotten,” Leon Lederman, another Nobel-winning experimentalist, writes in his chronicle of the search for the Higgs. “It’s probably because I hate him.”

Hee, hee, you see experimentalists hate theorists. Scan-dal!!!
And here's a slide show from Time that I got via The morning News
Hello, prepare to have your mind blown!