CERN Large Hadron Collider – Big Science

Thanks to Jeremy ^[1] for pointing out to me a photo feature on the LHC at CERN ^[2]. Some really brilliant pictures ^[2] of truly Big Science getting built.

Of course, if you’re worried about this causing the world to end it’s probably worth reading the info they put out in 2003 ^[3], which simply points out that the Earth will have seen this (and much more) before:

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) can achieve an energy that no other particle accelerators have reached before, but Nature routinely produces higher energies in cosmic-ray collisions. […] Whatever the LHC will do, Nature has already done many times over during the lifetime of the Earth and other astronomical bodies.

To put things into proportion:

Speculations about microscopic black holes at the LHC refer to particles produced in the collisions of pairs of protons, each of which has an energy comparable to that of a mosquito in flight.

So you can put your brown paper bags away now.. 🙂