Turtles all the way down

This is the outline of the Large Hadron (not hardon!) Collider at the Cern Institute in Switzerland - the circle above is not actually visible, but is drawn on to show the path of the Collider below ground. It's huge, as you can see.

Here's a pic from inside the tunnel:

 To wit: Particles get shot around this loop in both directions, faster and faster until the agreed upon speed is reached, then they are diverted into a collection chamber where they are smashed together under the eyes of many specialized cameras. The energy from these collisions is quite high, high enough in fact to briefly release more fundamental particles like quarks and electrons.


One of the main goals of the LHC is the discovery (or non-discovery) of a particle called the Higgs Boson, which is believe to be the gravity particle (i.e. like a photon is the particle for electromagnetism). It all gets very technical, but the importance of this for now theoretical particle is easily understood when you realize scientists think most mass comes from this particle. It's really, really fundamental.


If discovered, many people will win Nobel Prizes because of it - Stephen Hawking among them. If not discovered - which is a real possibility - then many working theories will have to be thrown out and new models developed. 


Which might sound like a failure, but is in fact the very essence of science.

Finally, here's a new picture from the LHC showing the collision of gold atoms:

Science is cool, kids!