My Collider is Bigger Than Yours

The Large Hadron Collider went online this week despite worry on behalf of some people that experiments there would create black holes and destroy the world. (One scientist recently received a death threat too.) As predicted by sane people, the world is still here.



And what is the LHC good for?

What it will do is help researchers answer some big questions about the universe—why particles have mass; what dark matter may be made of, and why matter survived its brush with antimatter when the universe was young.
Will the Higgs boson be found? Will researchers find themselves caught in a hypothetical blizzard of nonbaryonic matter? Stay tuned!

In the meantime, check out the LHC webcams where you can watch the Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment in progress.