Hold on to your hat

In a 27km tunnel underneath the border between France and Switzerland a giant ring of magnets and metal lies, ready to show us the wonders of the universe and the big bang - or so all of Earth's top scientists hope. Cern's LHC, or Large Hadron Collider, was switched on this morning at half past eight. I imagined a crazy looking guy in a white coat with wild white hair and slightly googly eyes pressing the big red button which immeditely sent lightening bolts over the equipment around him. In reality, it was not even half as exciting. A bunch of people standing about a circular office, walled with computers, mumbling to each other as the BBC breakfast reporters spoke over it all. Not a bolt of electricity anywhere. But then I suppose health and safety would have something to say about that. There must be some king of regulation about having lightening bolts running over the computers infront of you. It was the world's first big move to discover the secrets of the big bang whilst the rest of us were pulling our shirts on or diving out the front door to get to work. The idea is that a proton beam will be fired around the ring at a rate close to the speed of light later joined by another of the same kind which will be sent round in the opposite direction and forced to collide near the ring's detectors that will monitor the effect and results of the collision. Scientists thoerise that this collision will illustrate what happened at the Big Bang, the mother of all explosions (and the universe). It may also shed light on the theory of 'dark matter' and the Higgs boson, otherwise known as 'The God Particle'. The Higgs Boson is a particle not yet proven to exist but which is suspected to be the enabler by which all particles aquire their mass. Apparently the LHC proving it to exist would be just as useful as proving the opposite. Ordinary matter, such as planets, stars, us, only make up an estimated 4% of the Universe whereas the rest of matter is the 'dark matter', the 'stuff' inbetween all that we can see. Will it all work though? Many doom-mongerers have been prophecising disruptive reactions and even black holes opening in the centre of the ring and sucking the Earth down into them?! Scientists say this is all nonsense, of course. But what if it was something much more mundane? What if someone trips over a wire on the way back from the tea machine and pulls a plug from the wall? Would he ruin mankind's chances of finding the secrets of the universe?! He'd definately spill his tea. But then drinking tea may not be allowed in the LHC either, for health and safety reasons. God knows what would happen if tea was spilt onto one of those LHC controls. Mountain biking is fine though... as long as you've got your hard hat on.