You know it’s a weird day when The Sun (UK) features the headline:  Success!  The world hasn’t ended

At 2:30 BPN time this morning, scientists in Geneva steered the first beam of the Large Hadron Collider, widely considered to be one of the biggest, most expensive scientific experiments in human history.

In other words, the “on” button has been switched.  They won’t start colliding particles for a little while yet.

How important is this machine?  We don’t totally know yet, but the implications are potentially groundbreaking.  Even Google.com’s homepage features a special LHC logo today.

One of the scientists is blogging here.

Truth be told, this whole event is pretty freaky.  I went to bed last night after having read dozens of articles about the LHC, trying to find something that said I should be 100% comfortable that this thing is going to be safe.  Flarking Smoo of BipolarNation wondered if I was actually being serious - the answer was:  yeah, this thing kind of scared me.

I mean, it’s not every day that huge, unprecedented scientific experiments switch on, complete with something like 17 miles of tunnels, watched by thousands of scientists.

But it turns out that the thing is safe.  What rattled me is that we’re experimenting in a totally new world now.  We might prove something so significant that people call it (the Higgs boson) the “God particle.”

To quote Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, what a fascinating modern age we live in.

Stephen Hawking said that there’s no reason for concern and clearly, he knows more about physics than I do.  He’s more concerned that the Higgs boson won’t be discovered.

Visit the BPN Political Discussion Boards

Did you like this post? Subscribe to the BipolarNation feed.

You can also receive the latest BipolarNation.com posts delivered to your e-mail inbox! Subscribe here.