Big Bang You're Dead

I wonder how many of you have heard of the Large Hadron Collider. This is a groundbreaking particle accelerator that has been built in a 17-mile circular tunnel at the CERN laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland.

The $3.8 billion machine will collide two beams of protons moving at close to the speed of light so scientists can see what particles appear in the resulting debris.

It is a particle accelerator used by physicists to study the smallest known particles – the fundamental building blocks of all things. It will revolutionize our understanding, from the minuscule world deep within atoms to the vastness of the Universe.


Two beams of subatomic particles called 'hadrons' – either protons or lead ions – will travel in opposite directions inside the circular accelerator, gaining energy with every lap.

Physicists will use the LHC to recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang, by colliding the two beams head-on at very high energy.

Teams of physicists from around the world will analyze the particles created in the collisions using special detectors in a number of experiments dedicated to the LHC.

Concerns have been raised about the safety of the LHC on the grounds that high-energy particle collisions performed in the collider might cause disastrous events, including the production of stable micro black holes (mBHs) and strangelets.

Several CERN-commissioned reportsand subsequently published research papers have corroborated the safety of the LHC particle collisions.

One research paper reaches the opposite conclusion, stating that "at the present stage of knowledge there is a definite risk from mBHs production at colliders." The validity of this safety assessment has been disputed.

High tech stuff that high-energy particle physics, I could go on and explain all this to you from what I learned at a Holiday Inn Express but I have a better way.

Click here to check out "The Large Hadron Rap."

Performed by Kate McAlpine, a 23-year-old Michigan State University graduate and science writer,a rising star on YouTube thanks to her rap performance — about high-energy particle physics.

Her performance has drawn a half-million views so far on YouTube. McAlpine raps that when the collider goes into operation on Sept. 10, "the things that it discovers will rock you in the head."