CERN's Large Hadron Collider was the coolest place on the planet (-271.3°C, to be precise) to be today when it began smashing particles traveling at 99.99% the speed of light together at 3.5 TeV, or 3.5 trillion electron volts. Collisions are expected to generate heat at 100,000 times the hottest part of our sun, but they'll be super tiny, so we don't need to worry about any microscopic black holes, strangelets, vacuum bubbles, or magnetic monopoles.
It's expected the six experiments will soon begin to yield clues about the origins of our universe and answer nagging questions such as "where IS all that antimatter, anyway" and "are you SURE you only live in three (ok, four) dimensions?"
It's absolutely fascinating how the project has evolved from an idea in 1984 to a reality today, shattering one physics record after another as it tugs on Humanity's most primal desire to just obliterate stuff. In this case, however, and all jesting aside, the destructive forces are necessary as we look for clues about the origins of our universe and how we can explain it all.
But for me, that's a bit of a problem. My Sophomore year in college, I failed Calculus. I should have never taken it. I believed then, as I do now, it's ego-maniacal to claim we can explain it all in elegant fashion just using numbers. If you only ever knew of a hammer, you'd never benefit from a screwdriver. Ergo, it's difficult to build furniture if you have to invent the screwdriver along the way. I don't think we have all the tools, at least not yet. It's crippling to think we can manipulate numbers to prove something, then come up with complicated rules and offer exceptions when we need to craft them to fit something which just doesn't fit. Special Relativity led to General Relativity but wait, General Relativity excludes quantum physics. So off we go to find new numbers, or number theory, to explain it. I could never get my head around Calculus because I didn’t trust the numbers; I just didn’t believe them.
Sure, we'll learn a lot and LHC is going to take us tremendous distances. In fact, I'm hoping LHC will likely help us find evidence of screwdrivers (so to speak), so we can get closer to explaining it all. I just have a funny feeling the last explanation when it's all sorted won't have any numbers in it at all, or least not a number the way we know it today.
