March 30th was another significant anti-climax for doomsday-ers. Zapped with seven tera-electron volts, protons underneath the Swiss-French border raced around a 27 kilometer track at a fraction below the speed of light just to smash into each other, play-acting the universe moments after the big bang or, to use the analogy of some scientists, the absolute worst freeway accident imaginable. The astute reader may note that, no matter how fast they were going, an accident involving only two cars couldn’t be the worst one imaginable. Yet the analogy still works; these particle collisions are happening at the rate of 50-100 per second, with plans to increase the rate to 300 a second. Just imagine a 300-car pile-up. Then imagine it happening at light speed. More than 10 million of these miniature big bangs have occurred since scientists flipped the switch.

The miniature-scale replication of the big bang had caused many ill-informed people of apocalyptic bents to predict that the miniature black holes that should be created by the crashing protons would grow and envelop the solar system. Obviously this has not happened. The predicted miniature black holes, which consume themselves more or less instantly, are, theoretically, created by the entry of light through the ozone layer regardless of human creations.

The Large Hadron Collider has been in the works for roughly 25 years. It uses about three and a half times as many electron volts as its now-obsolete competitor, Fermilab, operating near Chicago. As if this unprecedented and semi-incomprehensible quantity of energy (a tera-electron volt is a million million electron volts) weren’t already adequately over-the-top, by 2013 the facility hopes to up this number to 14.

Still, no matter how fast it can throw things into other things, physics isn’t totally sexy yet. Data will be compiled and analyzed for months, and scientific discoveries, regardless of how they’re sensationalized, will proceed slowly from long laborious analysis.

It may also shock readers to know that anybody who would build a thoroughly magnetized, hyper-sensitive 27 kilometer underground racetrack would ever let the word “practical” enter their stream-of-consciousness. Never fear; it does little more than that. The discoveries scientists are hoping to make at CERN pertain to completing the Standard Model of particle physics. That is to say, even if you could understand what these people are doing (apologies to our readers who are physics professors) you would probably have trouble figuring out how it will be useful. Yet the theoretical importance of actually completing this body of research is hard to understate and will justify years of accumulated theory if validated. Analysis regarding the validity of string theory, which hopes to reconcile modern quantum theory and Einstein’s general theory- the two grand and incompatible frameworks for contemporary physics- should proceed. The big gun is the Higgs boson, a particle thought to imbue all other particles with mass. If it exists, it will complete the Standard Model of particle physics. If it doesn’t, then the more serious discussion of eleven dimensions and parallel universes will begin. In spite of the gratification of completing the standard model of particle physics, science is always more fun when it leads to more questions. So now that we’re $10 billion into CERN, the best thing for the amateur science-reader to do is hope things keep getting weirder.