LHC @ CERN

This week has been very exciting indeed! I've monitored, closely, the progress of the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) at the CERN facility in Geneva for some time. A series of penny farthing type tubular arrangements have been installed underground at the French/Swiss border accelerating two opposing beams of protons in order to collide their paths at strategic positions. Using incredibly sensitive hardware sensors, the collisions will be recorded and resulting collateral fragments of matter will be analysed.

It is impossible to envisage the proton beam 'packet' travelling - when fully accelerated - 11,000 times around the 27km ring every second [99.9999% the speed of light].

Much excitement has been aroused surrounding the potential for the LHC to 'discover' [or at least provide evidence of the existance of] the Higgs Boson particle - a particle imagined to be responsible for giving mass to other particles in the universe. Personally, I have never liked the concept and have felt for some years like the elusive Higgs was an easy way to explain away the inauguration of mass. I can't wait to see if answers are provided one way or the other, though.

The most exciting thing for me is the potential light the experimentations might shed on dark energy and dark matter.

Whatever happens, it feels like a precipice of breakthrough for me and I'm very excited..

New gadget [update]

The new gadget is going to be imminently gracing the pages of ebay! As much as I love it; it's unfortunately too technological to work with my car. The bluetooth car-phone synchronisation software can't decipher the address book in my phone which is stored in the Symbian S60 platform.

Regretfully, I'm going to have to restore my old [but brilliantly functional] phone to it's former position. My car got along just fine with him.

All this has left me pondering whether Aston Martin's have a compatible bluetooth system for the Nokia e90...