Un-Cern-tanty

By now you may have heard that a bunch of scientists in Switzerland with an organization called CERN (the French acronym for European Organization for Nuclear Research) might accidentally bring about the end of the world on Wednesday by firing up something called the Large Hadrion Collider to try to create matter not seen since the Big Bang. Stuart Jeffries of the Guardian tries to explain just what's going under the Alps in a way that someone without several PhDs in Quantum Physics might understand, it's worth a read so you'll know what happened should the world suddenly end tomorrow.

About that, it's probably not going to happen. In fact scientists expect to spend years, if not decades, analyzing the data from tomorrow's experiment. They hope to create something called a Higgs boson, which they think is the building block of all matter in the universe. But they might also create a mini black hole (and they do stress "mini") in the process, one that they assure us will evaporate quickly, which has sparked all of the internet end of the world rumors.

The real likelihood though is, that like many first experiments, the whole thing will fizzle and nothing exciting at all will happen.

And as for the invariable question of what effect does any of this have on my day-to-day life, consider this: to share their data more effectively around the world, scientists from CERN created a series of protocols for sending data over the internet in graphical form. Once they wrote the protocols they shared them with the public at-large for free, creating what they called the World Wide Web - the internet we know and love today.

I hope that when they fire the Collider up tomorrow they play REM's "It's the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine)", just in case.