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« Science: March 2008 | Main | Science: May 2008 » ScienceGod Particle Those crazy scientists are at it again. They built this huge atom smasher, called a Large Hadron Collider (LHC), in order to recreate the conditions that existed right after the Big Bang in order to find what is called the Higgs boson. It is theoretically the particle that "gives mass to every [otherwise massless] elementary particle." Can't create the universe without some mass, i guess. Two guys are suing to prevent them from using the LHC, claiming there's a chance it might create a black hole. Or it could spit out something called a "strangelet" that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called "strange matter." The Large Hadron Collider is designed to fire up protons to energies of 7 trillion electron volts before banging them together. Nothing will happen in the CERN collider that does not happen 100,000 times a day from cosmic rays in the atmosphere, said Nima Arkani-Hamed, a particle theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. So, pretty much it would be almost impossible for a blackhole to be created. ALMOST. I feel better now. The best thing about it all? Higg's boson is being referred to as the God Particle. (queue the DIO track) By min | April 8, 2008, 3:05 PM | Science | Link |