I see we’re all here this morning, in spite of a lot of warnings that we wouldn’t be. Or are we only here in some parallel universe? Pinch or touch your neighbor to see if they’re really here.

Okay. We’re all here.

On 08 September 2008 the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was finally turned on, and we weren’t turned off. What is the Large Hadron Collider? It’s the largest machine ever built, a seventeen mile long circular tunnel designed to smash together protons in a re-enactment of the Big Bang.

How’d it do? You guessed it. It broke down only after being “on-line” for a few hours. But the cooling unit that failed was soon replaced and within a week the LHC was back in service, warming up, or more accurately cooling down (since the protons must be kept at a crisp -459 degrees Fahrenheit, or…