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CERN created a “god particle” in 2012 and that initiated a black hole that sucked Earth into an alternate dimension and we just haven’t noticed it yet. So goes one conspiracy. The reality of what CERN is and does is both more cool and more boring.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: September 29, 1954--
Maybe we did drop into an alternate universe, because shit has been fucked lately. That’s not the only conspiracy. Others believe CERN is trying to summon the Hindu god Shiva or travel through time. Can we go back far enough and give Trump’s dad a vasectomy? Anyway, CERN stands for European Council for Nuclear Research, but because French the acronym is in a different order. It was established in a suburb of Geneva on September 29, 1954 with the cooperation of a dozen Western European countries (there are 23 member countries now), and wow has it cost a lot of money.
That’s because Large Hadron Colliders are expensive. The fuck is a Large Hadron Collider? It is—as the name implies—the largest as well as highest energy particle collider; it fired up in 2008 and is a 17-mile ring of superconducting magnets that can accelerate particles to ridiculously high speeds and then those particles crash into each other and we … learn shit. I guess. I don’t know. I’m not a particle physicist. People have won Nobel prizes using it though, like Peter Higgs and François Englert did after discovering the Higgs boson.
The Higgs boson is what the media coined the “God Particle,” although physicists hate that fucking name. The name was supposed to be a joke. Physicist Leon Lederman was writing a book in the 1990s and referred to it as “The Goddamn Particle” because it was so goddamn hard to find. The publisher shortened the title of his 1993 book to The God Particle and idiots thought finding it would prove the existence of God or some shit. But the particle has nothing to do with proving or disproving any deity or deities. Although my wife is a total goddess.
Anyway, it’s about the Higgs field that physicists think permeates through space and time and provides mass to all other particles. Which, I guess, is … nice? Mass is good. Not Catholic mass. Physical mass. Anyway, you need a bigger brain than I have to really get it.
CERN does more than use multibillion dollar toys to throw subatomic particles at each other at near the speed of light. It’s not just a massive expenditure to learn shit only physicists understand. There are real-world applications. CERN isn’t the only place with particle accelerators and detectors; their advancements in these technologies have allowed devices to be built for contributing to advancements in medical diagnosis technology such as X-rays, PET scans, and MRIs. Research at CERN has also led to advancements in imagery and photography, as well as computing, aerospace, and a bunch of other cool shit. Yay science.
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As a physics student, the number of times I had to sigh, roll my eyes, and then quickly decide if it was worth the time to explain how wrong it is to emphasize "god particle" in the way the person talking to me was... oof. I left particle physics and do condensed matter now, so now it's just a bunch of "Magnets, how the hell do they work?" jokes.