The Big Bang

I'm so excited.

I was watching BBC News on TV last night when they reported that scientists in Geneva or thereabouts have launched the world's largest experiment to simulate the 'Big Bang' in order to uncover the origins of our universe. How cool is that?

The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known for its French acronym CERN, successfully fired particle beams in the astronomically expensive 27-km Large Haldron Collider, a tightly sealed particle-smashing machine buried 100 meters under the Swiss-French border.

In successive tests, they fired a particle beam at close to the speed of light in both directions around the tunnel.

This paves the way for the researchers to send beams in both directions simultaneously in order to generate a high-energy particle collision that would briefly produce temperatures 100 thousand times hotter than the sun.

As these particles keep traveling and colliding with each other in the tunnel, the scientists postulate that more and new particles will be created, allowing them to find some of the universe's building materials that have gone missing.

Within two years, they hope to prove the existence of the Higgs Boson or 'God particle', which is supposed to be responsible for creating dark matter, part of the mass that went missing at the beginning of time.

According to BBC News on the radio this morning, 96% of our universe is missing or invisible to us. Imagine that!

There is so much to learn and discover from this experiment, and I can't wait to see what mysteries will be unraveled.