Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Whoopi-Do We Are Still Here


The world's biggest physics experiment has succeeded in its first major test as a beam of protons was successfully fired all the way around a 17-mile tunnel beneath the Swiss-French border. From the AP

You might have caught a bit about the event on the evening news when there was talk that it could possibly cause our planet to implode into a black hole. Something like that—I am not a physics person. Well, it obviously didn’t, and the “end of the worlders” can go back to worrying.

Here in my new hometown of Batavia, we know a thing or two about energy. Batavia was once home to windmill manufacturers and we have windmills all over the place. But the biggest and finest claim for the City of Energy is Fermilab, named for Nobel Prize winner Enrico Fermi, one of the most highly regarded physicists of the atomic age.

I reckon they’re smashing atoms and accelerating and colliding them as well, and so far everything here in Batavia seems to be just fine, and I am sure they will be fine in Geneva (Switzerland, not Illinois' Geneva which is just up the road from Batavia) too. Ahhh! We have escaped another “Chicken Little” scare.