A theory of everything

"Science is what we do when we don't know what we're doing." — CERN scientist

You may have heard about CERN. If you Dan Brown's books, you've definitely heard of them.

The organization bills itself as "the world's largest particle physics laboratory", and it does so with good reason.

Currently under construction, the lab's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a 26.659 kilometre-long particle accelerator. Built roughly 100 metres beneath the surface of the Earth, the accelerator is so long that it crosses the border between Switzerland and France four different times.

When it's put into operation next spring, the researchers hope to generate enough energy in their collisions to produce matter. This is the system to prove once and for all that e=mc2.

And how will they prove it? By recreating the big bang. And also, possibly, black holes. This, according to the scientists, is a massive step towards creating a theory that explains everything.

Hopefully they're right that the black holes will be too unstable to sustain themselves. Hopefully. I guess we shouldn't be too worried, after all, there was an outside chance that the first nuclear bomb would start a chain reaction that would destroy everything. But we're still here, right?

The following BBC documentary about the LHC is long, but watch the first couple of minutes and see if you don't get hooked: