Black holes Goes Micro, Cern's LHC Starts Up September 10

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In celebration of Cern's Large Hadron Collider, (LHC), going live September 10, 2008 Black holes is going micro, that's right microscopic. I've always been fascinated with the microscopic world and so every once in a while I am going to post some micro images with the help of the Celestron LCD digital microscope.

The above image is what my meteorite that my wife bought me for Christmas looks like under a microscope at 160X magnification, notice the pitting caused by the meteor's travel at more then 30,000 MPH through our atmosphere, if you were to look at it normally it looks and feels very smooth, not so, it's amazing what stuff looks like magnified under a microscope, what's cool is you are looking at a remnant of the building blocks of our solar system, some 4.5 billion years ago.

Mark your calenders September 10 2008, that's the date when they flick a switch, or many, probably many, to send particle beams of protons or heavy ions , called hadrons around a 27 km circular tunnel in opposing directions and then guide the beams to collide into each other.

I know what you're thinking, why would they want to do something like that. Well by smashing particles into each other at such high energies they hope to break down the proton into even more smaller indivisible fundamental particles known to humankind, in essence re-creating the conditions that were present less then a billionth of a second after the big bang.

Have you ever starting reading a book , lets just say for argument sake at page 20?, doesn't work, you have no idea what's going on, nothing makes sense, crap, I start at page 2 I'm screwed, well that's where we started, page 20 in the theory of life book, a lot of things don't make sense, dark energy, dark matter, black holes, we have to get to page 1, the Large Hadron Collider promises to take us there, to page 1 and in doing so will give us the proper background as to why things work the way they do, to understand the big stuff like you, me, and the Universe you have to know how the little stuff works, understand why things are the way they are so as to be able to go forward, build a better mouse trap, to figure out a lot of the crazy stuff that's happening, like are there really more dimensions? what is dark energy? we know there are such things as black holes, or do we, there is no irrefutable proof they exists, they figure they can once and for all prove their existence by creating one every second, mind you it will be a real small one and is supposed to evaporate before it sucks us and the Earth in it, due to a theory called Hawking Radiation. Guess we'll find out September 10.

By understanding how something works puts us one baby step closer to harnessing it's power, "Beam me up Scotty" may one day actually happen.

I like to leave you now with another microscopic image of, well I don't know what it is , what ever it is it was hitching a ride on a rock the size of a pin head, it is at 400x, I like to call it Alien guy with a tail holding a laser gun.