What the hell is a hadron?

The folks at CERN turned on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) today. You might be into particle physics or cosmology or science in general, or you might not. Either way, the realization of something as impressive as the LHC over a 20 year period is damn impressive.

It seems that all that happened today is that a beam was successfully steered around the entire 27 kilometer ring, so there were no collisions to be had. Good thing for us, at least according to the lunatic fringe that insists that the LHC is going to create black holes that will destroy the Earth. There's lots of work to do at CERN before the LHC is ready to actually smash particles into one another at almost the speed of light, so the Earth destroying doesn't commence for another 5 months or so.

The good news if the LHC is safe is that the Earth will go right on spinning while we learn even more about how the Universe works. The even better news if the LHC is in fact a doomsday machine, is that I can stop paying my bills around Christmas, and really live it up until February sometime.