The Large Hadron Collider and the Hunt for The God Particle

Beneath the French village of Crozet, the biggest, badass particle accelerator ever built, The Large Hadron Collider, is nearing completion:

Its purpose is simple but ambitious: to crack the code of the physical world; to figure out what the universe is made of; in other words, to get to the very bottom of things. Starting sometime in the coming months, two beams of particles will race in opposite directions around the tunnel, which forms an underground ring 17 miles in circumference. The particles will be guided by more than a thousand cylindrical, supercooled magnets, linked like sausages. At four locations the beams will converge, sending the particles crashing into each other at nearly the speed of light. If all goes right, matter will be transformed by the violent collisions into wads of energy, which will in turn condense back into various intriguing types of particles, some of them never seen before. That’s the essence of experimental particle physics: You smash stuff together and see what other stuff comes out.

What scientists hope “comes out” is evidence of the Higgs Boson, the so-called God Particle:

Most physicists believe that there must be a Higgs field that pervades all space; the Higgs particle would be the carrier of the field and would interact with other particles, sort of the way a Jedi knight in Star Wars is the carrier of the “force.” The Higgs is a crucial part of the standard model of particle physics—but no one’s ever found it.

However, a splinter group of internet scientists are rallying against the completion of the Large Hadron Deathstar, claiming that when it is fully operational, it will create a blackhole, and the end of the world will ensue:

This has of course, introduced the LHC, as it is abbreviated in the collective internet conscious as something of an upstart meme. It didn’t take long for someone to figure out that Hadron is just one letter-switch away from Hard on, at which point lulz were guaranteed:

Who needs science when you have /b/?