tBlog - Could "Mini" Be Taking Over As the Newest Fad?

I tell ya - in a nation always talking about bigger being better, i think the coolest fads as of late are the "mini"-sized ones. The BMW Mini Coop, Mini Me (sidekick of Doctor Evil, evil classmate of Doctor Thalamo), iPod minis, so on and so forth. Even those lab coat-wearing, uncool physicists who can't gain any respect have finally understood what's cool. To them, it's mini black holes... the famous Cern lab, near Geneva, Switzerland (physics geeky HQs) has jumped on the trendy bandwagon.

Their newest gadget, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a particle accelerator which will probe deeper into matter than ever before. Due to switch on in 2007, the LHC is designed to probe beyond our current understanding of physics. A while back, scientists discovered all kinds of mysterious rays, X-rays, cathode rays, alpha and beta rays. Where did they come from? Were they all made of the same thing, and if so what?

The hopes are that the LHC will help understand these questions and more, such as dark matter, by producing mini black holes. The LHC will recreate the searing-hot conditions that existed just fractions of a second after the Big Bang. Scientists hope this will enable them to see new physics, and discover the sought-after Higgs boson, or "God particle", which explains why matter has mass.