Black Hole Fails to Destruct

 Jonny Arnold, a Doctoral candidate at the California Institute of Technology, re-packages particle minutia into manageable Duplo block chunks. He describes protons like they are Tonka toys, designed to neatly align and click together in your mind. Better yet, he does not patronize his audience with wonky analogies.

Recently, one right-brained intern at a scholarly journal headquartered in Washington set out to understand particles, black holes, the beginning of the world, the end of the world and everything in between, through a series of chatty emails with Mr. Arnold. Little did she know that their correspondence would yield  accessible and particle-sized results. Freed from the stress of feigning comprehension, she absorbed Mr. Arnold’s information, both weighty and non-weighty. Below are the results:

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland (CH) (Thank the God Particle for acronyms!) is where it’s at: quite literally.

As of December 15, engineers at CERN have successfully introduced beams of particles into the LHC, they have aligned the beams so the protons collide, and they have pushed the collisions to energies higher than ever before, and as far as anyone can tell, the universe remains intact. Members of the fear media are sorely dissappointed that no life-ending black hole materialized (or de-materialized). As they scramble for reassurance that a black hole is still a terrfiyingly real and  newsworthy threat,  particle physicists the world over are elated.

After all, the goal of the LHC is to create a field where humans can observe the elusive God Particle ( less popularly known as the Higgs boson, a particle that will explain how mass is formed). Each tiny crash in the collider is a piece of our planet’s story that will write itself in data for all to see; and by this measure, the collider is a smashing success.

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