今天是个特殊的日子，不光是因为它是老师们的节日，还因为科学界发生了一件具划时代意义的大事情，详文转载如下。

——惭愧啊，人家质子束都开动了，我懒了这么多周了（包括北京奥运期间光看别人“动”了），再不动就说不过去了。

 

An international team is currently installing the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in a 27-kilometer ring buried deep below the countryside on the outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland. When its operations begin in 2008, the LHC will be the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. Scientists predict that its very-high-energy proton collisions will yield extraordinary discoveries about the nature of the physical universe. Beyond revealing a new world of unknown particles, the LHC experiments could explain why those particles exist and behave as they do. The LHC experiments could reveal the origins of mass, shed light on dark matter, uncover hidden symmetries of the universe, and possibly find extra dimensions of space.

 

Billions of protons in the LHC’s two counter-rotating particle beams will smash together at an energy of 14 trillion electron volts. After injection into the accelerator, the hair-thin proton beams will accelerate to a whisker below the speed of light. They will circulate for hours, guided around the LHC ring by thousands of powerful superconducting magnets. For most of their split-second journey around the ring, the beams travel in two separate vacuum pipes, but at four points they collide in the hearts of the main experiments, known by their acronyms: ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb.

The experiments' complex detectors could see up to 600 million collisions per second, as the energy of colliding protons transforms fleetingly into a plethora of exotic particles. In the data from these ultrahigh-energy collisions scientists from universities and laboratories around the world will search for the tracks of particles whose existence would transform the human understanding of the universe we live in.