Progress for all Mankind

Large Hadron Collider

The first thing that comes to mind when one puts physicists in pajamas and some in champagne together is definitely not progress of mankind. This, however was the story on September 10th 2008 when the Large Hadron Collider was successfully tested in Geneva. The $10 billion machine that took 20 years to build successfully accelerated two protons into each other in the 17 mile long tube at CERN. Scientists were excited to see the white flash as the protons collided with each other producing a small explosion similar to the one that is theorized to have created the universe.

Friends and enemies all joined together to celebrate this great success of mankind. The one quote that seems to sum up the entire success of the project came from Robery Aymar, director general of CERN according to the yahoo article. He said “Man has always shown he wants to know where he comes from and where he will go, where the universe comes from and where it will go. So here we’re looking at essential questions for mankind.”

The search for where we came from and where mankind is heading has been lost from the front pages of the modern newspaper. It may seem that the search has been given up because of the tragedies that plague the front pages day by day but this one experiment opens up the books once again and begins to shead more light on our past and possibly the future of mankind.

To look at this experiment as just another success in science is a failure to understand what the article is about. It is not about the success of just the experiment, it is not about CERN and not about the LHC, it is about the overall progress of man. This article was important enough for google to change its logo. Now how large is that?

On a more serious note; this shows that some of the people of the world have not forgotten that the search for where we came from has not ended and that progress may lay in those answers.

~ by Anand on September 10, 2008.