The doomsday machine

The Origins of the Universe: A Crash Course
"Black holes have a reputation for rapacity. If a black hole is produced under Geneva, might it swallow Switzerland and continue on a ravenous rampage until the earth is devoured? It’s a reasonable question with a definite answer: no."
"...issues that flummoxed Einstein."
Brian Greene, a professor of math and physics at Columbia, is the author, most recently, of “Icarus at the Edge of Time.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/12/opinion/12greene.html?em

Chris of Canberra queried, "If the world does end, who will do the Wikipedia entry about it?"
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,24320776-2,00.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/12/opinion/12krugman.html?ei=5070&emc=eta1

I last pondered these things on Sept. 12, 2008 at 11:30 a.m.,

but I posted the draft on Feb. 10, 2018, almost a decade later.

Now I'll have to do research to see what these links are about.

It's a NYT article about the Large Hadron Collider and Higgs Particles.

Do you know the difference between a proton and a crouton?

On Wednesday, CERN will switch on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a massive underground laboratory that will smash protons together and analyse the sub-atomic debris that results. What's CERN, you ask? It's the European Organization for Nuclear Research, and the photo above is where they'll be sending a beam flying in one direction on Wednesday the 10th, then a few days later they'll circulate a beam in the other direction, and about six weeks from now they'll send beams in both directions so they can collide. The first high-energy collisions are to take place on October 21st. Recently the physicists have been cooling down the circular tunnel (pictured above), which is 27 km in circumference and is located 100 metres underground near Geneva, Switzerland.

Believe it or not, the best way for many of us to begin to understand what they are doing is by watching a YouTube video called Large Hadron Rap, which has had 1,256,540 hits in the countdown to this week's startup of the world's greatest atom-smasher. Oh, by the way, some folks think what they're doing may create a black hole that could ... ummm ... suck us all into it. Into the black hole, that is. So how much do YOU know about matter and anti-matter?
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Read more:

Scientists start world's largest particle collider
CERN
The U.S. at the LHC
Large Hadron Rap, which has had 1,759,033 hits as of September 10, 2008.
Oh, my, the Large Hadron Rap has had 3,979,609 hits as of December 3, 2008!
And on December 13, 2009, the Large Hadron Rap has had 5,492,617 views.
Now it's March 30,2010 and the Large Hadron Rap has been viewed 5,688,524 times.
As of May 10, 2018, the Large Hadron Rap has been viewed 8, 037, 662 times.

Shinrin-yoku

Read more about shinrin-yoku, a Japanese term that June called Forest Air Bathing. I wrote about it in my earlier post entitled Unusual role for trees.