Monday, June 28, 2010

Of quarks and carrots

The Large Hadron Collider is doing...something. Something that I don't thoroughly understand.

However: it's clearly, really, truly, genuinely amazing.

Still, I'm not sure whether the metaphor chosen by one of the top scientists in charge is really doing that...something...justice:

"Protons are complicated particles, they've got quarks, [and other small particles], and colliding them is like colliding two garbage cans and watching carrots come out," he told BBC News. [Emphasis added]

I imagine the imagery used in the funding bids to build this enormously expensive (and, did I say it already, amazing!) thing was a little more...expressive.

But, then, you know, I'm not in the natural sciences. They seem to do things differently there.

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