Word: cern
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...ATLAS particle detector at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) outside Geneva is 150 ft. long, 82 ft. high, weighs 7,000 tons, and contains enough cable and wiring to wrap around Earth's equator seven times. It's a mammoth machine, designed for the delightful purpose of detecting particles so tiny, you can fit hundreds of billions of them into a beam narrower than a human hair...
...moment after the Big Bang, of course, nothing had mass, existing instead in a sort of naked, ethereal beauty). Extrapolating from Higgs' theory, scientists were able to explain how all particles get their mass - which would explain, in turn, how everything in the universe, from scientists at CERN to the grand Jura Mountains that surround them, comes to have weight. (See "Did a Time-Traveling Bird Sabotage the Collider...
Sources: TigerWoods.com CERN press release; AP; CNN; TIME.com AP; Men's Journal...
...alternative explanation: perhaps a time-traveling bird was sent from the future to sabotage the experiment. Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, have published several papers over the past year arguing that the CERN experiment may be the latest in a series of physics research projects whose purposes are so unacceptable to the universe that they are doomed to fail, subverted by the future. (See pictures of the Large Hadron Particle Collider...
...multibillion-dollar United States Superconducting Supercollider, which was designed to search for the Higgs, was abruptly canceled by Congress. In 2000, scientists at a previous CERN accelerator, LEP, said they were on the verge of discovering the particle when, again, funding dried up. And now there's the LHC. Originally scheduled to start operating in 2006, it has been hit with a series of delays and setbacks, including a sudden explosion between two magnets nine days after the accelerator was first turned on, the arrest of one of its contributing physicists on suspicion of terrorist activity and, most recently...