Scientists at the CERN research facility in Switzerland are about to try and recreate the conditions right after the “Big Bang”.  Insert your own joke here.  Some say the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest particle accelerator ala Saskatoon’s Synchrotron, would create a mini-black hole that could destroy life in an apocalyptic event.  Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of crap out there that needs cleaning up, but I don’t know that a total do-over is the way to go.

Enter Stephen Hawking, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge and author of “A Brief History of Time”.  Not only does he hope to see some mini-black holes (they would prove some of his theories and probably earn him a Nobel in physics) which he says occur naturally on earth anyway, but he hopes they can prove the existence of Higgs boson – the so-called “God particle” that is believed to give mass to all other particles (although he doesn’t like their chances).

Now, I’m not a big math guy, let alone physics guy – but if Stephen Hawking says it’s a good thing, I’ll take his word for it…  even if I don’t understand what the heck he’s talking about.

The down quark is my favourite baryon…  Dave