This Could Be My Last Entry Ever

And, if that is the case, it could be the last entry you ever read as well. Not that you’ll miss this particular site that much, because it’s a very good chance you don’t read it. Since I moved from my own CMS to WordPress, the number of visitors has gone down like the the London Stock Exchange when their .NET based crashed yesterday. The hits from search engines have almost completely vanished, probably because every entry was moved around and none of the links are valid anymore. The number of regular visitors - people who actually type in the site’s address or have it bookmarked - has staid more or less the same, close to no-one.

But I’m still the most important Vegard on the internet.

Anyway. What’s the reason why this entry might be the last one you’ll every read? It’s a good chance you know it already: The Large Hadron Collider, or the LHC for short. Here’s what The Register writes about the LHC:

[…] a titanic 27-kilometre doughnut made of ultra-chilly superconductor magnet pipe, is situated in hollowed-out caverns deep beneath the Franco-Swiss border. The machine functions essentially as a kind of enormous, outrageously powerful subatomic billiard cue, the idea being that it will smash protons into swarms of other protons at large fractions of the speed of light. Even though hadrons are much more strongly put together than ordinary billiard balls, banging them together at warp speed will blow them violently to bits.

Fascinating! The only problem with all this is that some scientists argue that playing with the really powerful forces of nature like this can result in a black hole that might eventually swallow Earth, the Universe and Everything. If I remember correctly, Dan Simmons writes about a similar happening in some of his books.

The CERN scientists will fire up their LHC tomorrow morning at 07:30 GMT, let’s hope that we’re still around at lunch time. If you want to know more about the safety of the LHC, you should read the official safety page.

Finger crossed for a safe tomorrow!


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