This is Heather C.

So they turned on the atom-smasher (which, by the way, sounds so much more badass than “Large Hadron Collider,” especially since my mind always reads Hadron as Hardon) and no blackholes — yet. Although, the more I think about it the more I keep coming back to an even cooler disaster scenario. Hang on for a second here: If they’re recreate the conditions a trillionth of a second after the universe was formed, wouldn’t one of those conditions be a rapidly expanding new universe. If that’s the case — excellent. Although I guess that would make Geneva the center of this new universe and I don’t know if I can get down with that.

As George Whipple recently drunk-texted my coworker, “What I most like about New York City is that it is the scientifically proven exact center of the universe.” Well, Georgy, time to go back to school; it’s New Math season.

But back to the atom-smasher. It seems like everything went fine, but that’s not as boring as it sounds. The coolest of all posibilities is that they discover the famous God particle, or Higgs boson. It’s the stuff that could explain just about all the fundamental forces of the universe. Groovy, eh?

I kinda love the way writer Joel Achenbach described the situation in National Geographic:

Building a contraption like the LHC to find the Higgs is a bit like embarking on a career as a stand-up comic with the hope that at some point in your career you’ll happen to blurt out a joke that’s not only side-splittingly funny but also a palindrome.

So maybe we’ll see God this week. And then all those evangelicals and extremists will have to find something new to obsess over. Or not.

What if it turns out that the universe is really a video game, and once you figure it all out it’s Game Over?

Is this the God Particle?