How could I not?
I'm not going to get all bogged down in science in this post, as much as it would reflect my entire day today. I have been asked a couple of times throughout the day to "calm down" and explain "simply" what it all means (when I have been getting over-excited etc.), so it would seem that not everyone has a shared level of interest in this subject. With that in mind, I won't be concerned if this leaves a lot of my readership disinterested. I understand that it's probably a bit weird that I'm so into stuff like this.
Anyway, I think I'm going to explain it all as simply as I can (as Einstein said,
"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough."), after which I will mention what it means in terms of its future implications. I feel like I have to do this, as today is such a monumental day for physics and I want to document my reaction, so ten years from now, when this is completely old news, I can look back with nostalgia and say things like "If only I'd known then what I know now....".
So here we go, the Lucie Guide to Finding the God Particle...
The Large Hadron Collider is something which has been a source of much excitement and disappointment for me. When it was first built back in 2008, it was around the time that I'd firmly established myself as an agnostic atheist and had really started to become interested in science. The LHC felt like an exciting step in filling the gaps of scientific knowledge I so desperately sought. But when there were problems with the cooling system, I was a little disheartened, especially as it then took a whole year to get it working again, and it wasn't actually until March 2010 that the first collision occured. I guess it was a bit of an anti-climax for me, but I still never lost hope in it! I'm glad I didn't.
I suppose an explanation of the LHC is necessary as the first level of understanding...