1Q 2011: The Big Bang

Scientists made an explosive discovery, literally, last November in how the universe began when they produced a mini near Big Bang under controlled conditions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider beneath France and Switzerland.

And who knew the Big Bang looked like a child’s spin art, or a Jackson Pollock painting? But that’s what the photos from CERN produced.

Now, why, if the CERN scientists have been banging particles in the super collider since its startup, is this latest collision so freaking fantastic? All previous collisions produced “beginning of time” particles but on such sub/micro/nano/ infinitesimal time frames that to even say they lasted a blink of the eye would be off by a googleplex of eons.

This latest collision, say the scientists, lasted in what they referred to as “a time frame everyone could understand.” While the “source” wouldn’t say how long that actually was, he didn’t hide his enthusiasm to the extent that a seasoned reporter couldn’t deduce he was referring to many seconds, which in Big Bang terms is an incredibly long, long time, with reams of data produced that will take hopefully not eons to decipher but will certainly keep the CERN guys busy for some time to come.