More info: www.bbc.co.uk Playlist: www.youtube.com Radio 4 joins CERN on 10 September 2008 as scientists attempt to discover more about the origins of the Universe by recreating the aftermath of the Big Bang. Here’s Brian Cox on particle collisions and journeys into the unknown.

think back to when you saw your first magic trick and how amazing it was until you found out how the trick was done !

Early heavy ion events in first heavy-ion fill with stable beam collisions seen in the ATLAS Experiment, 8 November 2010.

An inside look at the LHC

Ugh. People freaking out about science with no good reason to gives me a headache.

Created by Daniel Lederman Music by Fabien Chombart (vocals by Roxane Sigre)

What is a strangelet?: Strangelets are theorized cosmological objects composed of an exotic form of matter known as strange matter or quark matter. This form of matter is created in the cores of particularly massively neutron stars. In neutron stars, the remnants of collapsed stars with masses between 4 and 8 times that of our sun, pressure and temperature is so intense that the protons and electrons in atomic nuclei fuse to become neutrons. The resultant matter is sometimes referred to as neutronium, a sea of neutrons packed far more densely than conventional matter. Sometimes the pressure and gravity in the centres of neutron stars is so massive that the neutronium collapses into its constituent particles, quarks. This results in agglomerations of so-called strange quarks bound to each other directly much in the same manner that the transition from conventional star to neutron star results in seas of neutrons bound directly together. The names physicists have given this type of matter are “quark matter” or “strange matter”. This may be regarded as a phase change, like changing from a liquid to a solid, only at densities many orders of magnitude greater than those occuring in this solar system. It has been hypothesized that strangelets (sub-stellar agglomerations of strange matter) may be able to exist independently from the quark stars which created them. If so, there may be many strangelets in this universe, a possible explanation for the dark matter problem. Since …

CERN-LargeHadronCollider.blogspot.com

More info: www.bbc.co.uk Playlist: www.youtube.com Radio 4 joins CERN on 10 September 2008 as scientists attempt to discover more about the origins of the Universe by recreating the aftermath of the Big Bang. Here’s Simon Singh on exploring the secrets of science.

A 3 min tour of CERN and its research facilities