Another brief, YouTube-salvaged entry today to work on a review for the Book Book site…

Libba Bray (link to her site over there on the right, under the “Je Ne Sais Quoi…” category) is a funny YA author, and an all too infrequent blogger. In her most recent post, she mentions being a physics freak and takes the opportunity to draw our attention to news of the Large Hadron Collider:

Tomorrow [Editor’s Note: i.e., TODAY, Wednesday, 2008-09-10], on the border of France and Switzerland, way underground, The Hadron Super Collider will be turned on, and physicists will search for answers about the universe. What’s out there? What is dark energy? When the Big Bang happened, where did all that matter go, and would it have been such an imposition for it to have sent us a few postcards over the years? Is there a Higgs-Boson (aka “God Particle”) or is that just the name of some disaffected aristocratic particle who drinks too much and lives in a crumbling estate on the edge of the universe? (You know, next to the restaurant. Sigh. Douglas Adams. R.I.P. Did you know Douglas Adams and I share a birthday? You do now. Plenty of time to shop for it, too. Well, for me. Mr. Adams did not leave a forwarding address that I know of. But I digress.)

We were talking super colliders. And what the universe is made of. And why gravity is so weak in our world. And why we’re here. And whether there might be other dimensions and if they have malls and if those malls are more evolved or do they still have a Hot Topic right next to the Jamba Juice.

…There are naysayers who worry that the Hadron Super Collider will create a black hole that will swallow the earth and annihilate every single thing including the cockroaches and Paris Hilton. You know, there are always drawbacks, people. This is science.

To reassure us, though, she also directs our attention to this video, courtesy of the scientific community: