Over My Head, But...

I've been struggling to write something sensible about yesterday's big news out of CERN in Geneva, to wit:

GENEVA, March 31 (Reuters) - Physicists at CERN, buoyed by their ground-breaking success in creating mini-Big Bangs, giving them a glimpse of the dawn of time, have set their sights on pushing closer to the very birth of the universe.

[...]

The aim is to increase in the coming months the flow of data on what happens when particles smash into each other at a total force of 7 million million electron volts, or 7TeV, and at a mini-fraction under the speed of light.

At those powers, the collisions came very close to simulating events just nano-parts of a second after the real Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago which led to the creation of galaxies, stars, life on Earth, and perhaps life elsewhere.

The Large Hadron Collider achieved its first collisions at 7 TeV yesterday, prompting this lil celebration (Do not adjust your set.  The video is from a webcam and it's jerky.):

I find this subject fascinating even though (a) I don't understand 99% of what I see or read and (b) the discussions tend to make my head hurt.  Speaking of discussions... Charlie Rose had two noted physicists involved with the LHC project... Lisa Randall of Harvard and Kyle Cranmer of NYU... on his show last evening.  The 30-minute discussion that ensued is highly recommended if you find the LHC fascinating and/or want to know more about what the physicists are doing with it.

And just to keep things in character here at EIP, lest you think I'm getting too deep... I have a new lust object:

That's a screen cap of Ms. Randall from last night's "Charlie Rose."  The woman is HOT.  "Talk nerdy to me, Baybee..."