YOU would have thought it was the final moments of the World Cup. An estimated 1 billion people were glued to their television screens. Nearly 6000 newspaper articles discussed the event and the blogosphere was buzzing with anticipation. T-shirts were made, Google changed its logo for the day, and people placed their bets. Only it wasn’t soccer that people around the globe were so enthralled by – it was a beam of protons.
The protons’ lap around the 27-kilometre circumf-erence of the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, was the talk around water coolers everywhere. Coverage of the event even bumped the…
