Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that most epic triumph of human engineering and physics research has finally taken place, and
strangely enough our planet's still in one piece too. The search for the
Higgs boson particle resumed yesterday, somewhere under the Franco-Swiss border, with the CERN research team successfully executing what the
LHC was built to do -- accelerating proton beams to nearly the speed of light, then filming the wreckage as they crash into each other. Having encountered a number of
bumps in the road, the researchers have had to significantly
scale down the energy at which their early collisions will take place, with the very first ones said to have happened at 900 billion electron volts. Still, plans are afoot for an imminent shift up to 1.2 trillion electron volts (TeV), which would be the highest energy level any particle accelerator has achieved yet, before a ramp up to 7 TeV over the coming year if all goes well.
