boson

Having had enough of politics and scary uber-conservative women, I turn to science. The Large Hadron Collider is set to power up in about an hour and a half in Switzerland. This is the sort of thing that makes me wish I had stuck with physics and science in college. What could possibly be more cool than shooting subatomic particles at other subatomic particles, just to see what happens? Especially when it could destroy the world (ok, in reality that's a ludicrously remote possibility, but it sounds cooler when you pretend that they're all mad supervillians).

(Actually, there was a lawsuit about this pretty recently, with people trying to get the entire project stopped because they thought that the crazy science people would create a miniature black hole that would devour the earth. People are ridiculous.)

Here's the big thing I like about this project: among other things, these physicists are looking for a particular (predicted but currently unproven) particle called a Higgs boson. Admittedly, I'm not 100% sure what a Higgs boson really does, but from a quick scan of the Wikipedia article, it seems that it's basically the thing that gives mass to particles that shouldn't otherwise have mass, and extrapolating that out into the observable world, it's the reason why all matter has mass. Now, here's the cool part: some of the people working on this project said that the most boring result that they could get is proof that the Higgs boson exists, and nothing else. Because that would mean that they were right, and that doesn't tell them anything new. They'd rather be wrong and learn something than be proven right. And that right there is why I love science.