Surprising Science — March 30, 2010

Happy “First Physics Day”

March has its share of strange and obscure holidays. The first of the month is National Pig Day, the fifth is Multiple Personality Day (a chance for anyone to get in touch with themselves), and the fourteenth is National Pi Day (the decimal expansion of pi starts 3.14). And now there is a new March holiday…

First Physics Day! It’s being celebrated today because the particles

in the Large Hadron Collider are finally being smashed together at

super-high energies that mirror conditions after the Big Bang. The

physics community is aflutter over the potential of bagging the elusive

Higgs boson, and the rest of us are grateful that, improbable as it

seemed, the collider did not create a fatal black hole.

(Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons, user Julian Herzog.)

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