CERN is a funny old place. It was where Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, and it is where many have predicted the beginning of the end of the world started today. Of course, that is a load of old codswallop. Not least because the Armageddon today hype has proven to be somewhat premature.
So there are, for now at least, no God Particles underneath Switzerland. No mini black holes floating around near Geneva. Not even any protons crashing into each other as they whoosh around the sub-atomic racetrack buried underground near the Swiss-French borders.
You might be wondering where all the very nearly £5 billion what the project has swallowed so far went in that case? I know I am.
The good news is that it hasn't all been wasted on this theoretical scientists wet dream. Some of it has helped build the super fast network called The Grid Project. This has been built to help collect and collate the data from the Large Hadron Collider experiments, with the aid of thousands of computers lending a processing power collaborative hand. And it needs to be big, because the LHC experiments are expected to produce somewhere in the region of 15 million Gigabytes of raw data every year!
The really interesting bit though, for me at least, is the possibility that it could lead to an Internet running at 10,000 times the speed of the one I am using at the moment.
Not that it matters, of course, we will all be dead by the end of the year when they start bashing protons together.
