Pre-Ramble: April Fool’s Day is often memorable for the rash of lame pranks that befall the unsuspecting fool. Yesterday however, April 1st, 2010 was simply “a great day to be a particle physicist,“ exclaimed Rolf Heuer, director general of the European Nuclear Research Organization (CERN).

At 12:06 pm BST, the much hailed Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was once again operable after having been unceremoniously shut down by a “massive electrical failure” (uber-glitch) minutes after its inaugural spin in 2008. Cheers and applause broke out as scientists witnessed the two counter-rotating beams of protons accelerate to nearly the speed of light along the 27km circular tunnel 100 meters below the French-Swiss boarder.

The hope here is that the speedy protons will be forced into a series of head-on collisions creating “tiny fireballs” that mimic conditions that were present in the universe “during the fractions of a second after the big bang” … 13.7 billion years ago. (How we know that these conditions were actually present 13+ billion years ago is the topic for another day, I suppose.)  Fabiola Gianotti, spokesperson for the collaborative effort explains the significance of the event,

“With these record-shattering collision energies, the LHC experiments are propelled into a vast region to explore, and the hunt begins for dark matter, new [energy] forces, new dimensions and the Higgs boson …”

The Take-Away: Well, I hope they have the video camera set up. Wouldn’t it just be such a drag to have spent all this time and energy (not to mention the $6 billion) getting this all set up only to miss the big moment while texting or yawning or whatever you’re doing while waiting to see if something is going to happen? Like missing your kid’s only goal for the entire soccer season while digging around in your purse for a piece of gum.

Post-Note:  Doesn’t the photo of the inner-workings of the LHC look like a BSF (Big Spring Flower)?

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