I suppose I was trying to figure out the meaning of my own existence. ...I went about it in a more indirect way: I set about trying to understand the… - Suzie Sheehy

[I]f we start creating things like mini black holes, which we may or may not, they will pop out of existence so quickly that they wouldn't have time to suck any matter in... [T]he interesting message that I take from this is that these machines are built so infrequently... 25-30 years between these big accelerators. Every time it happens, I'm told by my... retired colleagues... It happens every time, this scare story that we're going to destroy the earth with it, because it's so long between them that people actually forget the media hype that happened the last time around.

The next thing we want to do with those particles is to give them some energy. That's the basics of how an accelerator works. I've got a machine here called a which does that...

The amazing thing about this collection of particles, which admittedly looks arbitrary until you learn it in more detail, is that you can take the entire description of every known particle and interaction, other than gravity, in the universe, and write it down on a mug.