I have to say though, it's kinda neat to see how boring and "click here to anihilate protons" the real thing is. I mean, if it was Hollywood, you just know the control room would look like the Cheyenne Mountain Complex warroom from that 80's movie, War Games. Kinda NASA Mission control meets a dream home theatre. Here, they spent like $250 billion on the collider and about $2500 outfitting the control room. They ever hear of Ikea over there?

FAKE! The narrator said that the proton is the heaviest part of an atom, when in fact the neutron is slightly more massive. Geez, and I'm not even a physicist.
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A marvel of science and *engineering, to be sure. And anything that deals with the Big Bang and black holes is *spacy in my book. Good find, kulpinator.

Benny Goodman = Elvis = The Beatles = Led Zepplin = Michael Jackson = Public Enemy = Nirvana = Radiohead = ????.............

woooooooaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh there horsey.. what!?

fans of each of these can adjust these comments because i'm not well versed in all but a few...
Benny Goodman, no idea - no comment
Elvis - more or less a crooner with elements of rock?
Beatles - guitar pop? and occasionally experimental
Led Zep - rock, experimental
Jackson - pop with attitude?
Public Enemey - who?
Nirvana - angsty grunge rock?
Radiohead - rock followed by completely experimental mixing styles and such

i don't want to get into some really really detailed shit here, because i'm not qualified for it... but surely calling those the same is a bit like saying all cars are exactly the same?

especially when you go directly from led zep to michael jackson.... double especially when you name pop and experimental stuff in the same sentence

i think that's mental

now go ahead and say "but they all follow the same chord progression timbre resonance factor!"... fair enough, but again that's like saying "every element in the periodic table is exactly the same because they are all made up of protons, neutrons and electrons" (do not start with me about string theory or quarks plz) - they have to be made up of the same things, just like a c sharp is the same as a b flat because they're both made up of compressions of air, and the only difference is how fast the compression occurs..

now if that's what you're saying - fair enough, you're right, but you need to get out more

otherwise please don't say they sound the same.. i'm not clinging to my generation, saying one is better than the other, more unique than the other... especially because i'm a fan of pink floyd and i'm far out of their generation.. but ....... dayum

I think the picture is simply there to help you understand what the matrix that represents the state of the system looks like.

In this case, rotation of the lattice changes the values of the matrix elements. I am not sure if the actual rotation has physical significance. Except that by rotating the matrix this collection of particles behaves as though it were all of the distinct particles that we know about like the electron, proton, etc.

The real question is, does this predict anything new?

I don't know.

I asked my friend Eric about it and he hadn't hear anything so, but I will keep you posted.

I knew it! No hokey farm boy who learned combat maneuvers plinking womp rats on some desolate backwater planet like Tatooine could have pulled off a shot like that.
What I'm surprised they haven't mentioned though is the "second shooter" theory that is rapidly gaining notoriety as people are gaining access to all the evidence. Review of holographic recordings of the event clearly demonstrates a second pair of proton torpedoes launched from a data archival tower near the exhaust port. Clearly, these torpedoes launched from aboard the Death Star itself are the ones that caused its ultimate destruction! Conspiracy!

I just think the proton torpedoes stopped off at the starbucks for a latte before going to the reactor. Hence the delay is perfectly reasonable.

An interesting article about Peter Higgs, a humble guy who says:

"Most of what has been attached to my name should not have been," he replies, "but probably the Higgs boson is correctly attached because I was probably the person who drew attention to it most in my papers. However, as far as the mechanism of generating vector boson masses is concerned, I usually write down a whole string of names, starting with Anderson and including Englert and Brout, Gerald Guralnik, Dick Hagen and Tom Kibble, and also Gerard 't Hooft."
http://physicsweb.org/articles/world/17/7/6

The physicist in the video, Kim Griest, says the typical theoretical upper bound for mass of higgs boson is around 1 TeV. He, personally thinks around "1000 GeV" is where it should be, "maybe up to 2000 GeV". Yet, Jos Engelen, CERN's chief scientific officer, who's been at CERN since 1971, say's "LEP showed that the Higgs was heavier than 114.4 GeV, and we can also guess its mass from other experiments. Within the Standard Model we know that it is not heavier than 240 GeV at the 95% confidence level." Engelen says that the LHC will only be able to produce pairs of Higgs bosons if the Higgs mass is less than 500 GeV. Hmmm, I remain thoroughly confused
http://physicsweb.org/articles/world/17/9/7

The New York Times has a suprisingly good, and lenghty, article about the LHC with nice multimedia:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/15/science/15cern.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

CERN has a metric shitload of media and info here:
http://press.web.cern.ch/press/
- It kinda bugs me that they have such a strict copyright on their media. Isn't it predominantly publicly funded?

Perspective on collision energies:
The LEP, the predicessor to LHC, prior to going offline in 2000, topped out at --- 104 GeV.
The Tevatron at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory is running at ---------------- 1.96 TeV.
The LHC will initially be capable of colliding beams of protons at an energy of -- 14 TeV.
The abandoned SSC project here in the US would have been capable of --------- 40 TeV.

the dangers include

* Creation of a stable black hole[7]
* Creation of strange matter that is more stable than ordinary matter
* Creation of magnetic monopoles that could catalyze proton decay
* Triggering a transition into a different quantum mechanical vacuum (see False vacuum)


But...
CERN performed a study to investigate whether such dangerous events as micro black holes, strangelets, or magnetic monopoles could occur.[8] The report concluded, "We find no basis for any conceivable threat." If black holes are produced, they are expected to evaporate almost immediately via Hawking radiation and thus be harmless. It should be noted however that this is not a wholly convincing argument because Hawking radiation is currently an untested theory. Perhaps the strongest argument for the safety of colliders such as the LHC comes from the simple fact that cosmic rays of much higher energies than the LHC can produce have been bombarding the Earth, Moon and other objects in the solar system for thousands of millions of years with no such effects.

ATLAS is a particle physics experiment that will explore the fundamental nature of matter and the basic forces that shape our universe. The ATLAS detector will search for new discoveries in the head on collisions of protons of extraordinarily high energy. ATLAS is one of the largest collaborative efforts ever attempted in the physical sciences. There are 1800 physicists (Including 400 students) participating from more than 150 universities and laboratories in 35 countries.
Visit http://atlas.ch for more information.

Episode 1 is listed below. This episode is in two parts, YouTube has part 2 here

from YouTube:
"ATLAS is a particle physics experiment that will explore the fundamental nature of matter and the basic forces that shape our universe. The ATLAS detector will search for new discoveries in the head on collisions of protons of extraordinarily high energy. ATLAS is one of the largest collaborative efforts ever attempted in the physical sciences. There are 1800 physicists (Including 400 students) participating from more than 150 universities and laboratories in 35 countries.
Visit http://atlas.ch for more information."

Well, the Interweb is a grand thing, and here's a little tidbit about Francium, turns out my memory was mostly correct...

"Francium occurs as a result of α disintegration of actinium. Francium is found in uranium minerals, and can be made artificially by bombarding thorium with protons. It is the most unstable of the first 101 elements. The longest lived isotope, 223Fr, a daughter of 227Ac, has a half-life of 22 minutes. This is the only isotope of francium occurring in nature, BUT AT MOST THERE IS ONLY 20-30 G OF THE ELEMENT PRESENT IN THE EARTH'S CRUST AT ANY ONE MOMENT (my emphasis). No weighable quantity of the element has been prepared or isolated".

So, in other words the biggest reason they can't have any Francium to blow up (real good), is that there is not enough Francium on the entire Earth to experiment with in the first place.