
Dawn of the Large Hadron Collider Credit & Copyright: Maximilien Brice, CERN
One of my favorite websites is NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day Archive.
On this day they presented the above picture of a new state of the art particle accelerator.
Formally, this image, it reminds me of a Rose Window or a eastern Buddhist Mandala. Can you see this? Perhaps science and the mystical are starting to merge in ways that we dont yet fully understand. I think it will be a quantum leap in Man's evolution as a being when these disciplines begin to complement each other rather than oppose, for both seek only to find, explore, and contexualize man's place in the universe.
here is the description...
"Explanation: Why do objects have mass? To help find out, Europe's CERN has built the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the most powerful particle accelerator yet created by humans. This May, the LHC is scheduled to start smashing protons into each other with unprecedented impact speeds. The LHC will explore the leading explanation that mass arises from ordinary particles slogging through an otherwise invisible but pervasive field of virtual Higgs particles. Were high energy colliding particles to create real Higgs bosons, the Higgs mechanism for mass creation may be bolstered. LHC will also look for micro black holes, magnetic monopoles, and explore the possibility that every type of fundamental particle we know about has a nearly invisible supersymmetric counterpart. The LHC@Home project will allow anyone with a home computer to help LHC scientists search archived LHC data for these strange beasts. Pictured above, a person stands in front of the huge ATLAS detector, one of six detectors being attached to the LHC."