Big Bang Day

Tomorrow is, drum roll please, 'Big Bang Day'. Under the ground in Geneva rumbles the Large Hadron Collider, which will send proton streams whizzing around a 27km race-track, blasting them together in four different locations around the ring. Here, scientists hope, the conditions just after the Big Bang will be recreated, allowing questions about the start and composition of the universe to be answered. (And it's unlikely they'll come up with the number 42. Sorry Douglas Adams.) For those who aren't so into physics, perhaps the strange beauty of the technical language involved could be of interest. Who could fail to love words and phrases such as muons, solenoid magnets,the Higgs boson,quark-gluon plasma,or the beauty quark?