The toys Santa wouldn't bring me

For the past three months, we should have been living our lives like every moment could be our last. And now we no longer need to.Physicists in Europe this week announced plans to turn off the Large Hadron Collider for a year, saying the machine is too dangerous to continue operating.The LHC started gaining infamy about five years ago as a doomsday machine. Housed underground, partly under France, partly under Switzerland, the machine is a huge particle accelerator - a huge magnetic gun. It's run by the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN.Remember playing with magnets when you were five or six, using one to repel the other, pushing them around the floor? The physicists at CERN are just big kids, playing with big magnets - over 1,600 magnets, each weighing almost 30 tons.These are the toys Santa wouldn't bring me.The magnets are arranged to make a massive particle gun - think of a magnetic train. One magnet turns on to push the train down the track to the next magnet, which pushes it a little further, a little faster, and so on. But the LHC has magnets so big, meant for objects so small, that instead of a 100 mph train, you have a 670 million mph proton-almost the speed of light. The LHC has two beams of these protons, running in opposite directions, at the speed of light, right next to one another.And then they move closer. And closer. Finally, the beams cross and the protons slam into one another, shredding each other like two Formula One cars playing chicken. This is why it's called the Large Hadron Collider - protons are part of a group of particles called Large Hadrons.A short digression to discuss how ludicrous light speed is. When anything moves, especially when it's at light speed, time actually slows down, and distance itself gets shorter. It's as though the universe doesn't want anything to move so fast - as though there's a cosmic referee reaching from the Twilight Zone to slow you down. If the train moves at 100 mph, the referee bends time to make it take an hour and a minute. And the referee turns the 100 miles into 99. All of a sudden the train's not going 100 miles an hour, it's going 99 miles an hour, even a little slower. If you've ever wondered about Einstein's Theory of Relativity, this is what it's all about - the cosmic referee. But there's no referee in real life, and no one knows why this slowing down occurs.