To Boldly Go

It's about time the old girl had a 10,000 light year service. Now, where are the spark plugs?

Tomorrow I go, along with 17 pupils and two colleagues, to CERN, the European Centre for Nuclear Research near Geneva, home of the Higgs Boson.

This trip has been a long time in the planning and suddenly it is upon us and we are off.

We shall spend nearly all of Wednesday 100 metres underground inside the biggest and most expensive machine ever built. Here, they accelerated protons in opposite directions and collided them at almost the speed of light. The result was the discovery of the Higgs, a fundamental particle thought to exist since the 1960s, but remaining hidden in plain sight until 2012.

Now the Large Hadron Collider is seeking other, even more fantastical particles and is even experimenting with antimatter to see if anti-gravity, long time a reality in the Star Trek universe, does indeed exist in ours.

To be allowed inside this piece of science-fiction-made fact will certainly be an uplifting experience.

And if the experiments go to plan, we should be back home sometime last week!