Did The Lights Just Blink?

Did the lights just blink?

Or was that life as we know it that is about to blink.

If sometime later next week? You suddenly see the lights blink? Then that may be a sign that they have accomplished their stated desires at CERN in Geneva. Of course if it is a weird kind of blink with spirals and auras? And we all suddenly find ourselves floating in some spectral flotsam in another dimension of existence? Then I suppose that all of our worst suspicions and greatest fears will have been realized.

GENEVA -- Operators of the world's largest atom smasher on Friday ramped up their massive machine to three times the energy ever previously achieved, in the run-up to experiments probing the secrets of the universe.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, said beams of protons circulated at 3.5 trillion electron volts in both directions around the 17-mile tunnel housing the Large Hadron Collider under the Swiss-French border at Geneva.

The next major development is expected in a few days when CERN starts colliding the beams in a new round of research to examine the tiniest particles and forces within the atom in hopes of finding out more about how matter is made up.

The collider in December had already eclipsed the record of the next most powerful machine, the Tevatron at Fermilab outside Chicago, which has been running just shy of a trillion electron volts, or TeV.

The extra energy in Geneva is expected to reveal even more about the unanswered questions of particle physics, such as the existence of dark energy and matter. Scientists hope also to approach on a tiny scale what happened in the first split seconds after the Big Bang, which they theorize was the creation of the universe some 14 billion years ago.