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Eighteen months to go. And now some nights Nima Arkani-Hamed can't sleep. Because in eighteen months someone will flip a switch in something called the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. And when that switch is flipped, billions of protons will fly around a seventeen-mile loop at nearly the speed of light until they smash together hard, harder than any subatomic particles have ever been smashed together on earth. It's the greatest, most anticipated, most expensive experiment in the history of mankind. And if Arkani-Hamed is right, it could help prove that the laws that govern the universe at every scale—from the smallest quarks to the largest black holes—are one and the same. Or else, of course, it could prove that Arkani-Hamed is full of sh*t.

I recently watched a program about the construction of this thing. Fascinating that the Europeans could get together and do something like this. Alot of abrasiveness between the English engineer, the French guy, and the Italian overseer. All I can say is, thank God the English are there. I predict one of two things when this gets switched on. A) Answers to some of our most fundamental questions, along with more fundamental questions, or B) The Earth will be destroyed by a tear in the fabric of Space-Time. Of course, we'll never know about that...