Large Hadron Collider

The Large Hadron Collider, built and mantained by the multiational laboratory CERN (which somehow stands for European Organization for Nuclear Research) is a "high-energy particle accelerator" that "collides opposing particle beams" of "protons" or "lead" "nuclei" at "99%" the "speed" "of" "light".

Ok, what. We here at Cracked are not, in fact, a team of thousands of brilliant scientists, so we requested the help of renowned physicist Remington Binary to break the LHC down in simpler terms for us to understand. According to his official definition, the Large Hadron Collider "isolates individual particles, like protons or electrons, accelerates them at almost the speed of light and smashes them together so we can observe theoretical super-tiny particles that result from the annihilation."

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Then we consulted our cousin's cool friend, who told us that the Large Hadron Colliders makes huge explosions out of tiny things and has the possibility to create black holes. Fuck yes. He provied this helpful diagram so we could digest these extremely advanced particle theories more easily:

However, this apocalpytic God-machine has been plagued with errors. And you know these are some seriously complicated problems when the world's most intelligent scientists can't figure out what the fuck is going on. Physicists believe that what is causing the LHC to fail time and time again is the elusive and technically non-existent (yet?) Higgs boson particle. Basically, the Standard Model of particle physics (more informally known as "Da Rulez") predicts a certain amount of supertiny particles that make up the particles that make up the particles that make up the particles of one atom. This is really fucking small. Your dick? It's smaller than that. Half of your dick? Still smaller. Anyways, with various experiments and tests with other particle rings (like Fermilab's way cooler-named Tevatron), all of these predicted supertiny particles have been discovered, except for the Higgs boson.

Scientists theorize that the Higgs boson is the particle responsible for giving matter its mass. So as you stare down at your disgustingly hairy beer belly, you can have some confidence in knowing what gave you your fattitude: The Higgs boson.

THIS IS YOUR FAULT HIGGS BOSOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHHN

Basically, scientists think that the Higgs boson is traveling back in time from the future to prevent itself from being discovered by humans, which is why the LHC has been having so many problems. Talk about anti-social. Going to all that trouble to stay a loner? Higgs, just apply some corpse-paint to your face and become obsessed with black metal and no one will want to be near you. Really.