title: Bugs and the big bang.
abstract: Now that's a cheery thought! Somewhere more than 100 km below the Geneva countryside two parallel beams of subatomic particles are whizzing around a 27 km circuit in opposite directions at about 99% of the speed of light, doing over 11 000 laps per second. Physicists hope to create a 'bang' that won't end the world, but will unlock some of its mysteries. I confess I have never thought of physicists as poets, but they certainly come up with some evocative models to explain the unknown such as 'dark matter', the invisible skeleton stretching through space; or 'dark energy', which drives the expansion of the universe; or the grandiose 'God's particle' (officially named 'Higgs boson') postulated to endow other particles with mass. These are concepts both too large and too small to grasp.
authors.forename: Jenni
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Parsons
mesh_terms: D003140:Communicable Disease Control; D018672:Community Health Planning; D018563:Disease Notification; D004196:Disease Outbreaks / Q000517:prevention & control*; D005194:Family Practice; D006266:Health Education; D006801:Humans; D007876:Legionellosis / Q000517:prevention & control; D012480:Salmonella Infections / Q000517:prevention & control; D014611:Vaccination