I just read in my University of Virginia alumni magazine that a team of UVA physicists have long been members of the Large Hadron Collider project, which recorded its first collision of proton beams in November ’09.    I’ve watched the Science Channel’s documentary on the build of this proton collision machine, and this project is massive in almost every way–size, financial expense, human effort, etc.

The amount of human ingenuity and brain power being put to the task of making this machine and designing experiments that hope to do no less than delve into the basic structure of matter and the origin of our universe, is just, well, in my view, a beautiful thing.  Like the inventors of mathematics, these UVA scientists make me proud to be not only an alum, but also a human…

“Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.”

— Theodore Roosevelt