In the beginning only God exist. Taco Bell only came into being billions of years after the big bang. God does not need to eat to sustain His life, because God is eternal, they is nothing that He needs to eat, let alone some fast food from a primeval Taco Bell. And cosmos wasn't before the big bang, the universe as we know it today along with toilet didn't exist before the big bang, so it couldn't have been a cosmic toilet bowl, either.

You're really good at that.

Fixed.

I understand the basics. If you know there are atoms, but you don't know what they're made up of, you can bang two atoms together really hard so they break into smaller pieces. With very fine measuring equipment, you can try and register those smaller bits.

That's what particle colliders do. They just bang particles together and hopefully, one can register the existence of even smaller particles than the ones you banged together. Perhaps it's somehow possible to get to the "bottom" of things (Higgs boson?), perhaps not. Discoveries of smaller particles and how they all relate to eachother advance physics.

edit :

In order to explain physics, some phycisists have hypothesized the existence of certain particles without actually knowing if they exist or not. That's part of what makes these experiments seem so deterministic, although they can't predict what's going to happen or what they will find, they're also looking for particles that so far only exist in theory.

Wouldn't the chances of them being successful being absurdly low?

I think so, I guess they have to do these collisions over and over and over again ..

Any word on LHC and the status? I know they started it up already, but I seem to remember something about some problems they had to work through. I didn't get much information about it.

As far as I know, they've had problems with the magnets and so it's not fully operational yet. I think they're scheduled to have it ready to run experiments in november.

I'm quite looking forward to the publications .. Although physics is not my field and it's a bit hard to sorta hang on when it gets advanced, I find it extremely interestnig. Wouldn't like to work with it though!

I get a hard on for physics.
I'm definitely on seat edges about the experiment results when it happens.

I find it funny that the sceintist threw away the idea of æther and then take up the all pervasive Higgs Fields. lol