About a week ago, the LHC was preparing itself for its inaugural 2010 current ramp to values consistent with 3.5 TeV energy proton beams.  While this was simply an opening act for the feature presentation (actual 3.5 TeV + 3.5 TeV collisions) next week, it certainly was an exciting and optimistic event celebrated widely at CERN and around the world.  Record energies were reached in the field of particle acceleration, and the timing was perfect considering the growing awareness of the 2010-2011 LHC physics programme.

One media outlet that decided to express its enthusiasm for the huge success of the LHC’s initial foray into the high energy realm was the British online newspaper The Telegraph.  Here is the article they published the day after the successful 3.5 TeV commissioning; really, things are pretty tame in this write-up — catchy headline, video of cute physicists, and lots of fervent anticipation for next week’s collision extravaganza.  However, when this article first appeared on the website of The Telegraph, their elation with the world record breaking energy ramp-up was much more apparent:

If that didn’t strike you as odd, have a look at that headline one more time.

Actually, this is quite a natural joke to be made, if you think about it.   I was surprised to find that, while ‘large hadron collider’ yields around 900k Google hits, ‘large hardon collider’ only finds 63.4k!  I can only hope that our fellow internet comrades will up the efforts to capitalize on this goldmine.  Sexual innuendos mix quite well with physics jargon.  How do you think the term hadron was derived in the first place?  I feel like we’re not far from hearing the phrases ‘beam dump’ and ‘that’s what she said’ used together quite regularly.

On the other hand, the top hit of that Google search surely sets the bar pretty high: http://largehardoncollider.com/