Congrats to all the physicists at CERN for getting the Large Hadron Collider up and running. Twitter and FriendFeed are going nuts.

Earlier this year physicist Frank Taylor gave me a tour of the LHC, which is up here.

Part I
Part II

Just look at the home page of Twitter’s search engine to see the trending topics are all about LHC right now. Even Google got into the act and changed its logo worldwide to one depicting the LHC. Here’s FriendFeed’s search engine for LHC.

You probably won’t have a chance to visit CERN, where they are slowly turning on a new 27-kilometer-long particle collider called the Large Hadron Collider. Even if you could, they soon won’t give public tours down underneath into the collision chamber. So here MIT Physicist Frank Taylor gives us a tour. We’ll have the second part up next week.

This isn’t the sexiest video. It probably won’t make it onto Digg, but it will make you smarter about the science that’s going on that will probably dramatically change how we understand our world.

Along on this tour is famous science fiction author Bruce Sterling, who you can see in the background at about minute 5 and also Ben Segal, who was Tim Berners-Lee’s mentor when he invented the Web at CERN.