The Large Hadron Collider Doomsday Machine was ready to shock the world today with a huge explosion that normal people cannot understand. But it failed. The Guardian's live blogger was disappointed. Update: It worked! But we're still alive.

Updated from The Guardian:
 12.07pm: Fabiola Gianotti, head of the Atlas team:
"We got something like 40 events per second, which is the expected rate.
"It's the beginning of a new era of physica exploration."

12.05pm: Gooooaaalllll!
We have collisions. The detectors are not yet fully on and taking data, but particles are colliding.

11.59am: Beams aligned and ready for collision. Nearly.

Two minutes after scientists at Cern (European Organization for Nuclear Research) announced the second failure due to a power glitch, the Guardian reminded readers that, "Britain pays £80m a year in Cern subscriptions, the bulk of which goes on the LHC."

But they're still trying! A live feed from Cern can be seen here.

There's no use trying to explain this thing. But just know that the scientists at Cern do things like "inject protons" into something so they can juice the machine up to 3.5TeV. Then laser beams shoot around and then a black hole or an extra spatial dimension opens up and we all die, maybe. Or nothing at all happens. It's science, people. Don't ask questions, just believe.

The LHC is housed in a 17-mile long tunnel under Switzerland and France, keeping the machine that can destroy everything at least half neutral and off limits for nefarious purposes.

[Image via NASA]