Have you counted the Alps lately?

From the years 1998 to 2008 engineers in Switzerland built the Large Hadron Collider - a structure created to allow physicists to test predictions relating to theories about particle physics and high-energy physics and whether or not the Higgs boson hypothesis is true or not.

Absolutely none of that interests me (perhaps it might if I knew what any of it meant). What does interest me, however, is that this huge laboratory (17 miles in circumference) was built below ground - 300 feet beneath homes, farms and other structures belonging to people just like you and me.



This prompted several immediate questions in my non-scientific mind:

What right had they to build something beneath someone else's property? If a scientist wanted to build something beneath my house, even so far down, I'd not only want to know about it - I'd want to be part of the group of neighbors trying to stop it.

Because after all, we own our land all the way to the core of the earth, right? My husband said I'm not the only American to wonder about this, but evidently that's not how Europeans feel about their land so rich in history. Perhaps they realize they're temporary caretakers, whereas we young and brash Americans have different ideas about the depth of our freedom - and our ownership.

Prompting yet another question. What in the world did they do with all that displaced dirt? Which of course inspired the title of today's blog post. So is there a new Alp in Switzerland? Is that what they did with all that dirt they removed from underneath those miles of other people's property?

There is no real reason for this week's topic, except that it seemed a fascinating discussion between my husband and I one day last week.
(Image Source Page: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/08/the_large_hadron_collider.html )
And now for those of you who remember me talking about the dress I couldn't stop myself from buying for my daughter's wedding. I'm pasting below several snapshots we took here at home. As you can see, the color looks a bit different depending on the light, which is part of the reason I was drawn to it in the first place. Isn't it pretty? I only wish the photos could have captured the sparkle on the bolero the way the candlelight did at the reception!