Yes, a miracle did happen last week all over the world when the Large Hadron Collider was switched on. It was the largest of such facility built with the singular aim of understanding particle physics the more, and thus explain the many puzzles of our existence. When completed, Microsoft Encarta writes in a 2007 article, the LHC will be the most powerful accelerator in the world. Now, on completion, the scientists of the world have their tab on a means to recreate the situation several millisecond after the Big Bang.

But as I left the public cybercafe on Wednesday the 10th September, for my residence some kilometers from the University campus, I thought about some irony. For everywhere else, life seemed just about the same. No hysteria. As a matter of fact, if not for Google dynamic advertisement that ensured that an image of the Collider was prominently displayed across their logo on the Google homepage, I admit that even I might have missed much of the news although even the CNN had occasionally flashed much of the news event all about their bulletin for the day.

Point is, a great thing happened, and conversely, nothing really happened. Humanity went on about its quotidian business of survival; daily struggles with the elements of nature and man-made disasters. The United States and Cuba with Hurricanes Ike and Gustav, Sudan with Darfur genocides, Georgia with the scars of the Russian jackboots far up their gonads, Iraq and Afghanistan with the mixed forces of occupation and liberation, Africa with hunger and ignorance, America with obesity, and everybody with their many diseases and dimensions of discomfort all over the globe. Humanity, it thus seems – and rightly so – was busy pushing around its own usual particles of survival. For many across the world, the alarm about a “black hole” loophole that might mar the gigantic scientific experiment is nothing compared to the large dark throes of their daily ordeals of survival.

No doubt, what happened last week was another large step for man towards understanding his own universe. We finally proved able to keep pace with the changes that happens around us all the time. Indeed, a miracle happened last week, but how did we feel it?