LHC reaches 7 TeV

[AMDave]

Today the Large Hadron Collider achieved collisions at 7 TeV

read more:
http://press.web.cern.ch/press/Press.../PR07.10E.html

[NeoGen]

I was unsure about the TeV unit, so I checked it on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronvolt

• 8000 TeV: The energy it takes to power a 100W light bulb for 1 second.

...

• 7 TeV: an energy at which the opposing particle beams collided at the Large Hadron Collider on March 30, 2010

• 1 TeV: A trillion electronvolts, or 1.602×10−7 J, about the kinetic energy of a flying mosquito

Suddenly, it doesn't seem to be that much of a feat no more.

But to be fair here we have to remember that they are talking about atomic particles, and for a single atomic particle to have that much energy it has to be going at almost the speed of light. That's what is impressive.