John Gilbey is a writer, photographer, educator, and project manager at Aberystwyth University in Wales. For the past two decades, his fiction and non-fiction stories have appeared in the likes of Nature, New Scientist, and the Guardian.
You've got to understand that all this happened a long time ago, and I reckon that with the monitoring we have in place now we'd have picked up on the event much sooner. But even if it recurred today, would we have any idea what was causing it?
With the Large Hadron Collider up and running, expectations are high: Shouldn't discoveries start pouring in? These things don't happen overnight. We trace the long, careful path from intriguing data to official discovery.