CERN today used its Large Hadron Collider to achieve a world record in doing the thing that they do, which no one really understands. Despite a (seeming) common lack of knowledge, CERN’s use of twitter through its handle @CERN made for gripping reading for scientific and non-scientific audiences alike (as well as a strange feeling of being in an interactive Star Trek episode where you’re expecting @CERN to say “Beam me up Scottie…”)

Where else can the words stabilise, beams and collisions be so enthralling? Never has a one word tweet: Collapsed!! – extorted such an explosive reaction across Twitter?

If you weren’t lucky enough to see it live, here are a few brilliant tweets to show what you missed:

• First time in the history!!!!!!!!!!!! World record!!!!!!!!
• Experiment have seen collisions!!!!!!!!!!!
• ­Now stabilizing the beams
• ­Collapsed!!
• ­The ramp is successfully completed! Beams are now accelerated to 3.5 TeV, the highest energy! Preparing for collisions now!!
• ­Ramping up now!
• ­Preparing for new injection from SPS, the smaller accelerator that brings particles to the LHC.

Genius.

Now, while we wait for those crazy scientist to work on transporting (“Uh oh. We’ve lost the eyes. Not the eyes!”) maybe surgeons could tweet operations in real time…“pass the pneumatic drill Sister, this cranium’s a toughie…”

You can still catch the aftermath by following @CERN or watch the scientists in action on their live webcast.

Of course, if the live feed goes quiet and the webcast blank we’ll know black holes really do exist.