Re: "We are generating kinetic energies that haven't been seen since literally the dawn of time."
Is 13 TeV really considered a lot of energy in terms of what happens daily with particles hitting our atmosphere? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray seems to suggest that we've observed naturally occurring 3 × 10^20 eV, which is a lot ( larger than 13 TeV (10^12).
You have to look at center of mass energy, the energy actually available for reactions in a collision. The collisions of ultra-high-energy-cosmic-rays (UHECRs) with air occur at hundreds of TeV center of mass energy. And they may be nucleons, in which case this energy is spread over several nuclei. So assuming that Lorentz symmetry holds (probably the safest assumption in modern physics), 13 TeV is in a similar ball park as UHECR collisions.
> For the Oh-My-God particle, this gives 7.5×10^14 eV, roughly 50 times the collision energy of the Large Hadron Collider.
> The speed of the particle (0.999 999 999 999 999 999 999 9951c), if it was a proton, is so high that it would experience relativistic time dilation by a factor of about 320 billion. At that rate, the particle could have traveled for the entire duration of the universe's existence while experiencing less than sixteen days subjective time.
Is 13 TeV really considered a lot of energy in terms of what happens daily with particles hitting our atmosphere? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray seems to suggest that we've observed naturally occurring 3 × 10^20 eV, which is a lot ( larger than 13 TeV (10^12).