Well....This has been in the news, around the globe for months on end. Here's the low down on what it is:

 

 

 

The Large Hadron Collider is a structure, which is 17 miles long, built 300ft underground, under the Franc-Swede Border. It has 2 metre thick walls, and the whole structure has cost 4.4billion pounds. It has been funded by over 85 countries, and many Universities around the world. 8000 Physicists (right word?) have participated in it. It is the worlds largest and highest energy particle accelerator.

 

 

 

The LHC is the world's largest and the highest-energy particle accelerator.[1] It is funded and built in collaboration with over eight thousand physicists from over eighty-five countries as well as hundreds of universities and laboratories. The idea of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), began in the early 1980s. The first approval of the project by the CERN Council occurred in December 1994 and the first civil engineering construction work began in April 1998.

 

 

 

So that's the general jist of it. It is being launched on September 10, and scientists are unable to really predict what will happen. No one has ever done anything like this before, any no one knows what will happen. They will be trying to find out other things as well.

 

 

 

When activated, it is theorized that the collider will produce the elusive Higgs boson, the observation of which could confirm the predictions and missing links in the Standard Model of physics and could explain how other elementary particles acquire properties such as mass. The verification of the existence of the Higgs boson would be a significant step in the search for a Grand Unified Theory, which seeks to unify three of the four known fundamental forces: electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force, leaving out only gravity. The Higgs boson may also help to explain why gravitation is so weak compared to the other three forces. In addition to the Higgs boson, other theorized particles, models and states might be produced, and for some searches are planned, including supersymmetric particles, compositeness (technicolor), extra dimensions, strangelets, micro black holes and magnetic monopoles

 

 

 

And of course, no one knows what the side-effects will be...

 

 

 

Some people have theorized mini-black holes, coming from inside of our planet, and things like that. They have theorized that the machine will produce strangelets, a particle which nothing is really know about

 

 

 

A strangelet is a hypothetical object consisting of a bound state of roughly equal numbers of up, down, and strange quarks. The size could be anything from a few femtometers across (with the mass of a light nucleus) to something much larger. Once the size becomes macroscopic (on the order of meters across), such an object is usually called a quark star or "strange star" rather than a strangelet. An equivalent description is that a strangelet is a small fragment of strange matter. The term "strangelet" originates with E. Farhi and R. Jaffe. Strangelets have been suggested as a dark matter candidate.

 

 

 

Tl;dr: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider - Have fun :roll:

 

 

 

So what are your thoughts on this. For me I just say, have a happy Wednesday, the world is being to come to an end 8-)

you should read the book flashforward by robert sawyer, it explores one possible outcome from this direct experiment, and goes into some quite heavy philosophy and theoretical physics, its a good read.

 

 

 

I love this kind of thing, its like the crest of the wave of science, and i dont understand it at all

Sorry ShineyRed, but there is already a topic on this :(

 

 

 

viewtopic.php?f=10&t=760858

Sorry ShineyRed, but there is already a topic on this :(

 

 

 

viewtopic.php?f=10&t=760858

 

 

 

Ah crap!

Too bad too, this OP was much better.

Locking this one since there is another topic on the subject, but feel free to repost your opinions on that one instead. :)

 

 

 

Laikrob,

 

Tip.It Moderator