Smashing

Tomorrow, scientists are going to flip the switch one of the most important pieces of scientific equipment on for the first time. That would be the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, which is run by CERN (the same folks who brought us the Internet - apologies to Al Gore).

CERN is a consortium of 20 nations, and the US, Japan and Russia have observer status and make important contributions as well. The LHC is the newest particle accelerator and would be the most powerful in the world, taking over for the US Fermilab's Tevatron.

It will take months for the machine to reach full power. But eventually, those protons will be whipped up to 99.999999 percent of the speed of light, slamming together with the energy of two bullet trains colliding head-on. Underground detectors as big as cathedrals will track the subatomic wreckage on a time scale of billionths of a second. Billions of bits of data will be sent out every second for analysis.

As big as the numbers surrounding the LHC are, the mysteries it was built to address are bigger:

* What was the newborn universe made of?
* What causes things to have mass?
* Why is most of that mass hidden?
* Where did all the antimatter go?
* Is our entire universe a mere sliver of all that is?

"The LHC is the most powerful microscope that's ever been built," said John Ellis, a theoretical physicist here at CERN. "It will be able to explore the inner structure of matter on a scale that is 10 times smaller than anyone's been able to do before."

Some folks are concerned that the LHC might create tiny black holes that would swallow up the planet, ending all life as we know it. Lawsuits have been filed in the US and elsewhere to try and stop the tests from going forward. In fact, some are placing death threats against the scientists involved.

UPDATE:
Anonymous emailer provides this "rap" about the LHC.

I guess anonymous emailer has stopped worrying and learned to love the LHC.