http://www.lhcountdown.com/

Only two more days now.

Actual collisions don't start until August, I don't think.

... This is the official site, so when their countdown says it is 1 day left i tend to believe that.

Can someone explain in laymens terms what they are going to do and what they hope to achieve thanks guys

to recreate what happened a millionth of a second after the big bang,but on a smaller scale.

They are doing what they call "injecting beams". They will be doing that for a few months yet before they collide two beams.

Will there be any danger to us if so what could happen ?

No.

thanks for the answers guys

yes don't walk between the beams.

in effect,could the LCH create a mini universe,with potential to evolve?

The problem is this: do they have any idea how fast and how far the chain reactions went after the big bang? How can they possibly know what the outcome of this experiment will be? Not that I care. My clock is ticking down to its last moments too. Even if the LHC ends the universe, I'm not sure I'm losing all that much anyway.

No matter what the collision does it is on a subatomic scale of a few particles. Not enough energy to do anything other than on a very small local scale.

There is a prediction that enough energy added to a subatomic particle will reach gravity equivalence. Should the LHC achieve this we can expect big leaps in technology in the next few decades.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider



Oh, well ... that's comforting.

They miss a basic structural engineering design flaw ... but they want us to trust them with strangelets?

Thats why they test complex designs before full runs. All effects woud be confined to the work area in any case. Its all on subaatomic scale, they are not working with weapons level stuff.

so what are the risks,its not risk free.if the shit hits the fan,what will happen,' nothing'?.what are stranglets?

could it rearrange a LHC workers dna at the subatomic level.Turn him into Gordon Freeman(Half-Life)?

If things went really wrong the most that could happen is powerful magnetic fields tossing metal fragments around. An industrial accident causing physical injury to workers in close proximity. Just like any mfg accident. An oil refinery is more dangerous. There are no major stockpiles of dangerous materials at the LHC.

Needless worry, there is nothing to fear.

Um, Bart ... they're planning on making miniature black holes, they want to study the chain reactions that followed The Big Bang, and they want to mess about with strangelets: Strange matter. There's a theory that when a strangelet encounters matter, it can convert the matter to another strangelet. Encounter enough matter and the strangelets become a quark star. Now, strangelets exist in the universe, and are carried on cosmic rays, but often they become harmless long before they reach the earth. However, these guys want to make strangelets ON earth, which has created some controversy through the ice-9 disaster scenario (in which a strangelet sets off a chain reaction that destroys the earth).

Yes, I know it sounds hysterical ... it is ... but they're messing around with quantum units: the essential building blocks of the universe. I think we probably shouldn't mess with that stuff.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strangelets

The work is demarcated. Those responsible for the mechanical design and construction are not the particle physicists themselves.

Cosmic rays have been recorded to have struck earth's atmosphere with much greater energy than even the LHC is capable of producing.