Theyre just about to

[burston]

re-create the big bang..........whats going to happen .........wait for it...........

[burston]

I hope nothing happens in the future from the effect of what theyre doing now, messing with nature, I think is always dangerous

[eltelioni]

All they are doing today is sending a few protons round the loop to see if they make it all the way round. They will not do any collision experiments till the end of the year and those will be just low energy collisions that have been done many times before. They are going to spend months calibrating the instruments and getting everything working. Then, sometime next year, they will do the high energy collisions that everyone is talking about. They will NOT re-create the big bang. They will create the conditions existing just after the big bang, but only in a very small volume of space.

The newspapers are full of crap, even the Times gets it wrong. But, why let facts get in the way of a good story!

[jake-the-peg]

Add into this the fact that we have upper atmosphere collisions much more powerfull than this all the time and it's a bit of a laugh.

I thought whoever at CERN opened his mouth and said "black hole" to a journalist needed a slap but I'm begining to change my mind.

It's given the LHC more coverage than any experiment ever. If it encourages kids to see Science and Physics as exciting that's got to be a good thing.

And think of what's been achieved already. 20 years planning - multi billion pound budget - the worlds most complicated machine using technology not invented when it was conceived.

And it works!

A real show of what we can do in Europe!

Well done to all at CERN!

[rojash]

"messing with nature, I think is always dangerous"

That's presumably why you don't use the Internet, watch TV, drive a car, or have any X-rays taken...

[Munkeh]

I think is v fascinating,,,, to think they are going to recreate the same conditions as the big bang!!! this experiment could tell us why and how the universe was created!

[jake-the-peg]

Er no it couldn't.

It could however give us an understanding of how mass and hence gravity came about.

A proper understanding of Gravity at this level is something that Einstein spent the last years of his life wrestling with and it defeated him.

Still he didn't have the LHC - I think he'd have been very happy today