If you’re one of the few people who still believes the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) could accidentally destroy the world, I’d recommend you get your affairs in order before September 10th. CERN, the European physics agency that oversees the LHC, has announced that the proton beam in the world’s most powerful collider will be turned on for the first time this September.

Well, it's never a great idea to stand next to a machine that could create black holes, but the magnets that steer the proton beams around the planet's most powerful particle accelerator would probably spare you from excess radiation. Then again, there is the off chance that some 300 trillion protons could erupt from the device and kill you on the spot.

The Large Hadron Collider, the giant particle accelerator that's scheduled to begin colliding protons in August, has the potential to produce the long-sought Higgs boson. That elusive particle is a missing link in the commonly accepted model of physics. Observing it would be an important milestone in our understanding of the fundamental forces of the universe.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a massive internationally-funded particle accelerator located in Switzerland, keeps hitting setbacks.  Originally scheduled to power up around 2005, the project's latest snag—supports for the collider's many powerful magnets are failing—has pushed the start date to May of 2008 [this could also affect the Higgs Boson PPX proposition]. Scientists also reported that cooling the massive magnets to the required 1.9 degrees Kelvin (that's cold) seems to be taking a little longer than planned." Personally, I'm glad theyre spending a bit of extratime to get everything perfect, since one theoretical failure situation could lead to the creation of a black hole that devours the earth.

Sometimes you have to wonder if physicists are just playing out a
cosmic joke on the rest of us. Harvard's Howard Georgi, a renowned
theorist, has suggested that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the
giant accelerator due to switch on next year, might be able to detect
what he calls "unparticles." The members of this new class of matter
have no mass, and should be difficult to detect, but physicists are
already at work trying to figure out how to find them at the LHC.

While Georgi deserves applause for the clever nomenclature, the
astrophysics community still prevails in this department, having
proposed the existence of such strange beauties as repulsive dark
matter (RDM), self-annihilating dark matter (SADM), and, our favorite,
fuzzy dark matter (FDM).—Gregory Mone

Via Phys Org

When the world´s biggest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, opens next year near Geneva, the focal point of the high-energy physics world will shift from U.S. soil for the first time in half a century. Bummer, indeed. But America´s brightest are busy devising a rescue plan. In April, a panel of U.S.