This has to fall in the Digital Section.  As the forerunner to the LHC is directly responsible for the Internet, and the latest experiments there may well lead to the next versions of the way that we can communicate with one another.

I am following the biggest Science experiment ever at CERN, where they have the massive LHC.  Basically this is a huge ring deep in the ground under France and Switzerland 27km in circumference.  It is kept just above absolute zero (at around -271°C).  Then tiny particles are accelerated first in smaller machines before being fed into the main ring, where their speed is increased to almost (99.9999991%) the speed of light.  Then another beam is introduced going in the opposite direction, and the particles are forced to collide in several different places around the ring where there are detectors.

The concept (which has been proved in other colliders) is to force tiny particles (hadrons) such as protons into one another to break them up.  The particles then break up into their constituent parts, and for a tiny amount of time, the detectors hope to be able to record the different pieces.

What is fascinating is that we do not know what they will discover, but we do know that they are looking in the right place.  Previous colliders have pointed to a magical amount of energy needed to yield results.  Every major collider has produced results, and this, the biggest by far, will yield yet more.  The energy (14TeV) of the collision is so massive as to be difficult to imagine.  At the speed that they are talking about, a tiny proton has the same momentum as a large aircraft carrier doing 30km/h…  And they have to place instruments at tiny clearances away from all this energy!  Amazing!!

So why?  Well, Newton, Einstein and many others have given us answers which work...most of the time.  But not quite.  Newton's work is still amazing - using calculations based on his work, NASA was able to accurately place man on the moon, and to work out how to get there, and for the different space vehicles to meet up in the right place, at the right time, doing the right speed.  Einstein noted the problems & managed to hugely improve on the work.  But not entirely.  The three main forces of nature - electromagnetism, and the strong & weak nuclear forces appear to come from one single point...they appear to be the same force...but only mathematically (due to work carried out by Higgs in the 1960's).  So they are testing his mathematical hypothesis.  That is connected to an amazing concept called super-symmetry - which posits that every particle has a symmetrical particle.  So they hope to see some of those.

It may explain what dark matter is.  We don't know.  We can (by the movement of stars, galaxies and the like) see that there is something other than what we can see (matter) acting upon them.  We can even map out where we think it is, and how much of it there is (much more than actual matter, it is thought).  Hopefully the LHC will answer that issue too.  Hopefully it will explain why gravity is such a weak force, and what actually causes gravity.

So just 2 days ago (at 13.02 0n 30/03/10 to be precise), operating at only half power (7TeV), they have caused their first collisions.  Already the LHC is producing results, and many papers have already been published.  I think we are on the cusp of potentially some huge scientific findings.  We may be able to answer all sorts of fundamental questions.

Of course, the anti-science, anti-knowledge crowd are asking where the benefits will be.  And the honest answer is that we don't know!!!  But there will be huge benefits to mankind, and all sorts of spin offs.  The figures are just amazing: