Well it's up and running as of sometime last night (for those of us in the US). The Large Hadron Collider.
The LHC is a 26.659km circumference tube (roughly 5 1/4 miles in diameter) buried 100m underground (roughly 328 ft) located between the Jura mountain range in France and Lake Geneva in Switzerland, surrounded by powerful magnets, that contains a vacuum, and allows scientists to propel trillions of protons through this tube 11,245 times a second (roughly 99.99% the speed of light), to smash them in to each other and see the results. They are expecting to unlock the mysteries of how our universe came into being with this 6-10 billion dollar donut. No doubt the results will be eye-opening and fascinating, but for me the price tag begs the question of "would this money be better applied to developing alternative energy sources or feeding the starving across the globe?".
There has been no word yet on the possibility of the millions of miniscule black holes some claim it will create, that will slowly eat away the earth.
Want to learn more? Here are some links:
CERN site 1, CERN site 2, LHC Communication site, US/LHC blog site
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