The $10billion Large Hadron Collider hosted at CERN, Switzerland is the world's most powerful proton-anti-proton collider besting the U.S. based 512 GeV(1 gev= 1,000 million ev) Tevatron, run by Fermilab.
The Tevatron was successful in helping physicists discover the top quark, the last of the six predicted quarks, and the bottom quark.
But it will require the LHC's more powerful collider, employing up to 3.5 TEV (trillion electron volts= 1,000,000 million ev) and occupying 17 mile superconducting magnetric track to help discover the existence of the mystical Higg's boson. It will require years to be able to confirm the existence of this particle, but scientists are happy that they have their powerful tool right now. Along the way, the LHC may help refine the picture of the zoo of elementary particles and anti-particles, which may help scientists to understand better what happened during the first moments of the big-bang creation of the universe.
On MARCH 30, the LCH started the successful collision of subatomic particles. The LHC has given rise to speculation that it may destroy the Earth by creating a black hole, an incredibly massive mix of atoms and particles compressed to an almost perfect singular point, so gravitationally attractive that even light cannot escape from it and embracing by its gigantic attractive force any nearby mass. Black holes do exist in the universe and we are glad they are so far away. Rest assured that the physicists have done their computations and shown that the LHC cannot create a small blackhole.
But I am wondering what we in the third-world country Philippines make out of this??!!
Further reading:
About CERN
New Yort Times
Tevatron
LHC photo galleries
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