If the world ends tonight...

It was a pleasure to have known you all.

You see, tonight, just before Midnight (PDT) the CERN laboratory in Switzerland is going to fire up its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for the very first time.  Some physicists argue that beam collision could be the very end of our existence...DON'T CROSS THE STREAMS, VENKMAN!!!!

But I don't see any stewardesses crying Caltech professors running around jumping out of airplanes and spending millions they don't have on fast cars and flashy bling, so I guess we're all gonna be fine.

So what is the LHC?  According to CERN (which stands for: The European Center for Nuclear Research, just in French):

The LHC is the world's most powerful particle accelerator, producing beams seven times more energetic than any previous machine, and around 30 times more intense when it reaches design performance, probably by 2010. Housed in a 27-kilometre tunnel, it relies on technologies that would not have been possible 30 years ago. The LHC is, in a sense, its own prototype.

Extensive studies have been performed to determine whether it's even SAFE to do these experiments, and hundreds of physicists agree that we won't vaporize the universe out of existence at 9:30am CEST (that's Central Europe Summer time).  You can see for yourself here.More on safety considerations here. (sorry, they won't let me embed the video)

If you're so inclined, you can watch the proceedings here, beginning at 8:30am CEST (10:30 PM Pacific)

And if you want to what on Earth they'd make such a thing for, try watching this: