Now that you know how the LHC works, I can talk a little bit about some of things happening there and explain some things you may have read in the media.
The LHC is at CERN. CERN is the European Organization for Nuclear Research and is in Geneva on the border between France and Switzerland (hence the misleading acronym). It has been a center for high energy physics research for some time. Recently the began work on the LHC, the large hadron collide. The fact that it's 17 miles should explain the large part. A hadron is a type of particle. There are so many different particles and so many classifications that it is often referred to as a particle zoo. Protons are hadrons (and the primary particle collided at the LHC). Collider should also be pretty clear, although it is interesting to note that there are 4 collision points in the LHC and that only a small fraction of the particles in the beams actually collide at these points.
On to the media. Google news gives 150 news stories for "god particle" in the last year alone including another one picked up by all the major news outlets just yesterday. This one irks me the most because it is entirely a media construction. The particle in question is the Higgs boson. The Higgs hasn't been seen even though it was first predicted some 45 years ago. The Higgs is supposed to be a way to describe how gravity works (yeah, we still don't really know how gravity works. I know, lame, right?) and since everything feels the gravity of everything else it is said, in some sense to be everywhere. So not only is the particle a sort of holy grail, a way to complete a nearly complete model that has been sitting for decades, but would also, in some sense, exists everywhere. Somewhere along the way a journalist misinterpreted a physicist comments and dubbed the particle the "god particle". Since the name is edgy in an article about science the media seems to love it, but it should be clear that the particle has nothing to do with any god of any sort. My main fear here is that if the LHC sees the Higgs, the papers are going to scream that physicists have proven god's existence with sections poorly explaining the actual physics.
The next media fiasco tied to the LHC is the fear that it will destroy the world (see here and here). There were several attempts to sue the United States government to shut down the LHC before it turned on (one such opinion can be found here (pdf)). Needless to say such claims are preposterous and baseless (you don't have to worry about the world ending from the LHC. 2012 is up to you though). Essentially the fears stem from a particularly bizarre theory taking off in a really unfortunate way (things like microscopic black holes or strange matter). On the one hand, there's no a priori reason to believe that these things can't happen. The Tevatron has been running for decades and nothing has happened. Not only has nothing happened, they haven't even glimpsed anything to suggest that something unheard of might occur. Maybe because the LHC will collide particles with 7 times as much energy these new phenomena will show up? Again, maybe. But particles with these energies (and higher) have been striking the earth's atmosphere forever and the earth is still here. While the frequencies are significantly lower than in a particle accelerator, these collisions do happen very regularly all the time and all around us.
Is this proof that the LHC won't destroy the world? No. It is very hard to prove that something won't happen. We can show that something has happened, or that something won't happen up to a certain probability. This is incredibly unsettling to some people. But our lives are ruled by random events. A random solar flare in just the right place can knock out half our satellites. No GPS, no satellite communications, in an instant. Or on a highway. The driver next to you can lose concentration and swerve into your car. These events, and their effects on us are probabilistic. We can plan for some eventualities, and put in place measures to limit these probabilities, but this doesn't mean that we shouldn't use cars or take advantage of satellites.
To be more precise on topics like these is impossible simply because no one understands them. If we did, we wouldn't need huge machines like the LHC to sort them all out.
That's the LHC.
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