The LHC (Large Hadron Collider) is the world's largest particle accelerator (as the name suggests :P). It's role is to answer some of the fundamental questions in physics and to widen our understanding of the laws of nature.
The LHC lies in a tunnel 27 km in circumference beneath the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland. It is designed to collide particle beams at very high energies. The Large Hadron Collider was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) with the intention of testing various predictions of high-energy physics, including the existence of the hypothesized Higgs boson and of the large family of new particles predicted by supersymmetry. In physics, theory must be confirmed by experiments and this is just the purpose of this collider.
This scientific "toy" cost about 9 billion US dollars and is the most expensive piece of scientific equipment ever build. I hope that the money was well spent and I am pretty optimistic about the whole thing.
A wide-spread rumor was that these experiments at very high energies will create micro black holes and lead to apocalyptic phenomena. Of course, safety precautions have been taken in order to avoid such things and it was proven that such results are impossible.
The LHC was definitely an engineering challenge. It took all the efforts of the world's brightest minds to build and operate it. An operational challenge was to handle all the massive energies stored in huge magnets and in the beams. While operating, the total energy stored in the magnets is 10 GJ (equivalent to 2.4 tons of TNT) and the total energy carried by the two beams reaches 724 MJ (173 kilograms of TNT).
The Large Hadron Collider reached the attention not only from the scientific community but also the attention of science fiction writers, TV producers, film directors and so on. Popularity is a great thing but in some cases some may distribute the wrong message creating concern among the general public. I remember that movie, "Angels & Demons" in which the LHC was held responsible for creating so called "dark matter" which in the wrong hands can lead to the extinction of our world. I think that such messages belong only to the imagination and have no reasonable scientific explanation.
