On Wednesday 10 September the Large Hadron Collider, the long-awaited new particle accelerator at CERN on the French-Swiss border, will see its First Beam. This means that protons will be sent round the 27 km-long ring for the very first time, after more than 20 years of development work since its inception in the 1980s. Scientists around the world, including me, are really excited about this happening, as the LHC will be able to confirm or disprove our current understanding of particle physics, which totally underpins the way we see nature, from the very small to the very large.
The switch-on event will be webcast live here on 10 September @ 9 am CEST
If you want to know how it works, particle physicist-rockstar-all-around-lovely bloke Brian Cox explains it here.
The CERN LHC website lists some very cool facts and figures and all the info about the experiments that will take place around the beam.
The Guardian newspaper have been doing a whole series of pieces on the new accelerator – all collected here.
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