Great photos here of the soon to be turned on "Large Hadron Collider" in Switzerland/France [LINK].

This thing is amazing; 10 years to build, thousands of scientists involved around the world, 27km of "track". The basic idea is they release particles into the thing, then speed them up and guide them using magnets. One particle goes clockwise, the other anticlockwise. When they get up to incredible speeds which I don’t even understand they smack them into one another and see what spills out.

They’re looking for all sorts of things such as the Higgs Bosons, Stranglets and other weird stuff. Again, I need to sit down and understand this better but this is exciting.

The first attempt to circulate a beam through the entire LHC is scheduled for 10 September 2008, and the first high-energy collisions are planned to take place after the LHC is officially unveiled, on 21 October 2008.