Atom-smashing scientists hope for the unexpected.

Scientists involved in a historic “Big Bang” experiment to begin this week hope it will turn up many surprises about the universe and its origins, but have rejected suggestions it will bring the end of the world.

Scientists will launch an experiment in a tunnel deep beneath the French-Swiss border Wednesday, hoping to find evidence of extra dimensions, invisible “dark matter,” and an elusive particle called the “Higgs boson.”

And although leading physicists such as Stephen Hawking say the atom-smashing experiment will be absolutely safe, some skeptics fear the proton collisions could unleash microscopic black holes that would eventually doom the Earth.

The most powerful atom-smasher ever built will produce collisions of protons travelling at nearly the speed of light in the circular tunnel, giving off showers of particles that will provide more clues about how everything in the universe is made.

In the $10 billion US project — the most extensive physics experiment in history — the Large Hadron Collider will come closer to re-enacting the “big bang,” which, the theory states, was a colossal explosion that created the cosmos.

The project, organized by the 20 member nations of the European Organization for Nuclear Research — known by its French initials CERN — has attracted researchers of 80 nationalities. Some 1,200 are from the United States, an observer country that contributed $531 million US.

The collider is designed to push proton beams close to the speed of light, moving around the 27-kilometer tunnel at 11,000 times a second when at full power.

Smaller colliders have been used for decades to study the atom. Scientists once thought protons and neutrons were the smallest components of an atom’s nucleus, but experiments have shown they are made of still smaller quarks and gluons, and that there are other forces and particles.

The CERN experiments could reveal more about dark matter, antimatter and possibly hidden dimensions of space and time. It could also find evidence of the hypothetical particle called the Higgs boson, which is sometimes called the “God particle.” It is believed to give mass to all other particles, and thus to matter that makes up the universe.

Two beams of protons will travel in two tubes about the width of fire hoses, speeding through a vacuum that is colder and emptier than outer space. Their trajectory will be curved by supercooled magnets to guide the beams. The paths of these beams will cross, and a few protons will collide. The two largest detectors, essentially huge digital cameras weighing thousands of tons, are capable of taking millions of snapshots a second.

Naysayers’ theory called nonsense

Some skeptics have said the collisions could result in tiny black holes — subatomic versions of collapsed stars with gravity so strong they can suck in planets and other stars.

“It’s nonsense,” said CERN chief spokesman James Gillies. Leading scientists like Hawking agree.

Gillies said the most dangerous thing that could happen would be if a beam at full power were to go out of control, and that would only damage the collider itself and burrow into the rock around the tunnel. Full power is probably a year away.

“On Wednesday, we start small,” Gillies said. “What we’re putting in to start with is one single low intensity bunch at low energy and we thread that around. We get experience with low energy things and then we ramp up as we get to know the machine better.”

Huge amounts of data will pour in — so much that the lab’s computers can’t sift through it all. Scientists, who will monitor the experiment at above-ground control centres, have devised a way to share the load among dozens of leading computing centres worldwide.

The result is the “LHC Grid,” a network of 60,000 computers that will analyze what happens when protons are hurled at each other. That computing power is needed if scientists are to find what they are looking for among the mountains of data.

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Robert Aymar, the French physicist who heads the CERN research centre in Switzerland, predicted that discoveries to emerge from his organisation’s 6.4 billion euro ($11 billion) project would spark major advances for human society.

“If some of what we expect to find does not turn up, and things we did not foresee do, that will be even more stimulating because it means that we understand less than we thought about nature,” said British physicist Brian Cox.

“What I would like to see is the unexpected,” said Gerardus t’Hooft of the University of Michigan.

Perhaps, Professor t’Hooft suggested, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) machine at the heart of the experiment “will show us things we didn’t know existed.”

Once it starts up on Wednesday, scientists plan to smash particle beams together at close to the speed of light inside CERN’s tightly-sealed LHC to create multiple mini-versions of the primeval Big Bang.

Cosmologists say that that explosion of an object the size of a small coin occurred about 13.7 billion years ago and led to formation of stars, planets, and eventually to life on earth.

A key aim of the CERN experiment is to find the “Higgs boson,” named after Scottish physicist Peter Higgs who in 1964 pointed to such a particle as the force that gave mass to matter and made the universe possible.

But other mysteries of physics and cosmology; supersymmetry, dark matter and dark energy among them, are at the focus of experiments in the 27-kilometre circular tunnel deep underneath the Swiss-French border.

Alien invasion fears

CERN says its key researchers and many ordinary staff have been inundated by e-mails voicing fears about the experiment.

There have been claims that it will create “black holes” of intensive gravity sucking in CERN, Europe and perhaps the whole planet, or that it will open the way for beings from another universe to invade through a “worm hole” in space-time.

But a safety review by scientists at CERN and in the United States and Russia, issued at the weekend, rejected the prospect of such outcomes.

“The LHC will enable us to study in detail what nature is doing all around us,” Professor Aymar, who has led CERN for five years, said in response to that review.

“The LHC is safe, and any suggestion that it might present a risk is pure fiction.”

Professor Cox, from the School of Physics and Astronomy at Britain’s Manchester University, was even more trenchant.

“I am immensely irritated by the conspiracy theorists who spread this nonsense around,” he said.

When the experiment begins soon after 9:00am local time on September 10, disaster advocates will have little to work on.

In the first tests, a particle beam will be shot all the way around the LHC channel in just one direction.

If all goes well, collisions might be tried within the coming weeks, but at low intensity.

Any bangs at this stage, said one CERN researcher, “will be little ones.”

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* CERN research centre website. Google search of Large Hadron Collider (LHC) click here…

* According to some, the beginning of the end will happen at 5pm Melbourne time.

* watch in TV in india around 12AM on sep 10.

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World Doesn’t End on Wednesday, and You Can Watch It Live

* MUST WATCH THIS VIDEO

& GO HERE.. & ALSO READ THIS HOW THE WORL WILL END

* CERN video broadcast.