At some point Wednesday (late Tuesday here in the U.S.), the switch will be thrown for the initial testing of the Large Hadron Collider on the border of Switzerland and France. The 17-mile underground loop will eventually smash stuff together with seven times the force available at the Fermilab collider in Illinois in an attempt to see what the universe was like a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. The holy grail for particle researchers will be the Higgs boson, the lone particle in the Standard Theory yet to be detected.

Large Hadron Collider
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The LHC will circulate protons around in only one direction for a month or so to kick the tires, and then cycle them in the other direction for more testing. Once everyone is happy, it's a go for it to become a fully armed and operational collider: The streams of protons circling in opposite directions will be guided into one of four areas where they will hopefully crash into each other to reveal the sub-atomic goop before almost instantly decaying back into more common particles.

Some have raised the specter of the LHC creating subatomic black holes and other phenomena that will devour us all, despite nature having already conducted its own more-powerful collisions with cosmic rays. The objectors to the LHC say that the big difference between the cosmic ray collisions and those in the collider is that the LHC collisions are head-on, causing the black holes to stand still and not fly off into the nothingness.

The problem with that complaint, though, is that the beams of protons aren't hitting each other directly; they're crossing in an X pattern, like your old Hot Wheels race track where the cars are meant to collide in the middle. With an angled impact, any resulting weird stuff will fly off in odd directions and into space. There's also the theory of black hole evaporation (aka "Hawking radiation") that says all black holes are inevitably doomed to fizzle away into nothingness, with lifespan directly related to size. According to the generally accepted theory, these subatomic black holes will poof away in .000000000000000000000000001 seconds.

CERN, the lab running the project, has commissioned several reports that refute these fears. While it's not unwise to mistrust a company policing itself, the most recent report has been peer-reviewed and published in the Journal of Physics G: Nuclear and Particle Physics. Questioning the report's authors is one thing, but the peers who double-checked everything before publication have no reason to lie or make any dangers look less probable than they may be. (You can read a PDF of the report itself.)

For some reason, the quote from the opening pages of Douglas Adams' Restaurant at the End of the Universe comes to mind:
There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.