The Large Hadron Collider has got the world talking about life, the universe and everything. Oh, and black holes and death, of course. Just wait until people hear about it's big brother: the International Linear Collider...

It is all about the bang. Well that and the stuff that is created as a result. Who would have thought that the world's media, and in turn much of the world it seems, would get so excited about a bunch of physicists searching for the Higgs boson, BEH Mechanism or the God Particle?

Call it what you will, the hunt for the meaning of life, the universe and everything has certainly got us all thinking. Mainly about the end of the world, it has to be said.

However, as already reported at iTWire you can remove your head from between your knees and relax, because the world is not going to end any time soon.

The Internet might just get a little faster as a direct result though.

But I digress, the Large Hadron Collider has only just been switched on, and will spend some weeks accelerating particles around the big atomic racetrack in different directions before deliberately crashing them together at a speed so zany it is hard to get your head around.

But let's at least try. The LHC tunnel, some 300 feet underneath Switzerland and France, is an impressive 27km circuit. Proton beams are fired around this at 99.99975 percent of the speed of light.

To put that into some perspective, that means a beam can complete something close to 11,000 laps of the 27km circuit every single second.

It is when the beams, travelling in opposing directions around the circuit, are guided into one another that the 'big bang' experiment does its stuff. The collision energy involved being 7 GeV, or 7 billion electron Volts if that makes it any clearer.

I didn't think so. Basically, an electron Volt, or eV, is just the amount of energy that an electron picks up when moving through a potential difference of 1 volt in a vacuum. It is the standard unit of energy in particle physics.

If you thought all that sounded impressive, just wait until you discover what Einstein's Telescope, the real Big Bang machine, can do...

So, we know that the Large Hadron Collider is big, and you might be forgiven for thinking if it is big enough, powerful enough, to get some scientists talking about it having the potential to end the world.

Forgiven, but wrong. In the world of particle physics, it would seem, bigger is better. To prove it, let me introduce you to the International Linear Collider.

Not only will the ILC be bigger than the LHC, a 31km dead straight tunnel is planned for the first stage of the project but the current baseline design already allows for an upgrade to 50km if needed.

Not only will it smash those particles together with a much higher collision energy of 500 GeV, around 70 times more powerful than the LHC which now seems a bit meek at just 7 GeV.

Not only could that be increased to a mind-boggling 1 TeV, or 1 trillion electron Volt collision during the second stage of the project if the 50km tunnel was completed.

But on top of all of that, the International Linear Collider has a really cool nickname: Einstein's Telescope.

The Royal Society of Chemistry has been trying to come up with one for the LHC but so far has only managed 'The Big Banger' and 'Colossitron' which really do not cut the mustard.

So why the need for Einstein's Telescope in the first place? Surely one end of the world machine is enough? Well, no, actually it isn't.

While it is hoped that the LHC will effectively point the way towards the answers to those universal questions, Einstein's Telescope will actually provide the missing pieces in the puzzle and solve it once and for all.

Brian Foster, professor of experimental physics at Oxford University and European director of the project explains:
"The LHC smashes protons together to discover new particles but also generates lots of debris that obscures the fine detail. The ILC would be a much cleaner machine and tell us far more about their real nature."
It is all early days for the three year old project though. Only UKP £150 million has bee spent so far, and the ILC is likely to eclipse the UKP £5 billion cost of the LHC in total. Final designs are not expected to be agreed upon and complete until 2012 at the earliest.