[tuckrdout]

Why roll your eyes? Do you understand what this thing is going to do?

Listen, I am the first to admit that I may be playing with a deck a couple of cards shy...but, can you help me understand this thing? Can anyone?

This is what I know; this won’t take long:

When we merely split one atom, we got a nuclear explosion, that leveled 2 cities.

Now we think it would be cool to fling these atoms around really, really fast, and then smash them into each other.

If a split atom blows up, what will 2 smashed, crashing atoms do?

This benefits humanity how?

[cammie]

It doesn’t. It’s a gazillion dollar waste of money that will give a small group of nerds, pardon my french, a woody. They could have flung these particles around or entirely halted the spread of AIDS around the world...oh, wait, Europeans aren’t supposed to be altrustic, that’s America’s job.

[Terpfen]

If a split atom blows up, what will 2 smashed, crashing atoms do?

This benefits humanity how?

You do realize the answers to your questions are a simple Google search away, correct? You're on the Internet. It's a vast source of insight and information if you bother to do the legwork.

And you're very poorly informed as to the purpose of the experiment and the methodology used. Yes, splitting the atom creates a substantial release of energy-- however, the LHC does not split the atom, so we're not going to see any mushroom clouds any time soon.

Do your homework.

[cartan]

When we merely split one atom, we got a nuclear explosion, that leveled 2 cities.

You didn’t “level 2 cities” by splitting one atom. If you split one Uranium-235 atom, all you’ll get is about 3.2 × 10^-11 J. This means you would need to split 156,250,000,000 atoms to get enough energy to power an average 5W flashlight for one second. The point of an atom bomb is that splitting one atom sets of a chain reaction that will split an incredibly high number of other atoms, and that will level a city. In the LHC, no such chain reaction is going to happen, so…relax!

[El Gato]

When we merely split one atom, we got a nuclear explosion, that leveled 2 cities.

We did not "split one atom". We split something on the order of a septillion (10 raised to the 24th) power of them, more or less, of them. But that is of little import.

We've been smashing particles into each other for several generations now. The only difference is now we'll be smashing heavier particles and they will be going faster (although due to relativistic effects not much faster percentage while, but with way more energy). Still one collision is no big bang, but it's the stuff that flies out of the collision that is of interest and can lead to new understandings of physics.

Someone once said it's like trying to learn about semiconductor electronics (transistors and integrated circuits) by smashing Buicks together and watch what comes flying out of the collision. :) But it's what has worked in the past.

The biggest "expected" outcome involves the discovery/confirmation of existence of something called the Higgs Boson. That in turn has, we think, something do with how things get their mass and thus also with gravity. All sorts of interesting, and beneficial, things could come from that.