'The Big Questions' - www.LHC "At the earliest moments of the Big Bang, the Universe consisted of a searingly hot soup of fundamental particles - quarks, leptons and the force carriers." "The LHC will collide lead nuclei so that they release their constituent quarks in a fleeting ‘Little Bang’." "The LHC will let us see how matter behaved a tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang. Researchers have some ideas of what to expect – but also expect the unexpected!" 'B.C. scientists aim to unlock secrets of universe' - Straight.com. May 15, 2008 "McPherson(Rob McPherson, an associate professor at the University of Victoria and Canada’s representative at CERN) went on to explain that ATLAS is one of four detectors that will monitor these collisions, which will re-create conditions similar to those that existed within billionths of a second of the big bang. Experiments at ATLAS will, essentially, take us back in time, close to a point when everything that exists began from an unimaginably small point of infinite energy, when the entire universe was no larger than a sphere one-third of a metre in diameter. “We don’t know what happens at these scales [of energy],” McPherson said." "Asked for odds on whether or not the world will end, O’Neil laughed but declined to commit himself to numbers. “Extremely, extremely unlikely,” he said. So we could discover how the universe originated, what it is made up of, and why it works the way that it does. And the probability of destroying the Earth in the process is relatively small." ALICE(A Large Ion Collider Experiment) "Collisions in the LHC will generate temperatures more than 100,000 times hotter than the heart of the Sun. Physicists hope that under these conditions, the protons and neutrons will 'melt', freeing the quarks from their bonds with the gluons." The Large Hadron Collider Explained