The worlds largest experiment

What is the unknown 96 percent of the universe made of?
Why do particles have mass?
What lies beyond Earth's dimension?
What happened in the Big Bang?

100 metres below ground at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland lies an enormous device that has been built to unlock the mysteries of the universe. Let's just cover the basics (for now).

The construction* mainly consists of a 27 km tunnel, and a very large particle detector. This wild thing will recreate conditions akin to the Big Bang - the scientific birth of our universe. Protons will be accelerated inside the tunnel to reach the highest speed possible (close to the speed of light**). At top speed there will be approximately 1 billion proton collisions every second. These collitions will be carefully monitored by the detection device called the ATLAS, which weighs 7000 tons.

To understand how precise the ATLAS is, we can compare it to a digital camera with 100 million image sensors that can produce 40 million snapshots every second. That will give us serious amounts of information. And scientists are hoping to use this information to answer the questions above.
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*Also reffered to as "large hadron collider" (LHC)
** 300 000 km/s , the speed of light

Question and Answer
Q: Will the machine produce information of importance?
A: Most likely (personal opinion). In fact, 2500 scientists from 37 countries were recruited to help design, test and build the ATLAS detector. This is the worlds largest experiment. This is as good as we get right now.

Q: Does it radiate?
A: Yes, the radiation field produced by the usage of the machine is stronger than a nuclear reactor.

Q: When is the ATLAS turned on?
A: Summer 2008 (goosebumps)