Another year has slipped through our fingers, but let’s try this reboot 2.0 with tomorrow’s inaugural debut of the Large Hadron Collider, a particle accelerator on steroids built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) under the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland.

It’s the biggest particle accelerator in the world, and tomorrow scientists will switch it on to hurl tiny particles against one another in the hopes of plumbing the depths of hidden dimensions, invisible dark matter and some sort of weird particle called a “Higgs boson.”

A look at a giant magnet, part of the Large Hadron Supercollider. Credit: AFP/File/Fabrice Coffini

Incidentally, the world of sf hasn’t missed this one either. In “The Void” (It will swallow you hole!), scientists fire up a supercollider that spawns a black hole which, you know, pretty much sucks. (See that’s a supercollider pun.)I actually own that movie, and it apparently has a fan club. I should probably check it out again for pointers before tomorrow’s atom-smashing goodness.

Animated explanation of how the LHC Grid works: http://tinyurl.com/5ll4g5