September 10^th marks the first test-run for CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. Doomsayers maintain it will cause the earth to be swallowed in a black hole and are making desperate legal efforts to stop it. Scientists say the worst likely outcome is a slow day on the Internet.

The largest acceleratometer complex in the world, capable of accelerating protons to energy levels of 7 TeV, will get its first test “fire” on Wednesday; although it is only being powered to 450 GeV, which is a tenth of its capacity, and protons are being fired only one way, not to be collided at all, there are those like former nuclear safety officer Walter Wagner and his Citizens Against the Large Hadron Collider, who claim it will cause the end of the world. Scientists have faced everything from lawsuits to death threats, all geared towards stopping the experiment. But what is really going to happen?

Scientists say there’s nothing to worry about, as the safety of the project, 20 years in the making, has been thoroughly considered. Given, it’s hard to explain the exact operation of the massive accelerator to someone without a degree in particle physics, but scientists say that what it does simply cannot generate a black hole, strangelets, or other phenomena capable of rending the space-time continuum.

This has not stopped such fears emerging in the past however, as Fermilab’s other particle accelerator, Tevatron, which has been around since the ‘80s, has faced similar protests. So has the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, New York.

The fact that these similar devices have not destroyed the Earth does little to reassure those who think that scientists are playing God, by pushing the limits of science and building such ever more complex and powerful machines.

However, even if the LHC does not destroy the Earth, it may ruin your bandwidth on Wednesday. Given the 15 petabytes or so of data that will be generated by the LHC’s test run, the massive amount of data will be processed by a global grid computing system composed of 60,000 computers placed worldwide. This network will test and push the limits of the Internet, and in and of itself may constitute the basis of a significant advance in information technology, as the massive processor arrays dedicated to analyzing LHC data redefine the meaning of looking for a needle in a haystack.

David Colling of Britain’s Imperial College, which is a contributor to the LHC grid, says that "The LHC experiment would not be possible without this infrastructure, that's why particle physicists have really driven the Grid." He adds that building a new computing system to process the data would have been costly and impractical. Sharing the computing load also has the advantage that each country involved has access to a part of the data and gets a portion of the glory should a breakthrough be made.

According to the Economic Times: “Scientists expect grid computing to become more widely used in future for research ranging from new drugs to more effective nuclear power. Eventually, consumers will start seeing it used in daily life to regulated traffic, predict the weather or even boost a flagging economy.” It would seem that the search for the Higgs Boson may inadvertently yield advances in computing as well. It wouldn’t be the first time great advances in science have been made by accident....