I will now set wonderful ground rules for this excellent and intelligent science discussion, I am suprised no one else has said anything, but this post is so full of just stuff that I didn't see anyone post some common sense.

One and only rule.

1. THE INTERNET IS OUT OF BOUNDS. If you use the internet to find these wonderful equations and act like you have PHD's in Physics and Quantum Physics you will be sent directly to jail, you will not pass GO! and you will not collect $200. If you can't follow this then at the very least give us links to whatever site you got your info from, at least then we can see how reputable your source was.

If by the rare and very unlikely chance that you do have a Master's/PHD in Physics and Quantum Physics then by all means go right ahead and share your knowledge because you all have worked for and achieved this level of intelligence that most of us can't even begin to fathom.

Besides, all of us gamers know that the most likely scenario of disaster involving the Hadron Collider will be the opening of an interdemensional gateway that will release Head Humpers into the world and bring about the reign of the combine.

http://www.destructoid.com/crowbar-finally-shipped-to-prevent-humanity-s-destruction-103120.phtml

YES FINALLY SOMEONE WHO HAS A DEGREE! FINALLY! (well at least claims, but I will be giving the benefit of the doubt as most people don't every say that they have a degree)

Again, I only skimmed this post as the posts before I finally got fed up were just people spouting off wonderful facts that the glorious internet has provided us.

Thank you dknippe2 for telling us you have a degree, that at least gives you credibility, but sadly this is the internet and no one can ever be sure who is what. But since most people just spout of ideas/equations and you actually told us your degree I actually believe you know what you are talking about.

I really didn't mean to come off as rude in my first post on this page, it is just that obviously most people on this forum have really no idea what they are talking about when it comes to astrophysics and so they go to Wikipedia and other sites to find information and then they post. It is one of my pet peves, I apologize again, but my rule still stands. INTERNET BAD!

Oh, and at donnor11...I don't mean to shoot you down or anything, but there's an overwhelming amount of evidence for the big bang.  The term big bang was also an intentional misnomer from a certain physicist who didn't like the idea, and prefered a steady state (static and unchanging) view of the universe.  So the big bang was not an explosion in any sense of the word, but a literal outward expansion of space itself.

Proof for anything usually consists of repeatability of experiment and having multiple, independent lines of evidence all pointing to the same thing.  This is the case with the big bang model.  The first observation was that all galaxies are moving away from each other at ever-increasing speeds.  Naturally, if they are flying apart now, at some time in the past they were flying apart but closer together, and so on.  Another piece, and by far the most significant which has provided more data than we can process, is the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation.  This is the afterglow of the big bang.  It gets a little technical but the main point is that at this point in time, the observable universe is too big for light to go from one end to the other in the time necessary to do so (we know the age of the universe from the ages of stars and their compositions, among other things).  So, this light could not "communicate" its state to another photon at the other end of the universe.  The crazy thing is, the CMB is a picture of a very short after the big bang, about 300,000 years.  This picture shows that the ENTIRE universe communicated with itself COMPLETELY across ALL distances.  This means that the picture shows a near perfect thermal equilibrium, this could not happen in the current state of the universe today.  As such, those regions of space that are no longer in causal contact, MUST have been at some point in the past.  That essentially proves that the big bang had to have happened, the details aren't completely clear, but we can accurately model the evolution of the universe down to about 10^-34 seconds after the event occured.  After that things get fuzzy because of quantum mechanics and gravity not being friends yet.

There's a ton more to it, and it's really interesting stuff, but that's the main idea.  I hope I have at least partially restored your confidence in the minds trying to figure all this out!

The experiment has been delayed. There is a crack in the LHC and currently undergoing repair work. Experiement is expected to begin feb/march 2009

Yeah, evidently a technitian soldered a wire on to the wrong connection, wich make on of the giant magnets crack. To repair it, they have to warm up the entire collider (it's below/around -200F), replace the magnet, and cool it back down again... In short, it could take a while to fix, not to mention the $$ ivolved...

lol, that would bite.

Like Winnie the Pooh. Or Hitler.

Sibilantae, that's a fairly good point (still not conceding that there are in fact people that "live every day like it's the last").

I mean, if we consider what I'd do if this'd be the last day of Earth, or my last day on Earth, in the context of which you propose to place this trail of thought. If it'd be my last day, I'd strap bombs to my chest and go take care of some domestic politics.

If it'd be the end of the earth, or civilization as we know it, I'd take my féz, a set of golf clubs, my cigars, my smoking robe (1), go to the tallest building in town, and proceed to play golf, listen to trallpunk at obscene levels of volume, and get drunk off my arse on the contents of my liquer cabinet. When the meteors/bombs/zombies comes, I want a front seat view.

Doing that every day would kinda detract from the inherent value of the vision.

Buddhists doesn't live for today, or tomorrow. They accept existance as a part of the eternal & cyclical, the very opposite of the modern-day atemporal "Living for today" & "Carpe Diem".

Good point!  This is actually where a lot of people have a misconception of "science", or more properly the scientific method.  The method is not an end product- it is a process for obtaining an end product.  It's not very complex either:

1) Observe something.

2) Make a hypothesis about what the something is or why that something happened.

3) Make a test to determine if your hypothesis is correct or incorrect.

4a) Test successful.  You have a good theory upon which to base the observation.  Congragulations!  Hopefully you can now do step 1 better than ever!
4b) Test unsuccessful.  Your hypothesis was incorrect.  Oh well, go back to step 2.

And that's all there is to science.  The troublesome aspect is that far too many people wind up treating a hypothesis like a theory, and way, way too many treat theories as facts.  One of the trickiest aspects to master is to always have a healthy dose of doubt in all things.  Take those people who considered the Earth to be flat- they were wrong, but a refusal to even suspect that they might be wrong led to all sorts of regrettable actions, to put it mildly.  It's thus very important to realize that any theory could potentially be incorrect, which is why occasionally retesting them is quite good.

  Take the old science of alchemy- laughable by today's standards, it neverless managed to set a few theories.  These theories were gradually built upon, retested, discarded, and/or refined by good scientests to produce modern chemistry.  Even a mostly incorrect set of initial theories at least gave them a place to start, and the method of science led to better answers.

Let me just jump in here and say that, actually, it is increasing. Something astrophysicists dub "dark energy" is expanding the space between galaxies (all matter, actually) and causing them to move accelerate faster and faster away.

It's pretty interesting stuff., worth looking up on Wikipedia at least.

"Dark Energy" is just a concept physicist throw in who are unable to accept that when the math fail to meet their expectations, then they are wrong, or if the math fails to meet the measured data, our math isn't advanced enough.  Mathematics based on relativity indicated there should be a varience in Mercury's orbit, a varience that wasn't noted until after it was predicted, not because no-one had been making careful measurements of Mercury, but because no-one wanted to accept that Newtonian gravity might not be accurate.  The origin of this "Dark Energy" according to Wikipedia is Einstein's "cosmological constant" which he later refered to as his greates mistake.  It was a constant that he added to his calculations to alter the results because he didn't like the fact that they indicated a variable expanding universe, he preferred the static state theroy.