First collisions at the LHC with unprecedented Energy! (Ask a particle physisicist)

[Alex K]

Is this collidin' watchable on teh youtubez? Kind of like NASA's rocket tests?

There is not much to see. The machine justs stands there... 
It's 20 million collisions per second, so even if one could look inside the detector, it would be a more or les constant glow with some flashes I guess. Selected reconstructed live event displays would be the closest thing to watching operations I guess.

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Why is it necessary for the entire universe to be at least a few times the size of the observable universe?

I went back and looked. So, a finite universe of the size of the observable one would leave characteristic traces in the CMB. Depending on the shape you assume the lower bound on the radius is up to twice the distance to the cmb "origin". That prompted me to say several times the size by which I meant volume.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1304.1811

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Pyrrho,

This is a question one has to remain agnostic about for the time being. All we know from observations of the microwave backgroubd is that it is at least a few times the size of the observable universe. My guess, which is more like a matter of taste, would be that it is finite and wrapped up, and that our visible universe is a super tiny patch of the whole. I would think that bc the observable universe looks geometrically flat, and that could be because we only observe a miniscule part of a curved whole.

Okay, I like the idea of an infinite universe.  If it is a matter of taste, why not go big?

If you look again at the way I asked the question, you will see that I fully expected the answer to be a "best guess" (my words in my previous post) rather than something known.

It is good to know about the background radiation indicating that our universe is much larger than just what we can see.

Do you expect the revamped toy that is the subject of this thread to find anything that will tell us more about the size of the universe?

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If it makes you feel better, I was listening to Bach while asking these questions, not Mozart.

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Not much larger, mind you, but at least abit larger. 

I highly doubt that the LHC is capable of finding answers to that question. I wouldn't know how. The closest thing would be finding some new forces that teach us about inflation, which would allow a conclusion about how much the early universe expanded. But that's a looong shot.

Btw: that is the correct music for such questions.