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The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator complex, intended to collide opposing beams of protons charged with approximately 7 TeV of energy. Its main purpose is to explore the validity and limitations of the Standard Model, the current theoretical picture for particle physics. It is theorized that the collider will produce the Higgs boson, the observation of which could confirm the predictions and missing links in the Standard Model, and could explain how other elementary particles acquire properties such as mass. The LHC was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), and lies underneath the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland. It is funded by and built in collaboration with over eight thousand physicists from over eighty-five countries as well as hundreds of universities and laboratories. The LHC is already operational and is presently in the process of being prepared for collisions. The first beams were circulated through the collider on 10 September 2008, and the first high-energy collisions are planned to take place after the LHC is officially unveiled on 21 October 2008. Although a few individuals have questioned the safety of the planned experiments in the media and through the courts, the consensus in the scientific community is that there is no conceivable threat from the LHC particle collisions. Concerns have been raised in the media and through the courts about the safety of the particle physics experiments planned to take place at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator to date, built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva, in Switzerland. The claimed dangers of the LHC particle collisions, which are scheduled to begin on 21 October 2008, include doomsday scenarios involving the production of stable micro black holes or the creation of hypothetical particles called strangelets. The potential risks of these unprecedented experiments were reviewed in 2003 by the LHC Safety Study Group, a group of independent scientists, who concluded that, like current particle experiments such as the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), the LHC particle collisions pose no conceivable threat.A second review of the evidence commissioned by CERN in 2008 reaffirmed the safety of the LHC collisions in light of further research conducted since the 2003 assessment. The 2008 report was reviewed and endorsed by CERN’s governing body and by the Division of Particles & Fields of the American Physical Society and was published in the Journal of Physics G. It concludes that any doomsday scenarios at the LHC are ruled out because the physical conditions and events that will be created in the LHC experiments occur naturally in the universe without hazardous consequences.