Nima Arkani-Hamed
Inst. for Advanced Study

With the anticipated turn-on of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) next
summer, fundamental physics is on the verge of entering its most 
exciting era in a generation. The LHC is the biggest experiment in 
history, in all senses of the word. The machine is a circular ring 
with a 28 km circumference, in which two beams of protons are accelerated 
in opposite directions, to speeds approaching 0.99999999 times the 
speed of light. They are then made to collide with each other,allowing 
us to probe the laws of Nature down to distances of 10^(??17)
cm, 1000 times smaller than the atomic nucleus, 10 times smaller the 
tiniest distances we have probed to date. There are strong arguments 
that dramatic new physical principles await us at these distances. The 
LHC could extend our usual notions of spacetime by detecting 
"supersymmetry" or extra dimensions of space, and could directly produce 
the particles that constitute the Dark Matter of the Universe. In this 
talk I will describe these ideas, and discuss the solid things we 
will have learned to by the early years of the next decade.

http://www.physics.rutgers.edu/irons