Watch Brian Cox’s talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 700+ TEDTalks.

Tonight scientists at CERN are rebooting the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) in an attempt to recreate conditions fractions of a second after the Big Bang by crashing opposing proton beams, traveling at nearly the speed of light, into one another. Shortly after the LHC’s debut last September, a manufacturing glitch in wiring led to a liquid helium explosion that left the surrounding equipment damaged and ice-coated. The LHC faced another (albeit more humorous) setback earlier this month when a bird dropped a piece of baguette into the machine, causing a short circuit.

Now that repairs are completed, scientists hope the LHC will offer insight into several puzzling theories such as dark matter and the Higgs boson, a particle which gives other particles mass. For the latest updates, follow @CERN on Twitter. To learn more about the LHC, check out Brian Cox’s talks on CERN’s supercollider and what went wrong at the LHC.

For more on this upcoming event, check out CERN’s press release. And don’t forget to watch Brian Cox’s talk from TED U in 2009, where he explicitly details what went wrong last year:

Scientists at Argonne National Laboratory are using the IBM Blue Gene supercomputer to model supernovas, and New Scientist has published a gallery of snapshots from the fiery visualizations. The images uncover the beautiful symmetry — and chaos — flowing through these explosive events.

Visit the gallery now >>

TEDTalks stars Carolyn Porco, Brian Cox and George Smoot also use powerful computers to model big bangs and other phenomena in astrophysics.

(Look for Henry Markram’s talk from TEDGlobal 2009 on TED.com in the coming weeks. Markram uses the Blue Gene supercomputing architecture for a different purpose: modeling the intricate workings of the brain.)

This one’s for the peace-makers:

On Alex Tabarrok’s interview with the TEDBlog:
TED talks are supposed to create debate, not end them.. Seems this one was a success then? — Oli

On Nathan Wolfe’s interview with the TEDBlog:
Bird flu is essentially a veterinary problem. Swine Flu is essentially a human health problem, and so is alarmism and fear. But not information and prevention, those are on our side and also on our side is the augmentation of average temperatures in the coming months and…wash your hands! — Manel via facebook

On Laurie Garrett’s TEDTalk: What can we learn from the 1918 flu pandemic?:
I thought this was particularly insightful given the evolution of the H1n1 virus in Mexico this past week. I heard people are reusing masks even those found in the trash cans. They wash and re-sell them, this is one case where ignorance kills and spreads a flu — Juan via facebook

On Nate Silver’s interview with the TEDBlog:
But yes, he is not pinheaded nor racist. He _is_ a nerdy dude who is big on analyzing and finding relationships within information… public speaking is not his forte. — Toby via facebook

And, sometimes, the community glue is the speaker themselves:

On Brian Cox’s TEDTalk: What went wrong (and what’s next) at the Large Hadron Collider:
If the Higgs bosun particle (God particle), when found, is as congenial as Brian Cox, I think we can all agree to presuppose why the elementary particles cohere. — Adrian

Thanks for keeping the debate alive.

Watch Brian Cox’s 2008 TEDTalk, “An inside tour of the world’s biggest supercollider” >>

Watch Brian Cox’s talk from TED U 2009 on TED.com, where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 400+ TEDTalks.

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Twenty years ago this month, something happened at CERN that would change the world forever: Tim Berners-Lee handed a document to his supervisor Mike Sendall entitled “Information Management : a Proposal”. “Vague, but exciting” is how Mike described it, and he gave Tim the nod to take his proposal forward. The following year, the World Wide Web was born.

A panel of speakers and dignitaries marked the event with a short symposium, after which Sir Tim and a few others took a private tour of the ATLAS cavern, part of the Large Hadron Collider. Sir Tim is at left, dwarfed by the massive project. (Learn more about what happens at ATLAS by watching Brian Cox’s TEDTalk.)

CERN has built out a helpful website celebrating the web’s birthday — including a look at the very first web site and web server, at info.cern.ch. The site now contains a pocket history of the web, including a photo of the very first web surfer, Robert Cailliau.

Berners-Lee spoke at the celebration today, sharing his vision for the next rev of the Web — one in which data is as open and exchangeable as words and images are on the current Web. Watch his TEDTalk to get the inspiring details >>

Photo: CERN

The show, “Horizon: What Time Is It?” airs in the UK on Dec. 2.

Dr. Stephen Hawking has made a $100 bet that the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, which throws its first beam tomorrow, will not find the elusive particle knows as the Higgs boson.

What makes the Higgs the most highly sought-after particle in physics? In his TEDTalk, Brian Cox describes the Higgs particle “in language a politician can understand”:

What the Higgs does is, it gives mass to the fundamental particles. The whole universe is full of something called the Higgs field, Higgs particles if you will. [Referring to the sketch above] The analogy is that these people in a room are the Higgs particles. Now, when a particle moves through the universe, it can interact with these particles. But imagine someone who’s not very popular moves through the room, and everyone ignores them. They just pass through the room very quickly, essentially at the speed of light. They’re massless.

Now imagine someone incredibly important, and popular, and intelligent … walks into the room, they’re surrounded by people, and their passage is impeded. It’s almost like they get heavy, they get massive. And that’s exactly the way the Higgs mechanism works. The … electrons and the quarks in your body, and in the universe that we see around us, are heavy, they’re massive, because they’re surrounded by Higgs particles. They’re interacting with the Higgs field.

The physicists at the LHC are looking to the Higgs particle to finally explain some mysteries of the universe. And that’s why Dr. Hawking doesn’t really want it to be found, he says:

I think it will be much more exciting if we don’t find the Higgs. That will show something is wrong, and we need to think again. I have a bet of $100 that we won’t find the Higgs.

You can watch the first attempt to circulate a beam in the LHC via CERN’s live webcast on the day. Many universities around the world will be hosting “first beam” lectures, watch parties and even a couple of pajama parties; here’s a list of first beam events in the United States, and if you know of more, drop a comment below or email contact@ted.com.

To get even more psyched up for the fire-up, check out the site for the recent BBC Radio 4 program Big Bang Day, with short (funny!) videos, including a great one from TEDTalks star Brian Cox, and a look at the LHC in science fiction, from Dr. Who to Dan Brown. CERN’s LHC First Beam site has even more background video and articles.

And our own Bruno Giussani, TED’s European Director, who lives near Geneva, has visited the LHC’s tunnel during the construction and wrote a field trip report complete with pictures.

Illustration of physicist Brian Cox at CERN, courtesy of Kate St. Claire, via her Flickr set