If you can read this sentence, congratulations! You just survived the official opening of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which an army of critics claim might create mini black holes that will devour the earth. This colossal machine outside Geneva, the largest machine of science ever created, went to full power for the first time on Wednesday, and by mid-October the first real collisions will take place inside the machine.

Amusingly, the LHC criticism has backfired, similar to the way that media criticism of Gov. Sarah Palin has. The more the critics slammed the machine, the more curiosity and intense interest it generated. Subatomic particle physics and string theory, hardly the subject of dinner table conversation, suddenly became the talk of the town. There's now even a rap song about the LHC that's become an instant, monster hit on YouTube.

At the heart of this debate is a truly mammoth machine, 17 miles in circumference, straddling the French-Swiss border. After $8 billion and 14 years of work by thousands of physicists and engineers, the LHC has finally been fired up. It's purpose is to accelerate two beams of protons to 99.999999% light speed in a huge tube in opposite directions and then slam them into each other to recreate the sizzling temperatures found at the instant of the Big Bang, and thereby unlock the greatest secrets of the universe.

At the very least, physicists hope to find a new particle, called the Higgs boson, the last piece of the Standard Model of particles. But some physicists hope to do even better. The LHC might shed light on the "theory of everything," a single theory which can explain all fundamental forces of the universe, a theory which eluded Albert Einstein for the last 30 years of his life. This is the Holy Grail of physics. Einstein hoped it would allow us to "read the Mind of God."

Today, the leading (and only) candidate for this fabled theory of everything is called "string theory," which is what I do for for a living. Our visible universe, according to this theory, represents only the lowest vibration of tiny vibrating strings. The LHC might find something called "sparticles," or super particles, which represent higher vibrations of the string. If so, the LHC might even verify the existence of higher dimensions of space-time, which would truly be an earth-shaking discovery.