China has recently finished the conceptual design of a humongous particle collider, which is likely to be the biggest and most powerful when built. The final design of the collider, located in the city of Qinhuangdao, east of Beijing, is expected to be ready by 2016.

China Daily reports that Wang Yifang, director of the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, says the collider is being built to gain a better understanding of fundamental physics, the Higgs Boson and to discover new particles.

According to Newsmax, actual construction will start in 2020. When completed, the particle collider would smash subatomic particles into each other at high speeds.

The world's first particle collider, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), proved in 2012 the existence of the Higgs Boson, or the “God particle.” It has “superconducting magnets with accelerating structures to boost the energy of the particles passing through it.”

The LHC is operated by the Conseil Europeen pour la Techerche Nucleaire (CERN), or European Council for Nuclear Research, which was created in 1952 to pursue fundamental physics research in Europe.

Shut down in 2013 for a planned two-year upgrade, the collider resumed operation in 2015 and is twice as powerful. However, it is approaching its energy level limits, and the existing facility it is housed in reportedly makes it impossible to increase the energy dramatically. But CERN plans to upgrade the LHC to increase its energy level tenfold by 2025, says Rolf Dieter Heuer, director general of CERN.

The new collider that China is building is twice the size of the existing collider in Switzerland – which measures 17 miles in circumference and is considered the most complex global research facility – and would be seven times more powerful, claims Wang.

The port city of Qinhuangdao, the beginning point of the Great Wall of China, was chosen for the underground research facility due to its location. Wang stresses, “This is a machine for the world and by the world: not a Chinese one.”

With the LHC, some scientists have already expressed fears that it could wipe out the planet. Astrophysicist Neil de Grasse Tyson thinks it could explode Earth.

British physicist Stephen Hawking even warns the “God particle” discovered by CERN could destroy the universe because of the risk that the Higgs Boson could become unstable when it reaches extremely high energy levels and possibly trigger a “catastrophic vacuum decay” which could result in collapse of time and space.

These fears have previously led German professor Otto Rossler, from the University of Tubingen, to file a lawsuit against CERN, claiming that the LHC could create a mini black hole that could get out of hand and blast the planet. However, the case was dismissed by the court.

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