Actually the majority of physicists believe there to be only 11 dimensions however there are a lot of projects coming up that will use the LHC to test for more. The only thing I'm surprised about is that none of the universities have yet thought of creating dimensions, theorietically it's possible as many physicists believe our universe started in another dimension which solves the problem of what was here before the universe but unfortunately doesn't solve the problem of what came before all of that and the infinite regress that follows.
Incidentely if you want to use your computer to help understand the materials in our universe then you can use the BOINC application to donate your idle computer time to this. Don't worry you don't have to have worked at Black Mesa........or Aperture Science. (if you know the Half life series) Just follow these steps:
1. Download BOINC from
Berkley University2. Install the program.
3. Open BOINC and click Add Project
4. Click next and select LHC@home from the list on the next page and click next again
5. Enter your email and a password and click next/finish
6. A web page will open up with some textboxes. You can put your postcode/zip code in so they can assign the points you earn to your area but I never do.
7. It'll ask you to join a team, I've got my own team PGCS, you can join me or if someone wants to make a planetside or terragen team that's cool too.
Then all you have to do is wait till October 21st, fire up BOINC and let it do the rest. There are a bunch of other really cool projects you can get involved in from researching gravitional waves from pulsar stars with Einstein@home to predicting the weather with Climateprediction to simulating a human brain with the Artificial Intellegence Simulator. These are all ones I'm involved in.
How it'll work once the experiments start is:
All of the academic centres around the world that are linked to the LHC grid (similar to the LHC@home but for adademic computer centres) will be coming up with their own research that they can do with the LHC, so they'll create projects for you all to run on BOINC that can plan the experiment (orbit path, speed, etc.)
Then they run the experiment with this data.
Once they have the results they will be analysed in one or more of two ways. Performing the analysis on the Grid will be done if there is a lot of data but not too much processing power required. Finding out how the universe expands would be done this way.
The other way is if there is a lot of processing required, this would be done through BOINC and usually this would be all the really cool stuff like finding gravitational waves caused by the collision. This is what Einstein@home does for pulsar stars, it looks for entities in the universe that are likely to generate gravitational waves and studies how the star or bi-star system works to see how the gravitational wave is generated, etc.
EDIT: Here's a screenshot of BOINC at work plotting a reaction from a collision in the LHC. It only takes 16 minutes to do which is the quickest project I've ever run with BOINC. Usually they're between 1 and 3000 hours depending on the project
