The track is almost 17 miles long. Racers travel in opposite directions, building up speed for the moment when they reach peak velocity and veer into oncoming traffic. Around the track and around the world, spectators watch in unblinking fascination — wondering what the outcome will be.

We wonder, too: Does NASCAR know about the Large Hadron Collider?

It is the largest machine ever built by humans, buried up to 300 feet underground on the French-Swiss border. Early Wednesday morning, the giant atom smasher surged into action.

So far, at least, no atoms have been harmed (on purpose) in the production of this $8 billion scientific marvel. There were some collisions between protons sent racing around the track and "stray gas molecules," but, as they say in physics, you have to crack a few eggs to make an omelet.

When the atom smashing begins in earnest later this fall, scientists hope to recreate conditions that existed milliseconds after the Big Bang. That should shed light on the so-called dark matter that makes up about a quarter of the universe.

Some physicists are even hoping to create a mysterious, hypothetical particle called a Higgs boson, or "God particle," thought to endow protons, neutrons, photons and electrons with their mass.

For physicists, the supercollider is a very big deal. For the rest of us, it's an interesting scientific advance that should advance mankind's store of knowledge and probably won't kill us.

There is, however, just a slight, tiny, no-need-to-worry-about-it-really, little sliver of a remote chance that the collider could create something else, too: a black hole. That would set in motion the end of the world.

Black holes are theoretical regions in space where the gravitational pull is so great that nothing, not even electromagnetic energy, can escape. A tiny black hole created by the Hadron supercollider could, in theory, sink to the center of the planet and begin devouring everything in sight.

Last spring, a pair of astrophysicists petitioned a federal court in Hawaii to block operation of the supercollider, calling it a "dark matter factory" that holds the potential for "global cultural genocide."

The European Center for Nuclear Research, which built the atom smasher, dismissed those concerns as what the London Telegraph eloquently termed "codswallop."

Part of the excitement generated by the supercollider is, of course, the uncertainty. Scientists really do not know what will happen once they wave the green flag to start this demolition derby for atoms.

But clearly, there's an opportunity here for a smart, Belgian/St. Louis-based brewery to get in on the ground floor of the next big thing. When the atoms start racing, one of them is sure to have a very, very tiny Budweiser logo painted on it.

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