But what things are they actually doing? How are they helping to save it? I can't be the only one left unsatisfied... >

OMG I think I had one of those Casio PT-80 keyboards when I was little, or one very like it :0

Disclaimer: I don't claim to be an authority on the topic, I just thought I'd share my musings for any who may be interested

I'm extremely surprised that none of the physicist could give a remotely satisfactory answer to the beam-hand interaction question. I realise that the energies involved are extreme so weird things may happen and they obviously specialise in more fundamental aspects of the physics but I would have expected all of them to know at least a little bit about the physics of interactions between charged particle radiation beams with solid objects or water.

I only learnt a bit about proton beam therapy used in radiation oncology during my Masters in Medical Physics, and I'll admit I've forgotten a lot of it and can't remember all the calculations or parameters involved, but it seems to me like this would be a similar although perhaps more extreme case. Ultimately you would be receiving some dose of ionising radiation, the amount would depend on various things.

As solid as our hand appears to be it is still mostly empty space on an atomic scale, and there is a very high likelihood that protons in the beam will not collide with anything as they pass through. This is particularly true at very high energies, I forget exactly why... either due to momentum or the time spent in close enough proximity with atomic nuclei or something, but protons interact relatively weakly until they lose enough energy through the few interactions that do occur, at which point the likelihood of further interactions rises exponentially dumping all the remaining energy very rapidly. It is interesting to note here that at medically relevant energies 100-200Mev (17-35 thousand times lower than the LHC) this energy dump requires between 5 and 20cm tissue for the initial slow down to take place before the beams slow enough to dump the bulk of their energy. Your hand is at most a few centimetres thick and barely sufficient enough to do this at 100MeV let alone 3.5TeV. Graph which illustrates this.

Anyway, energy from the beam would be deposited due to some deflections and collisions and result in ionisation of some atoms either directly by collisions or indirectly by xray/gamma rays produced in the interactions. The few direct collisions between protons in the beam and atomic nuclei would also likely result in exotic particles and radiation further contributing to the dose you receive.

Other things to consider are whether the protons that shoot through your hand are still following sensible enough trajectories for the LHC to bend them around for another pass. At near light speeds they would be shooting around the LHC many thousands of times per second so even if the chances of interactions occuring in your hand are slim, each proton that manages to make another pass rather than shoot off on a random path that takes it out of the LHC, will have many opportunities to interact and deposit energy.

So depending on just how many protons are in the beam, and how much energy they dump into your hand, the effect could be anywhere from increased chance of cancer to a radiation burn of some sort if not a hole in your hand (although I suspect that most extreme scenario is unlikely).

All of this assumes my understanding isn't completely void at the energies involved which, if it is, may explain why the physicists didn't mention any of this.

Cool thanks for the link. I'd only ever heard about the ones that actually hold the bike in place so this one intrigued me.

In reply to this comment by Hybrid:
It's literally just a bike roller which allows you to ride your own bike indoors.>> ^Ghostly:

I wanna know what exactly that bike treadmill thing is and how it works. Does anyone know?

Whoops I meant for that to be a regular comment with a quote, I fail

Nope. I believe we are one of only a few countries that don't have rabies.

In reply to this comment by radioRaheem:
dude. rabies could be lurking inside that thing.

I wasn't criticizing... I merely wanted to understand why this method had to be used and you have shed some light on it perhaps but not much. Why is it stronger when pieces are laminated. It doesn't make sense to me, but I'm no engineer so I may be thinking about it all wrong. Seems to me though that the bonds between sheets of glass would be weaker than the bonds within solid glass. So I'm still puzzled. Don't take this the wrong way, I'm just trying to understand as I find this quite interesting.

In reply to this comment by bcglass:
I'm The guy's partner that makes the guitars. If it was cast as a mold it would not be strong enough to with stand the tension of the strings. The neck is much stronger when pieces are laminated together. It took a "Glazer" to come up with this very simple idea that seemed to be imposible to everybody else. And the guy is not even a guitarist, He's a drummer so You know He can't be that smart. He just thought about it for two days and visualized it then built it. So all You people say what You will. We're already famous and We're going to be better off then We were before, weather You think We deserve it or not. We never knew making a my space page would lead to all of this attention. God Bless America, And thanks Tom, Who ever You are... for creating Myspace.com .
You can see more of Our work at,
http://www.bcglassstudio.com

In reply to this comment by Ghostly:
I don't know anything about working with glass... but after brief research I don't understand why it can't be cast in an appropriate clay mould with cavities for components and polished with diamond pads afterwards. Would it not be possible to make a clear glass guitar in this way? Does anyone know why it's not that simple?