It started with some ideas for a few hands-on exhibits, grew to a small Foucault pendulum and then the Chair of the Department of Physics, Astronomy and Enology at Occidental Université (formally the Easterly University of Northerly Ontario), Prof. S. Basu said enough is enough. “If we keep thinking small we will stay small” he told a group of reporters anxious for the 411 on this latest coup for Occidental.

Prof. Basu called CERN director general Rolf-Dieter Heuer and laid it on the line: give us the Large Hadron Collider. “I told him we have a world-class building with the latest renovations and due to the topology of the landscape we are built on neutrinos should be moving at least at 2c as they whiz through our building. He said deal and we’re in the process of making a few tweaks in the atrium design to accommodate the main storage ring.”

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) currently sits in a circular tunnel 27 km in circumference. The tunnel is buried around 50 to 175 m underground and straddles the border between Switzerland and France. How will the atrium accommodate it, Basu was asked. “The Euros goofed when they designed LHC and they knew it. Special relativity tells that though we see the ring having a circumference of 27 km the particles in the ring, moving near the speed of light, see the tunnel as having a circumference about the diameter of our atrium. So there is no need for such a huge tunnel, it was a political move so the French would pony up big bucks.”

Basu went on to discuss how the Department would produce twin particles, of which one particle would stay in the centre of the ring and the other could be accelerated by a student around the ring a few times and come back 100 years older than its twin and with a long grey beard. The installation is expected to come online when the building renovations are finished in 2525 (“if Man is still alive”).

Below: Director General of Cern Rolf-Dieter Heuer with Prof. Basu at the announcement.

Usually this question is meaningless since protons are too small to scatter light, they don't 'look' like anything. However at speeds close to the speed of light it seems they are a 'black disk', kinda like an elongated hockey puck. 

Physicists at the LHC have been smashing high energy protons together for a while now and the data they have gathered has lead to this conclusion by calculating and measuring the cross-section of proton-proton inelastic scattering collisions to that of the total cross-section (elastic plus inelastic). In the collision world of physics, at least at VERY high energies (the asymptotic limit to infinity), elastic and inelastic collisions hold more or less the same meaning, for an inelastic collision the protons absorb eachother and for an elastic collision they scatter off eachother. 

Theoretically at very high speeds relativity tells us that the proton will be 'squished' from length contraction and you can imagine a spherical object being squished down to a flat disk, this is essentially what is being suggested here.

The paper was just accepted to Physical Review Letters about a month ago: http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v107/i21/e212002

Physorg has a nice article about this as well:

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-12-physicists-ultrahigh-energy-proton-black-disk.html