The Large Hedron Collider is perhaps the largest physics experiment ever run on the planet earth. In their own words

“LHC – the aim of the exercise:
To smash protons moving at 99.999999% of the speed of light into each other and so recreate conditions a fraction of a second after the big bang. The LHC experiments try and work out what happened.”

It is installed in a 27-kilometer ring buried deep below the countryside on the outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland. The combined strands of the superconducting cable being produced for the LHC would go around the equator 6.8 times. If you added all the filaments of the strands together they would stretch to the sun and back 5 times with enough left over for a few trips to the moon.

The big hope is that it finds the Higgs Boson which is often referred as “The God Particle”. The Higgs field is proposed to give particle Mass and is currently the final particle “missing” from the Standard Model of physics. Currently it has not been observed which is what the LHC will try to overcome, if not directly then by looking for the signature of the Higgs field. Still confused? Try this YouTube video. I’ve searched around for the clearest and I liked this one best.

With the LHC back online there is again lots of focus on this rather massive experiment. The Boston Globe had provided an exciting range of images to show you just how big and complex this system really is. Here are one or two, but check out the link for the full compliment.