Errant baguettes, apocalyptic fantasy-mongers, and possibly time-traveling paradoxes haven’t stopped the scientists behind the 17-mile, $4.6 billion Large Hadron Collider from attempting to unlock the deepest laws of nature. Earlier this year, Motherboard went to CERN to check out the world’s largest science experiment will change the world — if not end it.By smashing protons at near the speed of light, the LHC — an underground racetrack straddling Switzerland and France — is able to create things like quark-gluon plasma and perhaps the Higgs boson, the Holy Grail of particle physics. Those might help explain why protons and neutrons weigh 100 times more than the quarks they're made of, what dark matter is, and how the universe came to exist. That’s a prospect that should give more than just theoretical physicists huge hadrons.It may sound dangerous (though it did not, and will probably not swallow the earth in a black hole, you bosons!) or worthy of a Dan Brown novel (oh wait, it was). But after a series of unfortunate events, CERN has safely flipped the switches back on; yesterday, they announced a new world record for proton acceleration, overtaking the US’s aging supercollider, the Tevatron in Illinois.At CERN, which happens to be the world's largest particle physics laboratory (and the birthplace of the internet), we met some of the brains behind the world’s biggest science experiment, including the man in charge, Lyn Evans (see a Q&A and a look behind the scenes). He and others explained how this gigantic tube won’t destroy us but rather shed some light on how we got created.
