The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN depicted on this issue's cover is a monument to human ingenuity- and not just for what it may be able to tell us. It astounds me in a number of different ways. Perhaps foremost, the techno-twit in me wonders at the feat of actually getting something so complicated to work. And the photographer in me would love to tag along with the CERN crew when they capture images of something so immense. The sheer scale of it is difficult to contemplate. But particle physics hasn't always been thus. As physicist and writer Jeremy Bernstein explains in "A Palette of Particles" (pages 146-155), over the course of little more than a century, the physics of the atom went from the tabletop inquiries of Ernest Rutherford to the 27-kilometer-circumference LHC, which spans the Swiss-French border. It's almost as if the smaller the object we seek, the larger the tool we need.
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