On October 21,2008. in accordance with some overly optimistic scheduling, 1,500 physicists and world leaders gathered outside Geneva to celebrate the inauguration of the biggest, most international, most expensive, most energetic, most ambitious experiment ever built. I enjoyed the day, which was filled with speeches, music, and-as is important at any European cultural event-good food. And despite anxieties (more on that later), everyone was filled with hope that these experiments would shed light on some of the mysteries surrounding mass, the weakness of gravity, dark matter, and the forces of nature. The machine in question is, of course, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The name is literal, though admittedly uninspired. The LHC is indeed large, containing a 27-kilometer circular underground tunnel that stretches between the Jura Mountains and Lake Geneva near the French-Swiss border.
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