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The Biggest Thing in Physics

Two teams of physicists compete to explain matter—and win a Nobel Prize.

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To find out more about the Large Hadron Collider check out our companion web exclusive article Beyond the Higgs.

The CMS detector created by a vast collaboration of 2,000 scientists and engineers, will race ATLAS to find the Higgs boson. | Image courtesy of © CERN

Near the west end of Lake Geneva in Switzerland, buried under the river plain of the Rhône, workers are fitting together the final pieces of the machine that hopes to unlock one of the biggest mysteries of the universe. It has taken over 20 years, $8 billion, and the combined efforts of more than 60 countries to create this extraordinary particle smasher, the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, built and operated by CERN, the European physics consortium.

The “large” in Large Hadron Collider is something of an understatement. “Enormous” is closer: The collider’s underground tunnel carves a circle 17 miles in circumference, traversing the ...

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