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What is the Large Hadron Collider?

What makes it worth $4.75 Billion?

Why would I possibly even care?

The Large Hadron Collider is a giant machine built on the border of France and Switzerland. It took over 10 years to build and costs a fortune. It is designed to smash atoms together to see what comes out of them when they do. So why did “they” build it?

Well, for a lot of reasons. But one of those reasons was to find a particular particle called the Higgs Boson. Why should you care? Well, if there were no Higgs Bosons, there’d be no you. Or me, or anything else for that matter. It turns out that the Higgs Boson is indicative of something called the Higgs Field. The Higgs field gives electrons their mass. Think about that for a moment. No Higgs Field, no electrons. No electrons, no atoms, etc. etc.

So, some of the energy moving through the Higgs Field interacts with a Higgs Boson and becomes an electron. What energy? Caution; speculation here. The energy from the Big Bang. Simply put, the Big Bang happens and this giant burst of energy radiates outward through the Higgs Field, among other things and at some point, becomes and electron in an atom in your eyeball allowing you to read this. Pretty cool huh? So, your electrons are the result of an interaction with THIS particular part of the Higgs Field at this particular point in time. Five minutes ago your energy was interacting with a different part of the Higgs Field, 5 minutes from now, another part, and so on.

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