The LHC is designed to help answer such questions. The LHC can reproduce the conditions that existed within a billionth of a second of the Big Bang. The colossal accelerator allows scientists to collide high-energy subatomic particles in a controlled environment and observe the interactions.

In particle physics, colliders, though harder to construct, are a powerful research tool because they reach a much higher center of mass energy than fixed target setups. Analysis of the byproducts of these collisions gives scientists good evidence of the structure of the subatomic world and the laws of nature governing it.

Its instruments are more sensitive, allowing researchers to study the collision of particles from the inside of atoms in higher definition; its software has been enhanced so that it is able to take data at a rate of 30 million times each second; and its beams are narrower, which greatly increases the number of collisions.

It proved the existence of an invisible process that performs the fundamentally important role of giving all other particles their mass or substance. Big stuff, but did it...

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. It consists of a 27-kilometre ring of superconducting magnets with a number of accelerating structures to boost the energy of the particles along the way.