In a 27-kilometer underground ring, scientists are smashing protons together at 99.9999991% the speed of light to recreate the exact conditions of the Big Bang.
This massive machine, the Large Hadron Collider, is effectively the largest microscope ever built. But instead of using light to look at cells, it uses these high-energy collisions to examine the fundamental fabric of reality. At its heart, CERN's mission is to figure out what the universe is made of and how it works at the most granular level. Everything people see around them is made of fundamental particles, but the rules governing those particles are still not entirely understood.
One of the most famous achievements of this effort was the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson, a particle that proves the existence of an invisible energy field giving mass to everything in the universe. But the current mathematical framework, known as the Standard Model of particle physics, is visibly incomplete. Scientists at CERN are currently hunting for evidence of dark matter, the invisible substance that accounts for about 85% of the mass in the universe. They are also trying to solve the mystery of antimatter. The Big Bang should have produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter, which would have annihilated each other, leaving nothing. Instead, the universe is made almost entirely of regular matter, and physicists are using CERN's antimatter factory to figure out why.
While the primary goal is pure theoretical physics, the extreme engineering required for these experiments consistently pushes technological boundaries. The World Wide Web was originally invented at CERN in 1989 simply to help international scientists share massive amounts of experimental data. Technologies developed for CERN's particle detectors have also revolutionized medical imaging, directly contributing to the development of modern PET scans and advanced targeted therapies.
Ultimately, CERN is trying to fill the remaining blank spaces in human understanding of the physical world. Smashing particles together at unimaginable speeds is simply the only known way to force the universe to reveal its smallest and most closely guarded secrets.