Protons on speed

Everything about the collider sounds, well, large — from the 14 trillion electron volts of energy with which it will smash together protons, its cast of thousands and the $8 billion it cost to build, to the 128 tons of liquid helium needed to cool the superconducting magnets that keep the particles whizzing around their track and the three million DVDs worth of data it will spew forth every year.

In what sounds like a teenage sub-atomic particle's most exciting fantasy, the whole thing's there so they, the particles, can get going really, really fast and then crash into something.

Link: CERN - Large Hadron Collider - Particle Physics - A Giant Takes On Physics' Biggest Questions - New York Times