Back to the future

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) made scientific history yesterday. After years of preparation, high-energy beams of protons were finally brought into collision in the 27km tunnel deep beneath the Franco-Swiss border. The purpose? The experiment is probing the deepest mysteries of physics, trying to answer questions that have troubled scientists for decades and delving into the existence of other dimensions beyond the three (plus time) that make up our visible world.
These particles will be smashing into each other at close to the speed of light and with a violence not seen since the Big Bang. That gives some people pause. What sort of monster are these mad scientists creating? Fear-mongering aside, the LHC is propelling mankind to a further frontier of science, the highest goal of physics, the so-called Theory of Everything, for which everyone from Albert Einstein to Stephen Hawking has been searching.