Trillions of Reasons to Be Excited

Cessy, France — It was late on an August evening when the proton wranglers at the Large Hadron Collider finally got five trillion high-energy particles under control, squeezed and tweaked them into tight bunches and started banging them together.

“Seven minutes too late,” grumbled Darin Acosta, a physicist from the University of Florida, whose shift running a control room here, among sunflower fields and strip malls, had just ended. On the walls around him, computer screens were suddenly blooming with multicolored streaks and curling tracks depicting the primordial subatomic chaos of protons colliding 300 feet under his feet, in the bowels of the Compact Muon Solenoid, one of the four giant particle detectors buried around the collider ring.