You've heard about it before: the Large Hadron Collider, often referred to as "one of the great engineering milestones of mankind," it is also one of the largest, encompassing a 17 mile circumference tube buried 330 feet under the border of France and Switzerland. But just what is it intended to discover? The behemoth project is tasked with unlocking the secrets of particle physics, giving us a look into what happened at the dawn of time by recreating the conditions when it all began.
This graphic -- a collaboration between Microsoft Project and Column Five -- looks at the massive scope of the experiments being undertaken and the equally massive implications to everyday life when we find out what's really going on.
Since its first stage completion in 2008, the Large Hadron Collider has already unlocked some of the deeper mysteries of the universe, most notably with the tentative confirmation of the Higgs boson particle in March 2013. Originally theorized in 1964, the Higgs boson discovery completed the set of predicted particles in the current Standard Model of particle physics and finally gave scientists the ability to validate unproven theories.
What else will it change about our understanding of the universe and its beginnings? We won't spoil it: click here or the graphic below for a full-sized view of the graphic.
Lead image via Shutterstock