COLLIDER

When our daughter was a year old, my wife’s work brought us to Geneva, Switzerland for several months. I spent that time looking after our daughter, often taking her on long walks in her stroller through quiet residential streets, along the edges of the lake, and out into the surrounding countryside. We were exploring this place together—it was new for me, and everything was new for her.

Just beyond the city’s edge lies CERN, home of the Large Hadron Collider. I had somehow imagined we’d be able to tour the massive underground facility, which of course was not possible without special clearance. Instead, my daughter and I visited the modest, almost nondescript museum above. Behind a plexiglass case sat what was said to be the first computer used to host the World Wide Web, used by scientists at CERN to collaborate more easily and eventually to share their findings with colleagues around the world.

Sitting in her stroller, my daughter was oblivious to the machine’s significance, just as she was to the miles-long circular tunnel beneath our feet, where particles were being accelerated to tremendous speeds and smashed together to recreate conditions last seen when the universe was less than a trillionth of a second old. Cathedral-sized chambers housed enormous instruments designed to decipher the meaning of those collisions.

As I looked out the window at the quiet countryside, I didn’t know what to make of it all—the strange and wondrous things we humans build, and the silences we break open, to look beyond the limits of our understanding.

- Carl Wooley