With a circumference of 27 kilometers and more than 6,000 superconducting magnets, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world’s largest machine and most sophisticated scientific instrument. The LHC is capable of accelerating protons to 99.9999991% of the speed of light and generating terrifically energetic collisions that are in some cases 100,000x hotter than our sun’s core.