THEY call it "the desert" – a vast, empty landscape separating us from a promised land that shimmers like a mirage on the horizon. A land full of answers, where we finally achieve a complete understanding of material reality.
Stop dreaming: we can't get to this nirvana. The way across the desert is too long and hot, and we have no vehicle to take us there. But if physicists' hopes are realised, a machine just waking from a two-year slumber could bring us a decisive step closer – and might even reveal answers closer to home.
The machine in question is the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC. This most muscular of particle smashers, situated at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, garnered fame for discovering the Higgs boson in 2012. That was the last uncharted feature of ...
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