The 7,000-ton ATLAS detector was one of the two key instruments the Large Hadron Collider that found the Higgs.
If physicists didn't sound so smart, you'd swear they were making half this stuff up. The universe began with a big bang called, well, the Big Bang. It's filled with wormholes and superstrings, dark matter and galactic bubbles, and assembled from little specks of stuff called fermions and leptons, top quarks and charm quarks, all of it glued together by, yes, gluons--and if you claim you understand a bit of it, you're probably lying too.
That's the trouble with particle physics: it exists on a plane that the brain doesn't visit--or at least most brains don't--and wholly defies our intuitive sense...
