A $10 billion machine that smashes particles together is
shutting down this weekend, taking a staycation in its 17-mile
tunnel near the French-Swiss border while receiving maintenance
and upgrades. The Large Hadron Collider, one of the world's
largest science experiments, will resume operations in 2014 or
2015 at unprecedented energies. Do you care? Judging from the
many comments that we get at CNN.com about what people perceive
as a "waste" of money for scientific exploration, you might not.
That may be because what happens at the LHC seems far removed
from everyday life, and even farther from the study of stars.
"Everybody is, in some sense, an amateur astronomer. We all look
up at the stars and wonder how the universe works," says Joel
Primack, professor of physics and astrophysics at the University
of California, Santa Cruz. "People are not amateur particle
physicists." Our window into outer space is visible and
dazzling. We can see spaceships and telescopes launch into the
sky, and we can see the images