"a trillionth of a second after the big bang"

A little more than a year after its ill-fated debut, the Large Hadron Collider is getting ready to roll again. The controversial device, including an 18-mile circular tunnel -- bigger than the London Underground's Circle Line -- is housed in the gigantic CERN laboratory in the Jura mountains just outside of Geneva, on the border of France and Switzerland. Using the particle collider, the largest ever built, would allow scientists to re-create conditions that existed a trillionth of a second after the big bang, as well as prove the existence of the spooky "Higgs boson" entity, also called the "God Particle" which give "things" (including living things like you and me) their mass. It is further anticipated to solve the mystery of "dark matter" and shed light on many other quirky physics conundrums.