'The most complicated thing that humans have ever built'

Fascinating article and pictures about the Large Hadron Collider being built by CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Switzerland. Turns out it may be capable of bending time itself. Some quick facts:

• 20-year work-in-progress.
• A team of 7,000 physicists from more than 80 nations.
• 27 kilometers in circumference, 175 meters underground.
• facilitating head-on collision of protons, traveling very near the speed-of-light.
• each tunnel is big enough to run a train through it.
• temperatures generated: more than 1000,000 times hotter than the sun's core.
• superconducting magnets are cooled to a temperature colder than in deep space.