Nestled 570 feet beneath the Alps on the Swiss-French border is the world’s largest physics experiment — the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Constructed for $8.8 billion by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland in collaboration with hundreds of universities and labs worldwide, the LHC was built to test various key predictions of high-energy physics by smashing proton beams together at high speeds.