Physical Society Colloquium

Searching for Answers at The Large Hadron Collider

Matt Strassler

Rutgers University

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's most powerful particle accelerator, has had a very successful year, collecting more than 100 times as much data as it did in its pilot run in 2010. The data is sufficient to allow particle physicists to begin addressing some long-standing profound questions about nature. In this talk I will introduce the LHC as a machine and as an enterprise, and explain briefly how science is done there. After outlining the profound questions that the LHC was meant to explore, I will provide a progress report on what has been learned this year, as well as describing the long road that lies ahead.