The world’s largest high-energy particle accelerator is 27 kilometers in circumference, beating the world’s second largest high-energy particle accelerator by 21 kilometers. The world’s second largest high-energy particle accelerator is somewhere in Illinois and called Tevatron, which sounds like a robot butler. The world’s largest high-energy particle accelerator is located on the Franco-Swiss border and called the Large Hadron Collider, which sounds like it was hauled in from some distant, crazy galaxy for the express purpose of killing The Avengers.

Listening to the physicists talk about the Higgs Boson particle, I understand every sixth word. I get protons. I can roll with protons for a while, all positive charged, not like neutrons. Neutrons have no charge. I remember that. But Brian Cox doesn’t spend much time on protons in his TED Talk, where he explains why it is totally badass and necessary to build this machine and recreate the conditions present less than a billionth of a second after the Big Bang, where he explains that certain elements are “very strong candidates for the dark matter,” as if becoming dark matter is like some sort of promotion, where I drink my beer in front of my computer and nod and pretend that I now know all about dark matter.

They call Brian Cox the rock star physicist because he wears a tailored black blazer and has a Beatles haircut that is totally working for him; because he is 44 but looks 25, perhaps the secret side effect of prolonged exposure to super magnets; because he can explain these things to people like they’re five without sounding anything but boyish and enthusiastic. He shows me the maniacal formulas in the Higgs Papers. He points to them and says, “See? It’s the unknown but necessary variable for these formulas to work. There has to be something there that gives all existence mass.” And I say to myself, “Sounds good.”

Further down the YouTube rabbit hole, to the other physicist, this time in the BBC interview, a wrathful physicist god to Brian Cox’s benevolence. He looks like some future person: bald and olive skinned, ambiguous accent, the eventual culmination of races. He takes a moment after every question the reporter must ask for our sake, stopping himself from saying, “Did I stutter? Exactly what part of the term ‘God Particle’ fails to resonate with you?” He tosses super symmetry theories into the air and lets them scatter like change. He waves away the rumors that the LHC could inadvertently create a black hole, eradicating life in an instant. But notice the smirk, as if to say, “But isn’t it cool that maybe we could?” He then drinks a vial of glowing elixir and partakes in human flight.

I like to imagine the army of PhDs, 10,000 strong, from 85 countries, buried deep with their machine. On September 30, 2009, just before the LHC shot off its protons, I see the men unshaven, shirt sleeves rolled up, chain smoking and sleeping in shifts; the women scrambling to find the pens that have been resting behind their ears, pens used to mark checklists and also puncture second holes on the top of Diet Coke cans to increase air flow, the way they taught their children to do during school lunches. And when the LHC circulated energy at 1.18 TeV per beam, which is apparently a lot more TeV per beam than Tevatron’s previous record of 0.98, everyone calls their wives and husbands and tells them not to wait up.

I do not understand the science of the thing. What turns me on, what I envy in them all, is the charge: the insatiable curiosity, the specificity of vision, the ability to simultaneously discover and create. Millions of years ago, man cut open a mammal and held its heart, placing his other hand over the beating in his chest. Then, one morning before primary school, Brian Cox crept down the stairs into his kitchen to see if the red dye had, in fact, made its way up the veins of the celery stick. Later still, I crept down the stairs to finish off the bag of Cheetos. Now physicists are colliding particles at the speed of light in order to isolate the variable they believe gives meaning and context to literally everything ever, a variable they themselves created. Then they proved it had been there all along. The hypothesis was correct. The math: sound. We exist as we thought.