Everything you need to know about the Large Hadron Collider

Elation when the Large Hadron Collider went online. Sadness when a major glitch caused a helium leak, because now the system won’t be back online until the spring.

The LHC is huge. I mean, I’ve toured the Stanford Linear Accelerator, which is an impresive 2 miles long. The LHC has a circumference of 17 miles. That’s seriously big.

Wondering what the LHC is all about? Want to know why smashing counter-rotating streams of hadrons (large subatomic particles made up of quarks) into each other at temperatures colder than outer space is important to physics?

Just watch this five-minute video. It’s Educational! It’s Science! It’s the Large Hadron Rap! (It was written and produced by Kate McAlpine, aka Alpinekat, a researcher on the ATLAS project at the LHC.)