The chase for the Higgs boson is about to get bigger, faster, and costlier—but we need it

I’ll admit it: I love Big Science. Experiments at epic proportions, particularly when they involve exploration into other universes, dimensions, and scales, are hard to resist. This past week on a visit to Geneva, I had the chance to get up close to an icon of Big Science, the 17-mile wide particle accelerator run by CERN, also know as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). One of the biggest scientific construction projects in history, this pan-European particle physics research center is so large it stretches across the Franco-Swiss border and is home to 10,000 scientists. While it was amazing from many angles, it may not be the biggest science we yet attempt.