The Large Hadron Collider is the biggest, and by far the most powerful, machine ever built. A project of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, its audacious purpose is to re-create the immensely hot and dense conditions that existed some 13.7 billion years ago within the first trillionth of a second after the fiery birth of our universe. In telling the story of one of the most anticipated experiments in the history of science, Present at the Creation takes us inside the control rooms at CERN at key moments when an international team of top researchers begins to discover whether this multibillion-euro investment will fulfill its spectacular promise. Through the eyes and words of the men and women who conceived and built CERN and the LHC--and with the same clarity and depth of knowledge that he demonstrated in Fermat's Last Theorem, Amir D. Aczel enriches his readers with a firm grounding in the scientific concepts we will need to understand and appreciate the most remarkable scientific collaboration since the Manhattan Project. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the biggest, and by far the most powerful, machine ever built. A project of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, its audacious purpose is to re-create, in a 16.5-mile-long circular tunnel under the French-Swiss countryside, the immensely hot and dense conditions that existed some 13.7 billion years ago within the first trillionth of a second after the fiery birth of our universe. In Present at the Creation, Amir D. Aczel takes us inside the control rooms, as an international team of researchers begins to discover whether a multibillion-euro investment will fulfill its promise- to find empirical confirmation of theories in physics and cosmology. Through the eyes and words of the men and women who conceived and built CERN and the LHC, Aczel enriches all of us with a firm grounding in the scientific concepts necessary to appreciate fully the stunning July 4, 2012 discovery of the Higgs Boson. Newly updated in the wake of the discovery, Present at the Creation tells the story of perhaps the greatest experiment in the history of science.