The Large Hadron Collider sent its first beam of protons around a 27-kilometer underground ring on September 10, 2008, beneath the French-Swiss border near Geneva. Built by CERN over a decade with more than 10,000 scientists from over 100 countries, it remains one of humanity’s most ambitious collaborative experiments in understanding matter itself.
In 1920, British astrophysicist Arthur Eddington proposed a radical answer to why stars shine: hydrogen fusing into helium, releasing energy per Einstein’s E=mc². He made the leap before anyone knew stars were mostly hydrogen, and decades before physicists worked out how fusion actually happens. It was a guess that turned out to be right.
Galileo Galilei, in early 17th-century Italy, pointed a homemade telescope at the sky and began dismantling a thousand years of cosmic certainty. He spotted four moons circling Jupiter, watched Venus move through phases, and rolled balls down ramps to uncover the laws of motion. His habit of measuring rather than assuming became the backbone of modern science.
