Kurt Andersen on the Large Hadron Collider

Vanityfair.com : Compared with the market-driven, killer-app insta-culture of the Digital Age, the new Large Hadron Collider exists in a near-magical realm, a $9 billion cathedral of science that is apparently, in any practical sense, useless.The LHC is an almost unimaginably long-term project. It was conceived a quarter-century ago, was given the green light in 1994, and has been under construction for the last 13 years, the product of tens of millions of man-hours.It’s also gargantuan: a circular tunnel 17 miles around, fitted out with more than $9 billion worth of steel and pipe and cable more reminiscent of Jules Verne than Steve Jobs.The believe-it-or-not superlatives are so extreme and Tom Swiftian they make you smile. The LHC is not merely the world’s largest particle accelerator but the largest machine ever built.The goal--and it’s a hope, a dream, a set of strong suspicions, rather than a certainty--is to achieve a deeper, better, truer understanding of the fundamental structure and nature of existence.In other words, it’s one of the most awesome scientific enterprises of all time, even though it looks like a monumental folly. Or else, possibly, the reverse.