The Cathedral of Science

 Panorama: An Enthralling Step Inside the Large Hadron Collider
Time, July 23, 2012

If physicists didn't sound so smart, you'd swear they were making half this stuff up. The universe began with a big bang called, well, the Big Bang. It's filled with wormholes and superstrings, dark matter and galactic bubbles, and assembled from little specks of stuff called fermions and leptons, top quarks and charm quarks, all of it glued together by, yes, gluons--and if you claim you understand a bit of it, you're probably lying too.

That's the trouble with particle physics: it exists on a plane that the brain doesn't visit--or at least most brains don't--and wholly defies our intuitive sense of order and reason, of cause and effect, of the very upness and downness of up and down. So we throw up our hands and turn it over to the scientists, and maybe every few years we read a Stephen Hawking book just to keep up appearances.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2119322,00.html#ixzz20p09A1T8