Among the defining attributes of now are ever tinier gadgets, ever shorter attention spans, and the privileging of marketplace values above all. Life is manically parceled into financial quarters, three-minute YouTube videos, 140-character tweets. In my pocket is a phone/computer/camera/video recorder/TV/stereo system half the size of a pack of Marlboros. And what about pursuing knowledge purely for its own sake, without any real thought of, um, monetizing it? Cute.

And so in our hyper-capitalist flibbertigibbet day and age, the new Large Hadron Collider, buried about 330 feet beneath the Swiss-French border, near Geneva, is a bizarre outlier.

The L.H.C., which operates under the auspices of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by its French acronym, cern, 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, punctuated by shopping-mall-size subterranean caverns and 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 L.H.C. is not merely the world’s largest particle accelerator but the largest machine ever built. At the center of just one of the four main experimental stations installed around its circumference, and not even the biggest of the four, is a magnet that generates a magnetic field 100,000 times as strong as Earth’s. And because the super-conducting, super-colliding guts of the collider must be cooled by 120 tons of liquid helium, inside the machine it’s one degree colder than outer space, thus making the L.H.C. the coldest place in the universe.

If all has gone according to plan, the physicists at cern by late November will have flipped a switch, and proton beams in each of two pipes will have started shooting around the ring, one beam clockwise and the other counterclockwise, at an energy level of 3.5 trillion electron volts, several times that of the current most-powerful-particle-accelerator-ever-built. And then, any day now, the L.H.C.’s proton streams will be forced to begin colliding head on, at a combined energy of seven trillion electron volts, producing up to 800 million collisions per second.

So many years, so much effort, so much money and matériel, so much energy and cutting-edge ingenuity. And yet the wizards at the controls aren’t really out to produce anything practical, or solve any urgent human problem. Rather, the L.H.C. is, essentially, a super-microscope that will use the largest energies ever generated to examine trillionth-of-a-millimeter bits of matter and record evanescent blinks of energy that last for only trillionths of a trillionth of a second. It’s also a kind of time machine, in the sense that it will reproduce the conditions that prevailed 14 billion years ago, giving scientists a look at the universe as it existed a trillionth of a second after the big bang. 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.

The Quench

When the proton beams start shooting around, it will in fact be for the second time. The On buttons of the new super-collider were first punched on September 10, 2008, and for a while everything was going extraordinarily well. The start-up had been preceded by some well-publicized hysteria on the fringes, with alarmists worrying that the L.H.C. would create a black hole that could swallow the earth. (The fear is unfounded.) There was also a cern subplot in Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons, in which Illuminati steal anti-matter from the L.H.C. in order to evaporate the Vatican. (Also not a concern—it would take an impossible amount of time and energy to produce enough anti-matter to make a bomb.) On September 10, the physicists at cern could not have been more pleased. Within 50 minutes of the start-up the proton beams were firing perfectly. Plus, says Dave Barney, a British physicist who has devoted his professional life to the collider, “the world hadn’t been destroyed. So that was nice.”