This summer, under France and a bit of Switzerland, proton collisions of unprecedented force will offer fresh insight into the nature of matter. You'll find ­photos of the Large Hadron ­Collider in the article "The Making of a New Collider"; and in the article "The New Collider", Jerome ­Friedman discusses its importance. Friedman won the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physics for particle accelerator experiments confirming the existence of quarks, the elementary particles that make up protons and neutrons. This work was essential to the standard model of particle physics, which ­Friedman thinks the LHC can help physicists complete. He adds that "if history is a guide, the LHC will also turn up complete surprises, phenomena not antici­pated by any theoretical speculation."

History is a guide. It's also an echo chamber. In the November 1939 issue of Technology Review, MIT physics professor Philip M. Morse argued for more experimentation in particle physics, lest theory go untested. (The polymath Morse went on to organize the Anti-Submarine Warfare Operations Research Group, which helped the U.S. Navy destroy German U-boats; after the war, he turned operations research into a wide field of study.)