Switzerland is the land of Big Ideas, where even the streets have Nobel prizes. At the European particle physics lab known as CERN, the roads through campus bear the names of Einstein, Curie, Bohr, and Heisenberg. Working amid those tributes to giants of the past century, physicists from around the world are trying to make history of their own and revolutionize their field. This article reports that late next month, if all goes as planned, the physicists will start up a machine called the Large Hadron Collider. Two decades in the making, at a cost of some $10 billion, the particle-smashing project carries the hopes of a generation of scientists. The collider has been billed as the largest experiment ever conducted. It is certainly the most important experiment of any kind in the past century, without qualification. Even at the mundane level of budgets and bodies, the collider shatters records. About 10,000 researchers--including some 1,600 from 86 universities and seven national laboratories in the United States--are working on the project. Built underground, the collider occupies a 17-mile-long tunnel spanning the Swiss-French border. The machine will smash together protons with so much violence that it will mimic what the universe was like when it was a mere trillionth of a trillionth of a second old.