 About 14 billion years ago, the universe began in a cataclysmic explosion called the Big Bang. Since then, it's been expanding and cooling leading to the familiar universe of today. Scientists and philosophers have long wanted to understand in detail how the universe came into existence, and the best way to do that would be if we could somehow recreate the conditions here in laboratories. That goal has eluded us, well, until now. Turns out it's possible to turn back the clock and recreate the Big Bang here on Earth. At large physics laboratories, my colleagues and I collide subatomic particles traveling nearly at the speed of light. These collisions generate tremendous temperatures. These temperatures are 100,000 times hotter than the center of the sun. They are 10 times hotter than the center of a supernova, which is the explosion of a star that is so powerful that it briefly will outshine a galaxy of 100 billion stars and so bright that we can see it across half the cosmos. Now, that may sound like it might be dangerous, maybe we shouldn't be doing that. But it turns out to be a little misleading. The collisions between two protons at the highest energy particle accelerator we've ever built is about the same energy as two mosquitoes bonking into one another. And so, how do we get such high temperatures? We do that by concentrating the energy of those two mosquitoes hitting each other into a tiny volume, much, much smaller than that of a proton. Now, it's hard to get your head around such tiny volumes, and so I can give you another idea to get a sense of what the conditions are like at the center of these collisions. And to do that, we need to invoke the power of the sun. Now, I don't mean the energy that you feel when you're laying on the beach. I don't even mean the energy of the sun hitting the earth. I mean all of the energy of the sun. And I don't mean for a minute, a day, a month, a year, you need to have all of the energy of the sun for one million years. You need to collect it, store it, concentrate it into a volume the size of a basketball. Now, shrink yourself down to the size of P and jump inside the basketball, and that's what it's like at the center of these collisions. But don't do this at home. At these temperatures, energy and matter lose their identity with energy converting to matter and matter converting back into energy, just like Einstein said over 100 years ago. These temperatures have not been common in the universe since a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Remember, the universe is 14 billion years old, and we can recreate the conditions all the way back to a trillionth of a second after the beginning. This truly is the crucible of creation, the very foundry in which the universe itself was forged. The fact that humanity, that mankind can create, control and understand a matter under these conditions is a testament to the creativity and the imagination of the human mind. And if it doesn't make you just a little bit proud of your humanity, I don't know what will. So you might be wondering, what are we going to find in these big accelerators? And the first answer is I don't know. Well, it's okay. I'm in good company. Einstein said, if I knew the answer, it wouldn't be called research. However, I do know some things. I do know the questions we're going to ask. I know that we are going to be able to look farther back in time ever than before. I know we are going to understand the cause of mass in the universe. I know that we are going to be able to study the ultimate building blocks of the cosmos in finer detail than ever before. I know that whatever we do, we're going to write a new chapter in the book of knowledge. A book, by the way, whose first pages were penned over 2,000 years ago. Whatever we do, it's going to be awesome for the next couple of years. I'm incredibly excited. Thank you for your attention.