What exactly are scientists looking for by using the world’s largest particle accelerator? As it turns out, they’re looking for anything. Marjorie Shapiro is a collaborator at the Large Hadron Collider and physics professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She says that aside from the high profile experiments like the Higgs boson and dark matter, there’s a lot of other physics going on as well.

"In some sense, it’s like a telescope. You build a telescope and then you decide what are you going to point it at and you can do lots of different science depending on what you point it at. We collect a lot of data from these proton collisions, and we can look at the data in different ways in order to understand different things about physics."

Shapiro explains that the protons are smashed together in order to create particles that existed in the early universe. But she also says that you never know what you might find.

"I hope that in a couple of years, we’ll be able to come back and say, we found something that none of us expected to see."