BECAUSE ALL SCIENCE IS PREMISED ON INTELLIGENT DESIGN:

A Big Bang... of Innovation: At the site of the world's most powerful accelerator, physicists aim to recreate the Big Bang. Innovation is an unexpected--but welcome--by-product (Bruno Giussani, 2/08/07, Business Week)

[M]odern particle physics is based on a "standard model" that explains the interaction between the building blocks of matter. All the particles in this model have been discovered, except for the Higgs, which is why it's target No. 1 of the LHC. Scientists hope that by re-creating the conditions of those first fractions of a second after the Big Bang (when it is supposed everything in the universe was weightless), they will then be able to observe the first appearance of mass--in the form of the Higgs, if the hypothesis is correct.

Hence, if successful the LHC experiment will reveal the origins of mass. And it may uncover more. For example: Why is the force of gravity so weak that we can lift an apple off a plate even if the whole Earth is pulling in the opposite direction?

So what happens if, after all this effort, they don't find the Higgs? Would that qualify as a failure? "Not really. We would still learn a lot," says Wengler, and the first lesson would be that some of today's physics theories would need serious reconsideration, for the Higgs is the glue that keeps the whole theoretical construct together. (The only scenario that Wengler would call "catastrophic" is that of a beam of protons going out of control, and spinning out of the tunnel. However, he's quick to say that it would likely travel a couple hundred meters at most and end up punching a hole in a rock, the energy dissipating into the ground. "There would be no risk for people," he adds, but "it would wreck our machine.")