Collider

Category: Physics
"By early 2011, [Fermilab's Tevatron] will have recorded enough data to either find the Higgs or rule it out. -New Scientist, August 2009
Sure, there's a whole lot of well-deserved hoopla about the LHC, the world's #1 particle accelerator in terms of energy!
Fermilab has been operating since the 1970s, and has been responsible for many of the most outstanding discoveries in the history of particle physics. Remember the standard model?
The standard model tells us that the most fundamental things in nature are the things that make up normal matter (six quarks and six leptons), the things that carry forces (the four gauge bosons), and the thing that gives everything else mass (the Higgs). This was first proposed and worked out in the late 1960s/early 1970s by Steven Weinberg and others, and has been the most rigorously verified physical theory ever!
How has Fermilab helped? For starters, Fermilab's was the accelerator where the bottom quark, top quark, and tau neutrino were discovered. It's the place where CP-violation, an intrinsic difference between matter and antimatter (and the thing that allows our Universe to have more matter than antimatter), was first directly observed, and it's the only place that's ever precisely measured the masses, lifetimes and widths -- or intrinsic uncertainty of masses -- of the highest energy particles in the Universe.

... stuff with mass. As the Universe expands, the matter density dilutes. You may remember that density is just mass over volume, and so as the volume increases, the energy decreases.
When this happens, the energy can nearly all go into producing new particles!
So that's the first big advantage to having a collider. The second is that you can control where these collisions occur, and so you can choose a collision point and build a giant detector around it! What do I mean by "giant detector?" There are two. There's the CMS detector (the "C" stands for Compact, believe it or not):