The New York Times: Next summer, the Large Hadron Collider, Europe's $9 billion investment in particle physics, will take a handful of ions, hurl them through 17 miles of circular tunnel and smash them together so hard they will shatter into the finest atomic shards anyone has ever observed. And if all goes according to plan, the glints and flashes from those shards will at last reveal the mysterious Higgs boson, the one particle that endows all others with the property of mass.