LHC data: how it's made

In the Large Hadron Collider, protons become new particles, which become energy and light, which become data. Scientists have never actually seen the Higgs boson. They've never seen the inside of a proton, either, and they'll almost certainly never see dark matter. Many of the fundamental patterns woven into the fabric of nature are completely imperceptible to our clunky human senses. But scientists don't need to see particles to learn about their properties and interactions. Physicists can stud...