COSTRUCTION BIG BANG ATLAS, CERN in 3 minutes,

The future of particle physics is being built below ground, in a setting that's more appropriate for construction hardhats than lab coats. To get to the caverns where the world's most powerful particle collider is taking shape, you have to take an industrial-issue elevator down just one floor. But that floor is a doozy: It's about 100 meters below ground, roughly as deep as a 30-story building is tall.
The machines under construction in the depths are just as gargantuan: It's hard for any picture to capture the immensity of the ATLAS experiment's seven-story-tall, electronics-laden cylinder. You have to be there to get the full effect. So that's where we went today, and we've created three video postcards just to say "wish you were here."
ATLAS is just one of the four major experimental edifices placed around the 17-mile (27-kilometer) ring on the French-Swiss border - an underground tunnel that will be the home of the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC. Scientists from around the world have converged on CERN's facilities here in hopes of finding the answers to decades-old questions about the subatomic world.