The LHC and the Higgs Boson (but its early in the game)

Buried 100m below the French / Swiss countryside, between the Alps and the Jura Mountains, is a 27km tunnel housing the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. This chain of superconducting magnets accelerates protons to high energies and then collides them in four different underground halls. Inside these halls are enormous, highly complex particle detectors, each bearing millions of electronic channels, and designed to reconstruct the remnants of the collisions. The talk describes the LHC, the detectors, the collaborations that built and run them, and the motivation for their existence. It also presents some of the more recent accomplishments, such as the discovery of the Higgs Boson, and then discusses the resonance that such basic research can strike with the public, arguably due to its recognition as a fundamental component of our existence. The talk concludes by describing methods currently employed to exploit this opportunity to inform and educate the public in an interactive manner.