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In spite of what you may have heard, I am not a genius, nor have I ever claimed to be (at least not since I was 17 and some young winner of the Nordic Combined was batting her eyelashes at me). I am not a physicist. I know nearly nothing of quantum mechanics, string theory, or Star Trek’s Heisenberg Compensator. Some time ago, as I contemplated a premise for a novel that could possibly involve scientific fact and theory so far past my meager knowledge as to fade into the far distance, a friend suggested I look into the massive, multi-billion-dollar Large Hadron Collider that lurks below the surface of the earth across the border of Switzerland and France. It has been built in the hopes of answering some really big questions. I looked into it. It frightens me.
