The 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson was a sensational triumph -- the culmination of a 48-year-long search that put the finishing touches on the so-called "Standard Model" of particle physics. While the celebrations were still underway, researchers in China were making plans to continue the centuries-old quest to identify the fundamental building blocks of nature. More specifically, they began laying the groundwork for a giant accelerator -- up to 100 kilometers in circumference -- that would transport physics into a previously inaccessible, high-energy realm where a host of new particles, and perhaps a sweeping new symmetry, might be found.

The case for such an instrument is compelling: Even though the Standard Model can describe the behavior of particles with astounding accuracy, it is incomplete. The theory has little to say about the Big Bang, gravity, dark matter, dark energy, and other far-reaching phenomena.

This book explains how an ambitious new machine -- on the scale of China's proposed "Great Collider" -- could provide us with a fuller understanding of the origins of our universe and its most basic constituents.

With 29 pages of color photographs.

Steve Nadis is a graduate of Hampshire College and a Contributing Editor to Astronomy and Discover magazines. He has written or contributed to more than two dozen books, including The Shape of Inner Space and A History in Sum (which were also written with Shing-Tung Yau). Nadis has served as a staff researcher at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a science journalism fellow at MIT, and a consultant to the World Resources Institute, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the Harvard Mathematics and Physics Departments, and WGBH/NOVA. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Shing-Tung Yau is the William Caspar Graustein Professor of Mathematics and Professor of Physics at Harvard University, where he has served on the faculty since 1987. He is the winner of the Fields Medal, the National Medal of Science, the Crafoord Prize, the Veblen Prize, the Wolf Prize, and a MacArthur Fellowship. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, Yau has received honorary degrees from ten universities. He is also the director of six mathematical institutes in China. Yau has written and edited more than twenty books and is the editor of numerous mathematics journals. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.