By now, most people who are on the internet as much as I am (admitting you have a problem is the first step) have no doubt run across talk of the so called “doomsday machine” set to fire up later this year. No, I’m not talking about this doomsday machine, but the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that lies under the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland.

Known as “the world’s largest and the highest-energy particle accelerator”, the LHC is a $4.7 billon investment that aims to recreate the few fleeting moments directly after the “Big Bang”. Whether you agree or disagree with the reasoning behind the experiment, it’s hard not to marvel at the images that have started trickling out of the LHC headquarters as it nears completion. They are simply stunning and mark human and technical achievements that are hard to overlook. Here are just a few of the pictures we found compelling, but you can view all in the LHC set here:

We hope you appreciate the beautiful achievements in these pictures as much as we have. We also hope that you plan to celebrate the night before we may or may not be molecularly ripped apart and sucked in to the darkness of space! Either way, we plan on partying like it doesn’t microscopic matter and we hope you do too!