From the NYT piece by Lawrence M. Krauss.

“The physicist Victor F. Weisskopf — the colorful director in the early 1960s of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which operates the collider — once described large particle accelerators as the gothic cathedrals of our time. Like those beautiful remnants of antiquity, accelerators require the cutting edge of technology, they take decades or more to build, and they require the concerted efforts of thousands of craftsmen and women. At CERN, each of the mammoth detectors used to study collisions requires the work of thousands of physicists, from scores of countries, speaking several dozen languages.”

Read the rest of the article here.