NPR

At CERN, Hunting For Invisible Worlds

With so many dedicated to solving nature's riddles at CERN, it's hard not to think of it as a modern cathedral, a link between reason and mystery, a place of pilgrimage, says blogger Marcelo Gleiser.
Source: Getty Images/iStockphoto

"Nature loves to hide."

This is how, more than 25 centuries back, the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus expressed the sense of mystery we all feel when we start pondering how the world works.

There seem to be hidden mechanisms, secret pacts between the things that make the world the world, from the smallest building blocks of matter to the neurons in our brains to the way the whole universe is stretching out in its inexorable expansion.

Science, at its loftiest, is about peering into these mysteries and so many more, trying to pry open some crack to let the light of reason shine in, illuminating nature's hidden ways. If nature loves to hide,

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