Whatever objects spring into being in the collider won't last long. They will be relatively big and thus inherently unstable and will quickly decay into more-familiar particles.
Some of these weird objects may travel as much as a millimeter or two before decaying, while others will travel less than the diameter of a proton before vanishing in a shower of quarks, gluons, electrons or neutrinos.
Because the detectors will produce millions of collisions every second, scientists will rely on huge clusters of computers to analyze the results. The computers will discard almost all the collisions, preserving only the most unusual for deeper analysis by humans.
Physicists aren't working completely in the dark. Extra dimensions, for example, could show themselves by the unusual paths the decaying particles take as they shoot off into the various layers of the detectors.
If all goes as planned, scientists say, the new collider is likely to become one of the greatest engines of discovery in history, far outstripping the Apollo moon missions and even Charles Darwin's monumental voyage aboard the Beagle.
"This is the elevator that will take us to the next floor" of discovery, Mangano said.
Explaining mass
The first big mystery to fall, theorists expect, will be the explanation for mass.
The theory is most often attributed to Scottish physicist Peter Higgs, who proposed about 40 years ago that the vacuum between the stars is not empty but made of a fabric that extends infinitely in all directions.
This fabric, which Mangano compared to the ether that the Victorians believed filled outer space, has come to be known as the Higgs field.
"There is something in the vacuum," Mangano said. "As a particle moves, it interacts with the vacuum and acquires mass." Some physicists compare this to a person walking on a dirt path after a rainstorm. As he walks, his boots get caked with mud.
If the Higgs field is real, physicists say, it should have a fundamental particle associated with it. Scientists have named the hypothetical particle the Higgs boson.
Fermilab's Tevatron spent years trying to find it. The Large Electron-Positron Collider at CERN saw tantalizing hints of the Higgs particle before it was shut down in 2000 for construction of the new collider.
Physicists are confident of the Higgs boson's existence but think that it is just too massive to be produced in smaller colliders.
