Few today can match 17th century mathematician and theologian Blaise Pascal’s deep grasp of the mysterious place of human beings in the immensity of creation. In his Pensées Pascal noted that the strange thing about human beings, is that they exist between two infinities, the infinitely large and the infinitely small, and they want to know both.

The odd thing—stranger than even Pascal could have imagined—is that we should have to look at the infinitely small to understand the infinitely large. That is the point of the Large Hadron Collider: to catch a glimpse of the “pieces” of the proton so that we can better understand the vast, intricate structure of the universe. Given the Big Bang, such a paradox makes sense. The universe unfolded from an infinitely small, infinitely dense point.

That is not the only paradox. The more we try to probe into either infinity—the great or small—the more elaborate, enormous, and expensive the machinery. There is something strikingly comical about the little round ball of a human eye peering through an enormous telescope toward the edges of the universe. But going in the direction of the other infinity, the disproportion is even more absurd. The Large Hadron Collider is an eight billion dollar, seventeen mile circular tunnel built under the border between Switzerland and France so that scientists can smash protons into each other in hopes of catching a glimpse of even smaller constituent shards after the collision just so they can then understand what might have happened the tiniest fraction of a second after the Big Bang.

And what will they find when it’s fired up to full speed? Here’s the exciting and humbling part. They don’t know what they will find. They don’t know what might happen.

They might create a black hole that destroys the Earth. They might have a peek into some other dimensions. They might set off some unforeseen chain-reaction that destroys a nice chunk of Europe. They might find out what happened to all the anti-matter, and why only matter was left. They could find solid evidence of the Higgs particle, and then we’d know where mass comes from. Or they could simply demolish any notion of the conjectured Higgs particle and several other lovely but merely theoretical constructions of physicists, and hence have to call for a big bonfire of suddenly obsolete textbooks. Perhaps nothing much will happen at all, and years of effort and piles of money will have been wasted.

They don’t know. That reveals as much about us as it does the universe.

About us. Despite the arrogance of some scientists, truthful scientists realize they don’t know everything. In fact, it is precisely at these great experimental junctures that they quietly and humbly reveal how little they know, and how much of the elegant architecture of the universe remains mysterious.

Yet—and this is even more revealing of the essence of human nature—what grand and absurd expense and impractical lengths we are willing to go to find out so something so little! In this respect, the Large Hadron Collider was a smashing success before they even fired it up. As an experiment it proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that human beings are not, as Marx, Darwin, and Freud would have it, defined by the simplest and lowest animal urges; rather, we are driven, almost to the point of madness by the desire to know everything, no matter what the danger or cost. We have an infinite and unearthly desire, entirely out of proportion to our size, to have God-like knowledge.

About the universe. It is a deeply, wonderfully, marvelously strange and still largely mysterious place. We know the effects of gravity but not what gravity is. We know that things have mass, but not why. We know from the effects of matter that there must be more of it, some kind of dark matter, but remain in the dark about it.

And what if they find something so surprising, so entirely outside the physicists’ theoretical box, that contemporary physics is shattered in more pieces than the colliding protons? Then once again we’ll know how much we don’t know of the infinite mysteries of the universe, and we’ll pick up the pieces and throw ourselves into this most human and humanizing endeavor.