The science of big machines did not start until Orlando Ernest Lawrence (1901-1958 ) moved to the Berkeley campus of the University of California in 1927. There, he invented the first few meters long spiral path particle accelerator called the cyclotron. Today, the biggest is known as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), straddling the Franco-Swiss border with a circumference of 27 kilometers and buried 100 meters below the ground. The energy output of the cyclotron is limited to accelerating protons to 80 000 electron volts. The energy output of the LHC for accelerating protons and antiprotons in opposite directions is higher than ten trillions electron volts, 8 orders of magnitude greater relative to the cyclotron. However, to simulate the energy output of the Big Bang at the epoch of one millionth pico pico picoseconds after the cosmic explosion, Planck energy of 10 to the nineteen GeV or 1 followed by 28 zeros electron volts is required. This is more than 14 orders of magnitude greater than the energy output of the LHC.

The compelling reason prompting the construction of bigger and bigger machines is to discover the ultimate structure of matter. Many believe this is the scalar spin zero Higgs boson. Topologically, this whole idea of bigger machines is the same as squeezing the entire universe into the size of a virus and then looking at it thru an electron microscope. Nonetheless, the key idea for understanding physical reality is that sizes (big or small) do not matter. The underlying topology of spacetime could never be analyzed simply by increasing or decreasing its size. This is the same as saying that directional properties of physical reality are truly independent of physical size. Moreover, since the square of the local infinitesimal spacetime curvature is inversely proportional to mass: ��=��/��² there is no compelling reason why basic scientific research should continue building bigger and bigger machine to understand elementary particles.