Abstract:

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will begin taking data this year and will for the first time directly explore of the TeV energy scale. This talk is an attempt by a particle theorist to convey the significance and excitement of this experiment. Theoretical attempts to understand the mysteries of physics at the TeV scale have led to at least three compelling but mutually exclusive scenarios for fundamental physics, and the LHC will give us direct information about which (if any) of them is correct.