Hard to DisCERN.

ALICE in Wonderland.

St Genis-Pouilly, France — We press our individualized keys to the instrument panel and step, one-by-one, into a tight glass box, waiting for the light to go green and for the door to close behind us with a thud.

And for the one in front to open.

The security system at CERN is very sensitive, rejecting me several times before spitting me out the other side. Today, we're excused from retina scans.

Bobbing along in blue hardhats, we drop 100 metres into the Earth, where scientists are trying to better understand how the universe formed, what it's made of and how it works.

Watch out for collisions.

Frankly, physics and philosophy have always tended to be my downfall, twisting my brain into another dimension. So, it goes without saying that theoretical physics flies by me at the speed of the particles that race around the accelerator here. That said, there was still no way I was going to pass up this opportunity to take a field trip to the birthplace of the world wide web and home to the discovery of the Higgs boson.

We started at the ALICE experiment, learning about quark-gluon plasma and how scientists used the equipment to recreate conditions that existed one millisecond after the Big Bang. Eventually, they hope to get to an n of zero.

How does this thing handle in the corners?

By smashing heavy ions at nearly the speed of light, the 2012 experiment produced the highest human-made temperature (5.5 trillion Kelvin) in the universe.

We've had the extremely unique opportunity to descend into the Large Hadron Collider itself, which is very rarely open to the public. Most scientists, we're told, can't even get in. It helps that we know people, and that it will be shut for two years for a facelift.

Physically, it's just a 27-kilometre-long circular tunnel lined with pipes and instruments. More practically, however, it's where discovery of the Higgs boson and other breakthroughs have been made possible. It's a scientific juggernaut.

And a giant (faster-than-a) bullet train for particles.

It's a humble, yet humbling place.