"The fundamental scientific purpose of the LHC is to explore the inner structure of matter and the forces that govern its behavior, and thereby understand better the present content of the Universe and its evolution since the Big Bang, and possibly into the future. The unparalleled high energy of the LHC, which is designed to be 7 TeV per proton in each colliding beam, and its enormous collision rate, which is planned to attain about a billion collisions per second, will enable the LHC to examine rare processes occurring at very small distances inside matter. It will be a microscope able to explore the inner structure of matter on scales an order of magnitude smaller than any previous collider. The energies involved in the proton-proton collisions will be similar to those in particle collisions in the first trillionth of a second of the history of the Universe. By studying these processes in the laboratory, the LHC experiments will, in a sense, be looking further back into time than is possible with any telescope."