Mike Maney

Geeks. Pocket protectors. Propeller heads. Today, all of the playful, derogatory descriptors go away.

Scientists — explorers, more accurately — fired up the Large Hadron Collider to recreate conditions of the Big Bang. Do they know what they’ll find? They have ideas, but the excitement of what they don’t know they’ll find makes this a brave and important experiment. Teachers from kindergarten to college should take a minute today to highlight this ambitious scientific advancement, to use it as an example of why science is so vital to what makes us human, and to encourage their students to break through the boundaries of the possible to push the boundaries of what might be possible.