New developments in  physics have the potential to radically revise our understanding of the world: its makeup, its evolution, and the fundamental forces that drive its operation. The Large Hadron Collider, which houses a 27 km ring accelerating protons to enormously high energies 100 meters underground, contains the most extensive and elaborate experiments ever built.  In this lecture I will explore the nature of  these experiments  and what  the tiny distances they will explore might teach us. I will also comment on searches for dark matter at the LHC and elsewhere.