The LHC in a Snapshot; The Main Design Ideas of the Accelerator; A Matter of Cooling; Small Historical Summary: Before Particle Physics; The Beginning of the Particle Century; Relativity: A Short Encounter with Einstein; The Strange Quantum World: Particles, Waves and Uncertainties; What is Antimatter?; The Particle Zoo; They are Neutral, They are Small: Let's Call Them Neutrinos; Some Order in the Zoo and Force Unification; Let's Break the Symmetry with the Higgs Boson; Searching for New Physics; A Short Story of CERN; Main Principles of Particle Detectors; The LHC Detectors; What are We Searching for in the World's Largest Collider?; How Data Collected at the LHC are Analysed; The Higgs Boson Discovery; The Computing Infrastructure and Technological Spinoffs; The Human Aspects of the Big Collider; The Experience of Some LHC Physicists; What About the Next Large Collider?;