The universe we live in is approximately 14 billion years old and has undergone many phases of transformation. The exact laws of its structure and formation remain largely unknown to us. One way to understand them is to re-create the conditions of the early universe when the matter was very dense and hot. This can be achieved in our days using high energy particle accelerators and colliders. In this talk I will present big questions particle physicists are facing today and explain how we try to address them using the data from accelerators, such as the Tevatron at Fermilab and the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. This talk is part of the STEM Lecture Series.
