But you—at your most frazzled, sleep-deprived, raccoon-eyed best—you can try. You can squint at the layers of abstraction and see through them. Peel back the nice ergonomic type-safe, pure, lazy, immutable syntactic sugar and imagine the mess of assembly the compiler pukes up.
The emergency copper quench conductors the thickness of my arm were pretty cool to see.
You got to realize they've built a giant circular vacuum tube surrounded by superconducting magnetic jackets that can steer and accelerate a particle beam (actually two going opposite directions), and giant cameras/calorimeters that image photons and other decaying particles from the beam collisions on the micrometer spatial scale. Each component individually may not be grand of scale and complexity but when taken as a whole it works together in amazing ways.
