The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, began smashing particles at record energies in March 2010 after more than two decades of planning and construction. The first high-energy collisions kicked off the search by more than 8,500 physicists for answers to some of the most profound mysteries of our universe. This symposium will introduce the LHC project and the international collaboration of scientists, researchers, students, and technicians who built and operated the accelerator and particle detectors. Scientists representing the LHC’s four major experiments will present some of the first scientific results from the collider. These first results will begin to address questions such as: How did the universe come to be? Are there undiscovered principles of nature? What is the origin of mass? Do extra dimensions exist? What is dark matter? What happened to the antimatter?