There’s big news com­ing out of Europe today. After 16 years and $10 bil­lion, the Large Hadron Col­lid­er (LHC) is final­ly begin­ning to col­lide sub­atom­ic par­ti­cles. If you’re won­der­ing what this all means, let me turn your atten­tion to a year­long course that we’re offer­ing in Stan­ford’s Con­tin­u­ing Stud­ies pro­gram (my day job). New Rev­o­lu­tions in Par­ti­cle Physics is taught by Leonard Susskind, one of the world lead­ing physi­cists, and it takes a deep look at new the­o­ries in par­ti­cle physics that emerged dur­ing the 1970s, and how they’re now being test­ed by the LHC. The first course overviews the basic con­cepts, and you can watch it on YouTube or iTunes. (The first lec­ture appears above.) The sec­ond course will be soon made avail­able online. The third course is just get­ting under­way in the class­room (you can enroll here if you live near Stan­ford), and we’ll even­tu­al­ly post that course online as well. You can find more physics cours­es in the Physics sec­tion of our large col­lec­tion of Free Online Cours­es.

UPDATE: As Maria, aka @brainpicker notes in the com­ments, CERN (which runs the LHC) hosts an archive of lec­tures, movies and col­li­sion videos, includ­ing some of this morning’s suc­cess­ful tests. More here.

Big­Think asked Dr. Michio Kaku to sum up Ein­stein’s lega­cy in a nut­shell. Above, you get his attempt in a quick minute. Obvi­ous­ly, this is just begin­ning to scratch the sur­face, and know­ing you, you want to go deep­er. So here you go: Leonard Susskind, a world famous physi­cist, offered a series of six cours­es for Stan­ford Con­tin­u­ing Stud­ies, which traced the arc of mod­ern physics. It goes from New­ton to Black Holes. Nat­u­ral­ly a tour of mod­ern physics would­n’t be com­plete with­out spend­ing a good amount of time on Ein­stein, and that’s what Susskind does. One course (runs about 20 hours) is ded­i­cat­ed to Spe­cial Rel­a­tiv­i­ty (iTunes – YouTube) and the oth­er focus­es exclu­sive­ly on Ein­stein’s The­o­ry of Gen­er­al Rel­a­tiv­i­ty (iTunes — YouTube). This series of cours­es (all per­ma­nent­ly found in the Physics sec­tion of our Free Online Course col­lec­tion) has been enjoyed by view­ers across the world, and we (at Stan­ford) have recent­ly shipped CDs of the course to remote places with min­i­mal band­width, includ­ing Nepal and Afghanistan. For more on how to learn physics online (for free, of course), see our post: Mod­ern Physics: A Com­plete Intro­duc­tion.