The LHC is the proton-proton supercollider currently being installed in a 17 mile tunnel underneath the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva. The LHC and its two-general purpose experiments ATLAS and CMS present us with unprecedented challenges in terms of complexity and size in the field of high-energy physics. This talk will cover the technology and physics of the most violent events ever to be observed in the laboratory, the challenges of extracting new physics from a billion collisions per second, and the path from detection to discovery.