High Energy Physics (HEP) is the study of the smallest and most fundamental building blocks of nature on the scale of attometers and smaller. To study these objects and their interactions, the 27 km circumference Large Hadron Collider slams protons and ions together billions of times a second at immense speeds (~0.99999999c). So why are the tools for doing physics at such small scales so large? And how are such tiny interactions even measured? This talk will focus on the experimental realities of doing high energy physics at a hadron collider like the LHC. A crash course in some of the basic theoretical elements will be followed by a top to bottom discussion of the physics that experimentalists care about, how to produce it, how to measure it, and finally, how to interpret the results.
