The CMS experiment is a general purpose detector which will record proton-proton interactions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva. Using the LHC, protons will be brought into head on collisions at the highest energies (14 TeV) ever achieved and will recreate the conditions just 10^-12 seconds (a million- millionth of a second!) after the "Big Bang" when the temperature was 10¹⁶ degrees. There are expected to be 1000 million collisions per second during operation.