I recently saw a Cleo Abrams video about particle accelerators and the lead scientist said that they use particle accelerators to create the building blocks for future innovations.
I’m sure advancements have been made only because particle accelerators exist but I don’t know any. Can someone highlight a direct influence particle accelerators have on our daily lives?
In: Physics
There are two simple particle accelerators, which were the first known.
The first are cathode ray tubes which led to the discovery of the electron, and later, major advances in a large number of fields, including radiography and medicine, and led to the first electronic computers, television, and later, transistors.
The second are certain radioactive elements such as uranium, thorium, and radium. I describe them as particle accelerators since they tend to randomly fling bits of nuclear shrapnel, usually alpha particles and electrons off into space at a significant fraction of the speed of light.. These led to the discovery of the nucleus and of subatomic particles.
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