What is the purpose of particle acceleration and why do we need to accelerate particles instead of viewing them in their current “normal” state?
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There are many different kinds of particle accelerators used for many different purposes. The majority are actually used for medicine or engineering. You can do all kinds of things with streams of high-energy radiation, such as destroying cancer cells, studying the structure of materials, or doping silicon to make semiconductors.
If you’re talking about why they’re needed for certain kinds of fundamental physics research, there are a few reasons. You can infer certain things about particles from how they move and interact at high speed. For example, the way they move in a magnetic field can tell you about their charge and mass. Some particles have such short lifetimes that if you want to do anything with them, you need them to move fast. More importantly, colliding particles with each other can create new kinds of particles. Some of these particles exist around us but are much easier to study if you create large numbers of them under controlled conditions. Others can’t be found on earth – they will be produced in the much higher-energy conditions found in stars, but will fail to penetrate our atmosphere.
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