the “new physics” being discovered at Cern.

Question

https://theconversation.com/evidence-of-brand-new-physics-at-cern-why-were-cautiously-optimistic-about-our-new-findings-157464

In: Physics

Answer 1

Imagine you’re throwing rocks in a pond.

You throw a rock, and make a few ripples.

You throw a different rock but harder, and it makes larger ripples.

You take a really heavy rock and throw it, and the ripples are really big even tough you couldn’t throw the rock as hard.

Year passes, and you think this is all there is, but then you go to summer camp and a kid who is older shows you a secret way to throw rocks: You want flat stones, and you want to throw them really fast but ” rotating sideways” and “away from you”. You don’t know what that means so the next time you go to a pond, you try and try and try and suddenly it happens: The rock doesn’t sink and makes ripples, but instead it skips along the water and makes a lot more ripples than the past rocks ever could.

Kind of the same thing, but instead of throwing rocks at ponds we are taking the smallest things we know of (protons), making them go really, *really* fast and watching what happens when they crash into each other.