Hey friends!
Most days I wake up and I’m able to tie my shoes without having to look up the manual so I have that going.
Concerning the Collider, imagine I know zero scientific terms and you don’t say stuff like “protons” or “particles”. Most P words are most likely banned.
I’m happy with the broadest, vaguest definition because the nitty gritty details are like Greek to me.
In: 33
they smash particles together really hard, really fast in an attempt to catch sight of exotic particles that are almost impossible to locate naturally. they do this because they’re hoping that these elusive quantum particles will help broaden and define our understanding of quantum physics, which will in turn help us understand more clearly how the universe functions.
It uses high powered magnets to accelerate beams of particles into each other at incredibly high speeds. For reasons I won’t go into, this enables physicists to study the underlying structure to phisics.
The Large Hadron Collider makes really, really small things move really, really fast. So fast that when they hit eachother they break down into the even smaller pieces that they are made out of.
Explain the most complicate machine in the world to a 5 year old is not easy.
let me have a try:
The LHC shoots two beams of energy in a huge circle in opposite directions at very very very high speeds and lets them collide at one point to then observe what happens during/after the collision to find out why anything exists.
We’ve learned that atoms are like buildings made of Lego, they are a thing, but they are also made up much smaller things built on each other.
All those smaller things are complicated but they are all the banned “P” words, just think of them as tiny Lego bricks that are usually assembled into a spaceship, or a racecar, or a castle.
The collider is like a 4 year old smashing the spaceship into the racecar. This does two things, it sprays out all the Lego bricks and we see them and pick them up and learn about Lego bricks that way, how big they are, how much they weight, how they attach to other Lego bricks, etc.
They also sometimes combine into new things, sometimes you smash a racecar and a castle and you get a pile of Lego bricks, but you also get a small house by pure chance. There’s stuff to be learned from that as well. For example, you might *think* Lego houses exist, but if you get one from the smash you realize that A. they do actually exist and B. what Lego bricks it requires to build a house.
That’s the gist of it. In lieu of a 4 year old they have a big machine that uses super powerful magnets that spin the atoms in loops on and on and on until they super dooper fast and then SMASH! Pick up the bricks.
EDIT – for those confused about “the banned P words” in OPs prompt, before it disappeared, they specifically requested a response that didn’t into all the different particles. They banned the “p”article words.
REmember those hot wheels crash tracks?
it’s like that, but with particles instead of cars, going much faster, but the aim is to make a weird unusual car by smashing them together really hard.
Hadrons are some of the (really small) main things that make up stuff.
The LHC takes big ones, and smashes them together really, really, hard.
Detectors then look very closely at what comes out of the crash.
There are certain rules in physics about what must come out of a collision depending on what went in (some things must stay the same). So scientists know what went in (they did the smashing together), they try to recognise some of the things that come out (because they know what these things look like and how they behave), and they use this to figure out what *else* came out of the collision that they don’t already know about.
And hopefully, eventually, some of those other things are new, interesting things they didn’t already know about or hadn’t already seen.
It is kind of like taking big rocks and smashing them into each other to look for interesting smaller minerals or patterns inside them. Most of the time you’ll just get boring bits of rock, but occasionally something exciting will come out.
If you wanted to see what was inside a radio, you could drop it off a tall building and look at the stuff that comes out. If you wanted to see what was inside a particle (sorry, but there’s just no getting around this one. They’re literally called particle accelerators) you could use a bunch of electromagnets to make one go really fast and smash it into another particle and look at the stuff that comes out.
Sidebar question – I remember when the LHC was coming on line years ago, and the internet was saying that a black hole could be created, and of course people who do not fully understand how things work, panicked. I was one of those people who don’t understand how it works, but presumed the panic was stupid and unjustified simply because I don’t think we live in a world (yet) where mad scientists want to destroy humanity to get an answer to a question.
So was there actually any legitimate concern about the LHC unintentionally “creating a black hole”?
Remember when you were a kid and it was fun to take something and smash it on the ground to see it shatter into pieces? Remember how sometimes you’d throw it on the ground and it didn’t break, so you picked it back up and threw it even harder?
That’s what the Large Hadron Collider does. The things it’s trying to shatter into pieces are really, really, strong at keeping themselves from shattering, so the LHC uses magnets to get the things moving really, really, fast in order to smash them together as hard possible in order to shatter them into the smaller pieces that make them up. Scientists then study these smaller pieces for science.
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