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
I worked on part of one of the detectors inside the LHC, here’s my crack at an answer.
We know a lot but not everything about what the smallest building blocks in our universe are “made of”. One way to find out is to smash them really hard together and try to study the pieces that they break into then. The pieces, do they have mass? Are hey heavy or light? Are they electrically charged? How many pieces of each type can we see in any particular smash?
To smash the smallest building blocks, together, **hard**, you first have to speed them up **really** fast and send them hurling towards each other and then make sure they crash. If you can make them go really really fast then smash them together at a specific place you control, you can then build a machine, a *detector*, around the crash place, to measure all the pieces that result from the smash.
This is what the LHC does: it is a large tunnel where the small building blocks (pieces of atoms, if you will) are pushed around and around by big magnets which make them go faster and faster, until they are sent to crash with each other (going in opposite directions) at specific places where detectors have been built.
Other people have worked out lots of different hypotesis for what we might see in different kind of crashes, and the output from the detectors in LHC is then checked against these hypotheses to see if they seem to fit, or not. Thus we can figure out which of the hypotheses might be true (because they match the output of the crashes) and should be worked on more to get closer to the truth about what is going on, and which must be wrong and so must be rejected.
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