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
The LHC is a place where scientists work, who are trying to discover what everything is made of.
Okay, you know that everything is made of atoms. Surely you know that. They teach everyone that. And you know atoms are made of atom pieces. You didn’t know that? Well now you do: atoms are made of pieces. People have known about three kinds of atom pieces for a long time now. Everything you can see and touch is made of these three kinds of things. Scientists knew exactly how they worked and life was good.
Well, it turns out there are more kinds. Way more kinds. Hundreds! But they’re extremely fragile which is why nobody saw them before. If you somehow manage to find one, it falls apart, all by itself, in a matter of nanoseconds. That’s a really really really short time. It’s too short to take a picture. So, you know, there aren’t any left any more. Of course nobody ever saw them.
But then, how do we know they exist? Well, we can make them. It turns out that if you get a lot of energy in one place it just sort of… converts itself into random *stuff*. All kinds of stuff. Atoms, radio waves, nuclear radiation, and bits of atoms, including the weird ones that fall apart by themselves. A good way to do it is to smash atoms or atom-pieces together really hard, which is what the LHC does.
Exploding stars also have lots of energy in one place, and they make lots of atom-pieces too, and sometimes those manage to get to our solar system and bump right into a scientist’s lab experiment. Because of Albert Einstein, things that are going really fast take longer to do anything, which is why they manage to go so far without falling apart. Before they invented hadron colliders, scientists used to do a lot of exploding-star-atom-piece-catching experiments.
—
We still can’t make pictures of them, but we don’t exactly need to. When the different atom-pieces fall apart they turn into other ones, and so on and so on, until eventually all that are left are the three usual ones that don’t fall apart, and maybe some flashes of light. By measuring what’s left at the end, and which direction it comes out, and how fast it’s going, and doing lots of these over and over, scientists do manage to work backwards and get a decently good idea of what happened.
—
So why are scientists studying these extra atom-pieces? Well, like I said, they are trying to discover what everything is made of. We thought it was atoms. It’s not atoms. It’s not even atom-pieces. Actually they have figured out that atom-pieces are made of atom-pieces-pieces, and they think there are exactly 17 different types. Is this the end of it? We don’t know yet.
Remember when the Higgs boson was in the news? That was the 17th one, the one that was hardest to see. Eventually they managed to see it. Not with their eyes, mind you, because they fall apart before you can take a picture, and they’re too small anyway. But they did enough experiments where they calculated that a Higgs boson had to have been there. That was really encouraging news because it meant the calculations were probably right.
They aren’t done with the research though. There is still stuff scientists don’t know. Why 17? Are we sure there aren’t atom-pieces-pieces-pieces? Does it go on forever? Probably not. And what about gravity? None of this says anything about gravity. It’s just missing. So weird. So the scientists keep looking.
Latest Answers