What does the Large Hadron Collider do?

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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.

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23 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

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.

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