What does the Large Hadron Collider do?

1.11K views

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

23 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

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.

You are viewing 1 out of 23 answers, click here to view all answers.