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
It smashes tiny stuff together to see it break into smaller pieces and occasionally very briefly recombine into some entirely different tiny stuff. All this to see and learn and check theories of what the reality is made of.
What stuff comes out different depends on how hard you smashed the tiny stuff in the first place. And the LHC just got upgraded to be able to smash tiny stuff even harder, harder than ever before.
It’s a set of *really good microscopes* and a huge machine to make really small stuff to look at with them.
The problem with an analogy is that there is something fundamental going on that is never observed in “real life”.
If I could throw two pillows together very, very fast and what was produced wasn’t feathers but a complete kitchen utensil set and matching cutlery then you would be very surprised. You would say how could feathers turn into metal? Or ceramics?
But this is what happens in the scales of the very small that the LHC deals with. It collides very fundamental building blocks of nature, at close to the fastest speed nature allows, and new things come out. *These new things are not smaller components of the things we are colliding.*
We then have cameras, as large as cathedrals, that surround the places where these collisions occur, and try and piece together the after state. (We know the before state because we precisely know what we are colliding together and how fast they are going.)
simple:
Smash tiny things together at very very high speed using big magnets to see what the hell happens.
Usually ends up with them discovering new things, getting nobel prizes and stuff.
less simple: Using magnets u can accelerate charged particles, these particles can absorb an immense amount of energy, so when they crash so much energy is released that it creates new matter (E=MC^2), some of this matter being rare and special.
It smashes the building blocks of everything around you together, so scientists can see what happens, what energy and what smaller blocks pop out, what they do, and a bunch of other stuff.
I have figured out 2 things by looking at the results from. The LHC.
1st – they look pretty cool and I don’t know anything about the physics behind reading and interpreting the results.
2nd – the LHC is doing blackmagicfukery that will result in us figuring out stuff….lots of stuff…maybe…maybe not, who am I to say, I’m just a millwright that fixes machines with ever ascending levels of hammer size not an astro physicist or scientist.
Everything is made up of really tiny pieces of stuff. I mean really tiny. Like mind-boggling tiny. These tiny pieces of stuff do different things.
The tiny pieces don’t like being alone and will clump together with other tiny pieces really really really fast.
The best way to see what the tiny pieces do is to smash slightly larger pieces together to break them into tiny pieces.
In order to see the tiny pieces you have to have a bunch of tools to measure what the tiny pieces do in a place that you can also smash together the slightly larger pieces.
The LHC is the best machine in the world at smashing the slightly larger pieces together to make tiny pieces in a place that they also have tools to see what the tiny pieces do.
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.
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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.
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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.
Broadest definition:
You know how we discovered fire? Just started banging rocks and boom! Fire!
Well, we know atoms exist. We now know even smaller stuff exists. So we bang those stuff together to see what happens. And seeing what happens can help us understand how it all works.
It is large, because you need to speed these things up(really really fast) because naturally they don’t like colliding with each other.
It is hadron, because they’re called hadrons.
It’s a collider, because it’s colliding.
We’re just trying to understand what everything is made of, down to the smallest building blocks, and the only way we know how is by smashing things together to see what comes out. The Large Hadron Collider does just that: makes things go fast, smash them together, then monitor the result.
Small aside, it’s funny you should say Greek because scientists love using Greek letters to call things (alpha particles, beta particles), so it actually sounds like Greek to everyone 😎
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