Hello everyone!
I have been watching the show young sheldon and there, Dr. Sturgis (a physics professor) said that he was working on a supercollider. But what is that? What is it exactly and what effects or impacts does it have on us?
(I am not really good in physics, just interested in the topic so a simple explanation would be appreciated if possible).
In: Physics
A particle collider (super or otherwise) is an electromagnetic gun. Normally this gun is engineered as a circle, but there are linear colliders as well, that boost particles such as protons in opposite directions to very close to the speed of light. When a signal triggers a certain gate to open, the two particle streams are directed into one another, forcing them to collide. No two particles are likely to collide at all in this attempt, but given the sheer number of particles involved, collisions do happen. This is not unlike a lottery being guaranteed an eventual winner due to the sheer number of people involved. Those extremely rare collisions literally sheer apart the particles into more fundamental constituents, which are then trapped in a very strong magnetic field. The physical interaction of these fundamental particles with that magnetic field inform us about the particle’s properties and how they fit into our mathematical understanding of particle physics, allowing us to create better theories, more accurate equations, and ultimately more predictions about what should and should not exist. It is all in an effort to understand the fabric of our universe, and indeed of reality itself.
One common method to investigate the physics of very small particles is to accelerate them and “smash” them into each other. This results in the particles breaking up into smaller pieces which can then be studied in detail.
This kind of investigation requires a lot of energy directed into a very small space. This is what a particle accelerator does. It is a large piece of equipment that is used to accelerate small particles like protons or electrons to very high speeds before smashing them into each other.
The term supercollider is used to describe the largest types of this equipment. The current largest one is called the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) located in Switzerland. It is in the shape of a ring with a circumference of 27km.
Given that they remain on the forefront of modern physics, it’s a bit difficult to truly convey what they are in an ELI5 format, but let’s see where we end up here.
Essentially, a “super collider” is just what the name implies – it collides things. Super fast. Typically, these things are protons and the “super fast” means extremely close to the speed of light. Typically, this is done by arranging powerful magnets in a large circle (as in ~4km radius in the case of the LHC), and then using those magnets to accelerate the protons to these incredible speeds. However, the speed isn’t really the point, the sheer energy you put into them is. Due to some physics stuff that this Einstein guy droned on about, you can put effectively infinite energy into something by speeding it up, because it’ll just keep speeding up towards the speed of light without ever reaching it. And then, well, you make a bunch of them collide. And by “a bunch” we’re talking trillions. You know, so that you actually get some to collide, since it turns out that’s not actually so easy with small things moving fast. Try hitting a bullet, mid-flight, with another bullet. Tricky stuff. So they just fire trillions and there you go. And when they collide, the sheer energy of that collision breaks them apart into more fundamental parts. The details here go into very deep physics very quickly, so let’s take a more macro look. In a way, you could think of it as cracking nuts to see what’s inside. Smashing them together is just a convenient way of figuring that out.
As for the effects and impacts – well, pretty much nothing. Knowledge. Fundamental research like this tends to be utterly useless until, one day, it suddenly isn’t. Let’s bring back Einstein again, take the discovery of the photoelectric effect. It’s some nonsense about electrons and photons and crap, who cares, does nothing. But a hundred years later, we have hundreds of categories of optics technology that directly came from that discovery. For all we know, this research will never lead to anything other than a deeper understanding of useless physics. But it also may not. Typically, whenever we discovered new physics, there turned out to be incredible uses for it. That may hold true, or it may not, but that’s one of the things these enormous machines are supposed to find out.
However, these things, at the very least, always lead to new insights in engineering. Because building these insane things usually requires a lot of new, clever ideas.
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