I never got to study psychics or any basics of science even, so I’m incredibly confused yet curious about what the purpose of CERN is and what they have been up to since its development
In: Physics
CERN is the largest physics laboratory in the world, operated jointly by 23 member nations. They do a lot of work in high energy physics, especially the kind of physics that can be done with their Large Hadron Collider (also the largest in the world). It is a center of innovation and science leadership and has been since it was created in 1954.
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They operate the largest machine ever created that speeds up two particles going in opposite directions in a large kilometers-long circular track. They can move those particles at nearly the speed of light and then steer them into each other until they get the occasional direct hit that smashes so hard that it ripples reality itself sufficiently to break off new particles that we couldn’t otherwise observe.
So stuff – all stuff you’ve ever encountered – is made of tiny little particles bunched together. You may have heard of atoms – well atoms are made up of smaller things called hadrons and leptons. If you’ve heard of an electron, that’s a kind of lepton. And if you’ve heard of protons and neutrons, they’re examples of hadrons. The overwhelming majority of stuff in the universe is made up of just protons, neutrons, and electrons, but there’s a bunch of others.
So it turns out that hadrons can be broken down into even smaller things, called quarks and gluons. But these particles don’t really exist on their own in nature, outside of a hadron, which makes it really difficult to study them. In order to make a bunch of individual quarks and gluons, you need to break apart a hadron, in a very specific, controlled way. That is what the Large Hadron Collider does. It’s basically a race track that uses magnets to guide hadrons around a track, speed them up to incredible speeds, and then smash them together.
Scientists do experiments with it by choosing specific hadrons, smashing them together at specific speeds, and measuring a whole bunch of different things about the little explosion that results. If their understanding of how these hadrons work is correct, then they should be able to calculate what the explosion will look like. If there’s something they haven’t understood yet, then the explosion won’t match their calculations, and they can go back and think about why that might be.
Wanna know what something is made of? Crack it open.
CERN aims to find out what the universe itself is made out of. To do that, they need to crack open the building blocks that make up the very foundation of the universe. Things that refuse to crack even under the most violent events imaginable.
Wanna crack open a rock, but you can’t do it with your fists? Use a hammer and chisel. Focus your effort into one tiny place, and you can do some incredible things.
CERN operates the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC. It’s an enormous machine (the largest single machine built by humans) that is designed to pump an enormous amount of energy into one very small place. On the scale of the universe, the total energy used by the LHC is pitiful; but due to our cleverness in its design, we can focus that energy into such a tiny, precise spot that nearly everything else in the universe pales in comparison. Even the centers of supernovae can’t hold a candle to what goes on there. This allows CERN to be able to crack the toughest nuts of the universe, and find out what they are made of.
The highest temperature event known to have ever existed in the universe short of the Big Bang itself happened here in a lab on Earth. How does that make you feel?
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