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
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.
Latest Answers