Hadron Collider. Can someone explain to an idiot?

Was reading about it again today and I still don’t understand. It looks hideously, expensively impressive but what do we learn from colliding atoms together? I’m absolutely rubbish at science but could someone try to explain it in the most simple way possible please?

Physicists come up with theory of stuff. Includes sums.

Astronomers look at stuff, count it.

Physicists say there are 100 things!

Astronomers say, are you sure, we can only see 60?

Physicist says: hang on, I’ll be back in a decade.

Waits…

Physicists (now with longer beards) say the other stuff is there. It’s just that it’s invisible and has no mass or smell, that’s how you missed it, not that our theory is wrong or anything like that. Here, have a smiley physicist without a beard to explain it to you. Enter Brian Cox. Oh, and can we have a large grant to build a shiny thing to make it better, and give us something to do while someone thinks of a better theory.

Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!

Donk.

When two men love each other very much……oh hadron.
Sorry.

You know how you can find out what bits your stereo is made of by smashing it into the ground? Its like that but with electrons and stuff.

When you smash the atoms together you learn what they are made of. Hopefully you discover new particles. These particle may or may not have a practical use

It largely a pure science experiment – eg there is no guarantee that anything we learn will have any practical benefit – its science for the sake of science.

But constructing this immense machine means creating and utilising new technology as well. The engineering of the machine itself and what has been learned in its construction will certainly have practical applications in fields such as semiconductors.

Previous particle experiments have isolated the electron – which proved to be quite useful

Positrons discovered in particle accelerators play an imprtant role in medical scanners.

And spin offs from CERN include, rather famously, the World Wide Web

You know how you can find out what bits your stereo is made of by smashing it into the ground? Its like that but with electrons and stuff.

Best. Explanation. Eva.

DrP

Theoretical physicists generally come up with ideas and often ‘invent’ new particles and the like to make the theory work.

The experimental physicists then come along to try and prove or disprove the theories.

The hadron collider is so important because basically a lot of current physics theorem somewhat depends on there being something called the Higgs Bosom particle and without it there will have to be a whole load of physics reworked or chucked in the bin.

It is being used to find the Higgs Bosom particle.

Cheers

Danny B

As to what it will do for us…

Well, the Higgs Boson (the pesky little thing they’ve been looking for) has a lot to do with stuff like how things acquire mass.

Now that the Higgs Boson has sort of been found, and the existence of the Higgs Field has sort of been confirmed, then all we need is some clever way to take all the Higgs Bosons (and mass) out of something like, say, a skateboard and you have… a hoverboard!

All you need to know:

Higgs Bosom particle.

Autocorrect, I salute you!

I’m full of admiration for all you guys who know what any of this means. No wonder I opted out of physics at school. My brain feels like It’s going to explode in a ‘Scanners’ stylee. I get the chucking my stereo out of the window bit. How much did it cost to build and what the hell does it cost to run?

Everything’s made of atoms. Atoms are made of electrons and protons. What are protons and electrons made of?

It cost a lot, but remember that money doesn’t get burned in a big pile. It gets spent with manufacturers, who employ people, who then go and buy cars, clothes, food etc.

But remember, this is Particle Physics. Not all Physics is like this.

Lots, and lots. It’s like a big skalextrix track with the cars running in opposite directions before smashing into one another. Money can’t buy that kind of fun.

From this to that:

I heard it was built from blueprints decoded from a mysterious transmission and it’s going to open a portal to let though all sorts of wrongness that’ll eat our souls. Just like last time.

I heard it was built from blueprints decoded from a mysterious transmission and it’s going to open a portal to let though all sorts of wrongness that’ll eat our souls. Just like last time.

That’s pretty much the plot of the Jodie Foster film Contact, only without the soul eating….

You know how you can find out what bits your stereo is made of by smashing it into the groundwith a really big hammer? Its like that but with electrons and stuff.

Either use very very heavy hammer and donk it at a leisurely pace or take teeny tiny hammer (another particle) and hit it very very fast = same difference innit. Then see what pings off (ideally the higgs thingy).

s’why its called a particle accelerator, a collider and a detector. Simples, all done with magents, and stuff.

The LHC is the most ambitious and powerful particle accelerator built to date. Thousands of scientists from hundreds of countries are working together — and competing with one another — to make new discoveries. Six sites along the LHC’s circumference gather data for different experiments. Some of these experiments overlap, and scientists will be trying to be the first to uncover important new information.

That’s pretty much the plot of the Jodie Foster film Contact, only without the soul eating….

Yeah that’s what they want you to think.

LHC has rocked me in the head – nice video

Imagine you had never seen a bike before. You could probably work out quite quickly that it was capable of being ridden by a human from its exterior shape. Then, with an allen key and some spanners you could start taking bits of it apart. That would tell you say how the freewheel or the fork work mechanically. That is all easy and cheap to do. But then, you wonder, what is this material the frame is made from? How do you work those kind of things out? You start to build more and more complicated and powerful machines to run tests on parts of the bike. An optical microscope, easy(ish) to build would tell you the structure of the materials, then perhaps construct a scanning electron microscope, which can start to look at the actual atoms that make up the material. But then what? How do you work out what an “atom” is made from? Well, you need an even more complicated, and powerful machine to help you see inside it. And effectively that is where the LHC comes in. The more power (in this case speed) your machine can apply, the smaller and smaller particles it can “break apart” and study.

Smashing stereos and taking bikes apart. Now you’re talking! I wish you were my physics teacher at school.

I heard it was built from blueprints decoded from a mysterious transmission and it’s going to open a portal to let though all sorts of wrongness that’ll eat our souls. Just like last time.

Absolutely! One minute you’re sat there, following the text with your finger, and reading the really difficult words aloud, next minute you’re up to your arse in Shoggoths. Trying to get rid of those is like trying to get rid of PPE salesmen…

Bigger bombs
Faster cars
Laser guns
Teleports

If it can’t do all that I want my money back

My sister works for a CERN supported materials science unit at the Zurich technical institute. I asked her one time about a: Hadron Collider and b: her day to day work. Well above my intellect level, I really struggled to understand a huge amount of it! But I do know that they do some immensely important work there, SHC is a tiny part of it all, my sis has been involved in a project to develop metallic foams that can be used to decontaminate old nuclear power stations so they can be dismantled safely. Kind of real world application of the out there magic/science they are up to.

sugdenr – Member
use very very heavy hammer and donk it at a leisurely pace

D0NK to the forum, you’ve been verbed again!! 😀

maxtorque – Member
Imagine you had never seen a bike before. … The more power (in this case speed) your machine can apply, the smaller and smaller particles it can “break apart” and study

As I suspected, they’ll never find the fun 🙁