accelerator

"It is no good to try to stop knowledge from going forward. Ignorance is never better than knowledge." -Enrico Fermi As you probably know, the Large Hadron Collider -- site of discovery of the last fundamental particle in the Standard Model, the Higgs Boson -- is the most energetic particle accelerator in the history of humankind. When the upgrades it's currently undergoing are complete, it will reach collision energies of 14 TeV. Image credit: CERN / LHC, add-on created by http://www.panglosstech.com/. The way this happens is that protons are circulated in a giant ring, underground, that'…
Since the dawn of time man has yearned to destroy the sun. - C. M. Burns There's no need to stop at the Sun, though. Since yesterday was Earth day, I thought it was only appropriate to spend today telling you how not only to destroy the Earth, but to effectively destroy the entire Universe. To tell you this story, we have to go all the way back to the beginning, to just before the big bang. The big bang was when the Universe was hot, dense, full of energy, and expanding very quickly. The Universe was also spatially flat and the same temperature everywhere, and full of both matter and…