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Out of context: Reply #23
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- vespa0
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Particle Physics in a Nut Shell for Sea_Sea
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Hello Sea_Sea, i'm no particle physicist but here is my meagre understanding of the significance of the Large Hadron Collider experiment:--------------------------------...
Everything is made up of atoms.Atoms are incredibly tiny (500000 would fit behind a human hair) and incredibly durable (apparently an atom can last 10 years to the power of 35, that's 10000000000000000000000000000000... years). They are also incredibly abundant (in a cubic centimetre of air, that's about the size of a sugar cube, there are 45 billion billion molecules)
Their durability and abundance means they would be very useful to know about, but their tininess makes them very difficult to study.
The basic structure of an atom is protons, neutrons and electrons, but there's loads of other subatomic particles that have only recently been discovered (bosons, gluons, muons, mesons, there's loads of them) and that we don't know much about.
This is because finding subatomic particles to study is difficult.
For one thing, they can come into existence and pop out of existence again in as little as 0.000000000000000000000001 of a second.
Secondly, they are hard to capture. The Earth is bombarded by ten thousand trillion trillion neutrinos every second, but they are notoriously difficult to track. Scientists need tanks of up to 57,000 cubic metres of water (in underground chambers so that no radiation can interfere with them) to capture just a few neutrinos in order to study them.