The Harder You Look, the More There Is to See

Far away, on the border of both France and Switzerland, lies the massive CERN Accelerator Complex. This series of particle accelerators increases the momentum of packets of nuclei to almost light speed, then collides them. It collects the debris of the resulting destruction in hopes of finding the basic building blocks of matter. This is a basic overview of what happens at CERN, but when examined more closely, this process becomes far more difficult and complicated. How does this “Atom Smasher” work? How is it built? Most importantly, how do the thousands of euros poured into this costly research benefit the practical world?

The CERN Accelerator Complex uses advanced technology and complicated processes to speed up particles just below light speed. The first step is that hydrogen atoms are fed into a chamber and striped of their electrons. This provides the particles that are accelerated. The LINAC-2 linear accelerator, an accelerator that boost particles to high speeds via electromagnets in a linear vacuum tube, increases the nuclei’s speed to one-third the speed of light. The next accelerator, the Proton Synchrotron Booster, splits the packet into four parts, then accelerates them further. This is a circular accelerator, as opposed to linear, because at this velocity, speeding protons in a straight line would be impractical. This beam could travel around the world within a second. The electromagnets in the booster bend the beam around the ring, while the electric field increase the speed in a way much like one would push a child on a swing. The booster flings the packets into the Proton Synchrotron recombining them as a single packet. This is where things begin to get extremely fast. The Proton Synchrotron, 628 meters in circ...

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...Particle accelerators could even cure the great modern day plague known as cancer. By firing a carefully controlled 400 EV beam at the cancer tumor, it would kill the cancer, saving the subject life. The people at CERN are doing an excellent job, and are well worth their funding.

The particle accelerator is a complex machine with many complicated parts, and costs a fortune to run, but if they continue in assisting in advances like this, it will be worth it many times over. Particle accelerators are growing constantly better, and there could be many other things they could help the world discover, like alternate dimensions and new particles. There is still a whole universe out there, and every puzzle of physics we solve, every new gadget we make, every new cure we find, exposes new problems for the world to solve, because the more we know, the more there is to know.