re: #5 CuriousLurker

I’ve been wanting to know for the longest time what the heck that Large Hadron Collider thing is and why it’s such a big deal, but I guess I’ll have to wait till we get past the beginner’s stage before I can even begin to understand such a thing.

Thanks for taking the time to write these articles, Ludwig—very interesting! Maybe you could also recommend some good books for us newbies/non-scientists.

The Large Hadron Collider is an an upgrade to the CERN accelerator ring, that will allow the experimenters to get to much higher energies. It will collide protons and anti-protons in the TeV energy scale. Protons and anti Protons are examples of Hadrons, which are particles made of three quarks.

What makes this such a big deal are the energy densities achievable at impact of the two beams.

At those high energies it is possible to create exotic particles. In this case, one of the major things that is being searched for are things called super symmetric partners.