FUNDAMENTAL BUILDING BLOCKS 305
and John Cockcroft using
a particle accelerator in Cambridge,
England. Since then, ever more
powerful particle accelerators have
been constructed. These machines
boost tiny subatomic particles to
nearly the speed of light before
slamming them into targets or
each other. Research is now driven
by theoretical predictions—the
largest particle accelerator, the
Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in
Switzerland, was built primarily to
find the theoretical Higgs boson
(pp.298–99). The LHC is a 17-mile
(27-km) ring of superconducting
magnets that took 10 years to build.
Collisions between subatomic
particles splinter them into their
core units. The energy released is
sometimes enough to produce new
generations of particles that cannot
exist under everyday conditions.
Showers of short-lived, exotic
particles spray off these pileups,
before swiftly annihilating or
decaying. With ever-increasing
energies at their disposal,
researchers attempt to probe the
mysteries of matter by getting
even closer to the conditions at the
birth of matter itself—the Big Bang.
The process has been likened to
smashing two watches togetherSee also: Max Planck 202–05 ■ Ernest Rutherford 206–13 ■ Albert Einstein 214–21 ■ Paul Dirac 246–47 ■
Richard Feynman 272–73 ■ Sheldon Glashow 292–93 ■ Peter Higgs 298–99
and then sifting through the
wrecked pieces in an attempt to
find out how the timepiece works.
By 1953, with colliders
achieving ever-increasing energies,
exotic particles not found in
ordinary matter seemed to tumble
out of thin air. More than 100
strongly interacting particles were
detected, all thought at the time ❯❯The Stanford Linear Accelerator
in California, built in 1962, is 2 miles
(3 km) long—the longest linear
accelerator in the world. It was here,
in 1968, that it was first demonstrated
that protons are composed of quarks.