Did you read about the big bang last week in Geneva where they spend $10 billion to smash an atom?
I heard about it on the news but didn’t pay too much attention to the details until I was reading an article in the weekend newspaper. This really was an incredible feat. Now I’m no physicist, I struggled through two years of university physics classes before ending up with a BSc but that said I found this a mind boggling story.
First there were 10,000 physicists working on this atom smasher. The collider, the thing they use to shoot the atoms at each other, is a 27-kilometre (16.78 mile) long tunnel which took 15 years to build.
How this thing works is it accelerates billions of protons along the tunnel at 99.9999991 per cent of the speed of light. Here is why I say mind boggling. At this speed they circle the 27-kilometer ring 11,245 times a second. Yes a second! I don’t know about you but my mind has a tough time fathoming this.
What is even more incredible is that a proton has a diameter of one millionth of a millionth of a millimetre. To have two protons hit head on is the mathematical equivalent of firing a pair of knitting needles at each other from opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean, and have them hit dead-on in the middle.
Sales is not rocket science, nor is it on the same level of quantum physics, and maybe for many of us that’s a good thing!
