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30 Mar 2010 10:33

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Tech: Pretend you’re a scientist: Study these particle physics terms

  • hadron A particle that has mass,
    bound together from smaller parts called quarks. Protons and electrons are types of hadron
    (which we didn’t misspell).
  • collider A device that takes two beams headed in opposite directions and makes them run into each other, in an attempt to make two sets of particles combine.
  • higgs boson The thing which is suspected to give matter its mass if Peter Higgs‘ theory pans out. The Large Hadron Collider is trying to figure out whether it’s real or not.
  • dark matter This weird, cool stuff that
    scientists think makes up a quarter of the universe, and kinda shapes the trajectory of the universe a little. Like we said, weird and cool. source

30 Mar 2010 10:10

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Tech: We admit it, we think the Large Hadron Collider is freaking cool

  • 27km length of the underground tunnel, near Geneva, where
    all the good stuff happened this morning
  • 3.5x the strength of the atom-smasher compared the next-highest level of energy achieved
  • 99.9% the speed of the collider compared
    to the speed of light; any faster, and we might all die source