Probing the Improbable |
| Written by spacetravel.org | |||
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Fundamental forces govern the behaviour of the basic building blocks of matter. Both forces and matter are probed by special kinds of microscopes known as accelerators. The largest, at CERN, the European nuclear research organisation whose particle physics laboratory straddles the border between France and Switzerland, has a circumference of 27 kilometres. Not a conventional device with lenses, the CERN machine is an enormous underground ring through which sub-atomic particles are hurled at one another at speeds approaching the speed of light. The particle collisions create other particles, not seen at ordinary low energies. These events are recorded by banks of computers. The data is analysed and scanned for ‘Signatures’ of particles that determine the structure of the smallest units of matter. The energies achieved in these collisions are thought to have been present during the early stages of the universe. Information gained during this research bleeds through to cosmologists. There is a two-way channel of intelligence passing between the particle physicists and cosmologists, advantageous to both disciplines. The result is a better understanding of the structure of matter in terms of a few kinds of 'elementary’ particles. There are three groups of elementary particle: quarks, leptons (Greek for ‘light ones') and gauge particles. The 'lepton' group has the familiar electron carrier of electric charge. The 'gauge' group includes the photon, the light particle. ) Quarks are the elementary particles that have been found in threes inside protons and neutrons (constituents of atomic nuclei). They were named with aplomb by Murray Gell-Mann, a North American physicist, from a passage in Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce (a book thought by admirers to make high energy physics manuals pale into intellectual insignificance).
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