A Short History of Nearly Everything

by Bill Bryson

Today accelerators have names that sound like something Flash Gordon would use in battle: the Super Proton Synchrotron, the Large Electron-Positron Collider, the Large Hadron Collider, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. Using huge amounts of energy (some operate only at night so that people in neighbouring towns don’t have to witness their lights fading when the apparatus is fired up), they can whip particles into such a state of liveliness that a single electron can do 47,000 laps around a 7-kilometre tunnel in under a second3. Fears have been raised that in their enthusiasm scientists might inadvertently create a black hole or even something called ‘strange quarks’, which could, theoretically, interact with other subatomic particles and propagate uncontrollably. If you are reading this, that hasn’t happened. Finding particles takes a certain amount of concentration. They are not just tiny and swift but often also tantalizingly evanescent. Particles can come into being and be gone again in as little as 0.000000000000000000000001 of a second (10−24 seconds). Even the most sluggish4 of unstable particles hang around for no more than 0.0000001 of a second (10−7 seconds). Some particles are almost ludicrously slippery. Every second the Earth is visited by ten thousand trillion trillion tiny, all-but-massless neutrinos (mostly shot out by the nuclear broilings of the Sun) and virtually all of them pass right through the planet and everything that is on it, including you and ...

Enormous Economics and size of large particle detector and accelerator - Challenges with Subatomic particles.