• Question: What exactly is the Hadron collider aiming to do? Could it tell us about how the world came into being?

    Asked by pinkelephants17 to Amy, Grant, Martin, Shawn, Usman on 13 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Martin Archer

      Martin Archer answered on 13 Mar 2013:

      The Large Hadron Collider was built to answer a number of question. The main was to work out if the theorised Higgs Boson exists. This is the particle that gives everything else the sense of mass, without it our theories didn’t work. Last year the LHC did find a new boson (force particle) and from the work that’s gone on since it does seem to be like the Higgs, though they’re still working on that. But the LHC has other experiments to work out for example what the difference between matter and anti matter and why our Universe seems to be mostly made of matter.

      What the LHC does is fire protons together at energies that were previously only around mere moments after the Big Bang. So the idea is the particle interactions going on in it would be the same ones that would have happened just after the Universe was created.

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