What is happening at CERN this weekend?
Basically, they are doing a test firing on the tenth of September at 10 TeV (terra electron volts) and will raise it to up to 14/15 TeV in the near future. How it works is that they fire lots of protons around these enormous rings, surrounded in electromagnets at close to the speed of light. They have two sets going in opposite directions, and when they collide, they ‘smash’ together in the highest ever concentration of energy that humankind has ever produced (even if it is within a space a trillionth the size of a spec of dust). When this happens lots of subatomic particles fly out. These are measured using large detectors which are metres thick, the largest of which is known as ATLAS (suitably titanic). They are looking for a selection of relatively unknown particles, such as supersymetric particles, which may provide insights into the nature of dark matter, and the Higgs Boson, which supposedly gives things mass. The reason CERN is so much better than the others is that they can fir
