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One of the grandest scientific tools ever made by mankind
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is called an atom smasher.
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And I mean literally grand.
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The biggest one ever built,
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the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC,
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is a ring with a circumference of about 18 miles.
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That's more than the entire length of Manhattan.
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So what is an atom smasher?
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It is a device that collides atomic nuclei together
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at extremely high energy.
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The most powerful one scientists have ever built
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can heat matter to the hottest temperatures ever achieved,
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temperatures last seen at a trillionth of second
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after the universe began.
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Our accelerators are full of engineering superlatives.
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The beam-containing region of the LHC is a vacuum,
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with lower pressure than what surrounds
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the international space station,
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and is 456 degrees Fahrenheit below zero,
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colder than the temperature of deepest space.
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A previous accelerator sitting in the LHC tunnel
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holds the world record for velocity,
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accelerating an electron to a speed so fast
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that if it were to race a photon of light,
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it would take about 14 minutes for the photon
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to get a lead of about 10 feet.
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If that doesn't impress you,
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remember the photon is fastest thing in the universe,
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it goes about 186,000 miles per second.
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So how do these subatomic particle accelerators work?
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Well, they use electric fields.
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Electric fields make charged particles move in the same way
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that gravity will pull a dropped baseball.
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The force from the electric field
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will pull a particle to make it move.
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The speed will continue to increase
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until the charged particle is moving incredibly fast.
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A simple particle accelerator can be made
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by hooking two parallel metal plates to a battery.
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The charge from the battery moves
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on to the two metal plates
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and makes an electric field that pulls the particle along.
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you got a particle accelerator.
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The problem is that an accelerator built this way is very weak.
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Building a modern accelerator like the LHC this way
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would take over five trillion standard D-cell batteries.
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So scientists use much stronger batteries
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and put them one after another.
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An earlier accelerator used this method
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