Question: Could we ever harness the energy that is created when two particles collide? If so, how close are we to being able to?

Jaclyn Bell answered on 14 Mar 2015:

I don’t think we could… since we put a LOT of energy in to the machines to get the particles to collide. We pump the colliders with higher and higher energies because we want to cram as much energy as possible into that tiny space to see if new particles can be created. When the particles smash together and create more/different particles they have only been able to do this by using up all of the energy we have given them – they don’t give off energy – it was all used up in creating the new particles. This is called ‘conservation of energy’ 🙂