• Question: What have you discovered about the Universe from smashing particles together at high energies?

    Asked by Georgina to Jackie on 17 Mar 2015.
    • Photo: Jaclyn Bell

      Jaclyn Bell answered on 17 Mar 2015:

      I haven’t personally discovered anything because I’m a theorist, but scientists have discovered that atoms are made up of protons and neutrons, which are made up of smaller particles called quarks and gluons. There have been 6 quarks found so far – up, down, top, bottom, charm, strange – and we believe there are only 6 and that we have found them all 🙂 But non of these would have been found without colliders. We have recently found the Higgs boson and when we turn up the energy in the LHC for when it next starts up we will hopefully be able to find more particles! Finding all of these different particles is like pieces of a jigsaw – when we have them all we will be able to piece together what happened at the start of the universe and we will be able to construct a theory of everything 🙂

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