The Particle
From the stars to the smallest things: what the particle tells us about everything.
The machineCERN and the great ring
CERN, founded in 1954 on the border of France and Switzerland, is where nations work together to study the smallest pieces of matter. Its Large Hadron Collider is a ring 27 kilometres long, where particles are smashed together at nearly the speed of light.
Those collisions recreate, for an instant, conditions like the first moments after the Big Bang. The world wide web was also born at CERN, in 1989, so scientists could share their work.
What it foundThree truths from the smallest world
- The Higgs boson. In 2012 the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN announced the particle linked to how other particles get their mass. A year later, two of the scientists who had predicted it won the Nobel Prize.
- Entanglement. Two particles can be linked so that measuring one tells you about the other, however far apart they are. In 2022 the Nobel Prize in Physics honoured the experiments that proved it. It cannot carry messages faster than light, but it shows that the world is more connected than it looks.
- The same laws everywhere. The physics that rules the smallest particle also rules the largest galaxy. As above, so below.
Learn itWhere to start
You do not need a laboratory. There are free interactive simulations of quantum physics you can play with in a browser, a full university course in quantum physics open to all, and a gentle tour of the particle world made for beginners. You will find them below.
Go deeperSources
Everything on this page was written for you here. These are the places we drew from, if you want to walk further on your own: