Particle Accelerators

Misha Glenny and guests discuss the machines that are described as the world’s largest experiments: Particle Accelerators. A famous example of a Particle Accelerator is the Large Hadron Collider, a device which stretches for nearly 30km, deep beneath the ground in a tunnel between France and Switzerland.

This enormous scale enables the particles within to be propelled to incredible speeds, reaching almost the speed of light before they smash together. The resulting debris offers insights into the fundamental building blocks of our universe, such as the Higgs Boson Particle.

These Colliders are international scientific projects costing billions of pounds, but thousands of other particle accelerators exist around the world. The process has remarkable applications in medicine, archaeology and technology.

With Harry Cliff Particle Physicist at the University of Cambridge
Victoria Martin Professor of Collider Physics at the University of Edinburgh
Joseph Martin Professor of the History of Science and Technology at Durham University.

Producer: Sam Peach

In Our Time is a BBC Studios production

A world-class seminar every week. Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time celebrates the pursuit of knowledge and the enduring power of ideas. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.