The reason to write this is mainly to “force” myself to read about stuff I always wanted to but found excuses not to; plus, it is a nice way to explain to my friends what I’m trying to do as an (ahem) future experimental physicist. The full title should probably be: “Experimental High Energy Physics for dummies (from a complete Idiot)” but I preferred the short version 
. That said, let’s begin:
As the title reveals, more posts will follow. This first article is supposed to be an introduction to the whole concept of High Energy Physics (HEP for short) and how experiments are done.I will focus only on colliders and (surprise!) the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector that are at the final stages of assembly at CERN in Geneva. This means that the next posts will have to do with these two. There is no actual schedule for the articles, but my goal right now is to try to post once every two-three weeks. If you want to be updated on when the next articles appear you can simply subscribe to my Physics RSS feed (avoiding the rest of the boring posts in my blog)
To begin with: Why do physicists need particle accelerators anyway? How do these devices help them do research? What is the history behind them? What is the present situation and their future?
Why particle accelerators?
A very brief (and completely irrelevant as you’ll soon realize) answer could be: Because microscopes have limits. Before I explain what I mean let’s talk about the past. A century or more ago our knowledge about the structure of matter could be described at best as simplistic. Scientists knew that Dmitri Mendeleev’s periodic table classified all known materials so everybody believed that matter was made of atoms. At the end of the 19th century, J.J. Thomson made one step further: He showed that atoms were made of positive and negative particles. And twenty years later Ernest Rutherford with his famous scattering experiments (along with Geiger and Marsden) showed that the positive charge was inside a very compact nucleus and the electrons were moving around it just like the planets of our solar system. The puzzle needed just one more piece which came in 1932: The neutron’s discovery by James Chadwick. And everyone was happy. Sort of.
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