• Question: why and how did you recreating the big bang

    Asked by georgemaryke to Ben on 16 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Ben Smart

      Ben Smart answered on 16 Mar 2012:

      We do it by speeding up protons (tiny things inside atoms) until they’re going really fast, and then we smash them together in head-on collisions. The protons are destroyed in the collision and this creates something very like the big bang.
      The reason we do it is so that we can find out how the smallest things in the universe work. It’s the best way we have of looking at all these really small things because they all appear in our recreated big bang.

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