Science and Technology

The Role of Science and Technology 

March 20, 2016

Today, physicists study the properties of sub-atomic particles in high-speed accelerators, called particle accelerators or atom smashers where selected particles circle the tube in opposite directions and are made to collide with each other. Because of these devices and procedure, the earlier beginnings of creation now become replicable. In effect, the Big-Bang theory can now be tested in the laboratory of the physicists by tinkering with subatomic particles. These machines are huge, circular tube extending for some miles in circumference inside which subatomic particles are accelerated at velocities close to the speed of light. One such accelerator is the one at Fermilab located near Batavia, Illinois, the circumference of which extend four miles. Fermilab is known as the highest particle collider in the world.

Another such machine is the one housed at CERN (for Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire or European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Geneva, Switzerland. Today, physicists study the properties of sub-atomic particles in these high-speed accelerators, where selected particles circle the tube in opposite directions and are made to collide with each other. Other atom-smashing laboratories can now be found in Russia, Germany, and Japan. But the first particle accelerator is said to be devised in 1929 by the British physicist John Douglas Cockroft and his co-worker, the Irish physicist Ernest Thomas Sinton Walton. The following year, another one is devised by the American physicist Ernest Orlando Lawrence (Asimov).

Because of these devices, more bizarre phenomena begin to be discovered at the subatomic realm.