Daniel Whiteson

Something I think a lot of people don't understand about the collisions at CERN is that we do the same experiment over and over again.

It's two particles, very high energy, smashing against each other.

And every time we do it, every 24 nanoseconds, the universe decides what comes out.

Every 24 nanoseconds?

Every 24 nanoseconds, there's a collision.

Okay.

And quantum mechanics tells you that you can do the same experiment twice and get two different outcomes.

I mean, essentially infinitely and get all the outcomes.

That's right.

That's exactly it.

We don't know what the universe can do, but if we do the same experiment over and over again, eventually everything it can do is revealed to us.

And that's what we want to know is like, what can happen when you smash two protons together?

If you're thinking of photons as like little billiard balls and you think, well, I smash them together, then they're gonna bounce off at a certain angle and the initial state determines the final state.

That's classical physics.

The initial state determines the final state.

Take the same shot and pull over and over again.

If you're really precise, you get exactly the same outcome.

But quantum mechanics says what's predicted, what's determined is not the outcome, but the probability of various outcomes.

And that's how we explore the universe with collisions is that we're looking for things that are really, really rare.

One's a trillion, one's a quadrillion collisions.