Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jun 28, 2026

A Precise and Autonomous System for the Detection of Insect Emergence Patterns
Published on: January 9, 2019
Abstract:
Now that's a cheery thought! Somewhere more than 100 km below the Geneva countryside two parallel beams of subatomic particles are whizzing around a 27 km circuit in opposite directions at about 99% of the speed of light, doing over 11 000 laps per second. Physicists hope to create a 'bang' that won't end the world, but will unlock some of its mysteries. I confess I have never thought of physicists as poets, but they certainly come up with some evocative models to explain the unknown such as 'dark matter', the invisible skeleton stretching through space; or 'dark energy', which drives the expansion of the universe; or the grandiose 'God's particle' (officially named 'Higgs boson') postulated to endow other particles with mass. These are concepts both too large and too small to grasp.
Related Concept Videos
Detection of Black Holes
Their closest cousins are neutron stars, which are composed almost entirely of neutrons packed against each other, making them extremely dense. A neutron star has the same mass as the Sun but its diameter is only a few kilometers. Therefore, the escape velocity from their surface is close to the speed of light.
Not until the 1960s, when the first neutron...
Mutation, Gene Flow, and Genetic Drift
The Tree of Life - Bacteria, Archaea, Eukaryotes
Eukaryotic Evolution
Contrary to the endosymbiont theory, the eukaryote-first hypothesis proposes that the simpler prokaryotic and...
Evolution of New Traits in Microbes
The Evidence for Evolution

