Misha Glenny and guests discuss the machines that are described as the world’s largest experiments: Particle Accelerators. A famous example of a Particle Accelerator is the Large Hadron Collider, a device which stretches for nearly 30km, deep beneath the ground in a tunnel between France and Switzerland.

This enormous scale enables the particles within to be propelled to incredible speeds, reaching almost the speed of light before they smash together. The resulting debris offers insights into the fundamental building blocks of our universe, such as the Higgs Boson Particle.

These Colliders are international scientific projects costing billions of pounds, but thousands of other particle accelerators exist around the world. The process has remarkable applications in medicine, archaeology and technology.

With

Harry Cliff, Particle Physicist at the University of Cambridge

Victoria Martin Professor of Collider Physics at the University of Edinburgh

Joseph Martin Professor of the History of Science and Technology at Durham University.

Producer: Sam Peach

Reading list:

Jon Butterworth, A Map of the Invisible: Journeys into Particle Physics (William Heinemann Ltd, 2017)

Jon Butterworth, Smashing Physics: Inside the World’s Biggest Experiment (John Murray, 2014)

Brian Cathcart, The Fly in the Cathedral: How a Small Group of Cambridge Scientists Won the Race to Split the Atom (Viking, 2004)

Panagiotis Charitos, Theodore Arabatzis, Harry Cliff, Günther Dissertori, Juliette Forneris, and Jason Li-Ying (eds.), Big Science in the 21st Century: Economic and Societal Impacts (IOP Publishing, 2023)

Harry Cliff, Space Oddities: The Mysterious Anomalies Challenging Our Understanding of the Universe (Picador, 2024)

Harry Cliff, How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch: In Search of the Recipe for Our Universe (Picador, 2021)

Frank Close, Elusive: How Peter Higgs Solved the Mystery of Mass (Allen Lane, 2022)

Allan Franklin, Shifting Standards: Experiments in Particle Physics in the Twentieth Century (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013)

John L. Heilbron, Ernest Rutherford and the Explosion of Atoms (Oxford University Press, 2003)

John L. Heilbron and Robert W. Seidel, Lawrence and His Laboratory: A History of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (University of California Press, 2023)

Lillian Hoddeson, Adrienne W. Kolb, and Catherine Westfall, Fermilab: Physics, the Frontier, and Megascience (University of Chicago Press, 2011)

Joseph D. Martin, Solid State Insurrection: How the Science of Substance Made American Physics Matter (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019)

Michael Riordan, The Hunting of the Quark: A True Story of Modern Physics (Touchstone Books, 1987)

Michael Riordan, Lillian Hoddeson, and Adrienne W. Kolb, Tunnel Visions: The Rise and Fall of the Superconducting Super Collider (University of Chicago Press, 2018)

Suzie Sheehy, The Matter of Everything: A History of Discovery (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023)

Sharon Traweek, Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists (Harvard University Press, 1992)

A world-class seminar every week. Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time celebrates the pursuit of knowledge and the enduring power of ideas. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

In Our Time is a BBC Studios production