Follow me through space and time.
The Universe is born 13.8 billion years ago in a Big Bang. After the first spark, a sequence of opportune events brought us here: a small creature on a peculiar planet, sailing a vast ocean of stars, wondering about the mysteries of the cosmos.
The known is finite, the unknown is infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land — Carl Sagan, Cosmos.
Since its childhood, Humanity has tried to interpret the cosmic machinery. Over centuries we have elaborated models…
How particle accelerators retrace the course of time.
Since the discovery of X-rays and radioactivity at the turn of the 20th century, the beams of particles opened us new horizons that our eyes couldn’t contemplate before. From the first radiograph in 1895 to the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, many breakthroughs in modern physics are tightly connected to the development of particle accelerators. For research in fundamental physics, these machines generate beams of charged particles with precise parameters under control continuously. They have, however, a clear tendency to grow drastically in size at every new generation.
The first modern particle accelerator built by Ernest Lawrence at…
