My Visit

I recently took a trip to Cornell for a visit to the Synchrotron. The Synchrotron is the particle accelerator that is found there. This machine basically takes small streams of electrons and its antimatter counterparts, positrons, and smashes them together at 99.999995% the speed of light. When matter and their antimatter counterparts collide, they annihilate themselves and create a huge bunch of matter which scientists can use to analyze and prove hypotheses. There are only a few of these accelerators in existence right now for a few reasons. One reason is because these contraptions are massive! The one in Cornell stretches underneath the whole campus and the famous L.H.C. (large hadron collider) in Geneva is much much larger. The LHC is being used by scientists to try and prove the Higgs Boson theory.
Unfortunately, the Cornell Synchrotron is too old to collide particles like they used to. But this retired accelerator is not completely out of business. It is still used for research. The radiation that the collider gives off when it is turned on is a powerful X-ray. This x-ray is used to as a way to look at things at a microscopic level. Many Nobel Prizes in Chemistry were given to people who used the machine for their findings. I am quite lucky to have been able to live so close to this particle accelerator.