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.

Antimatter!

Sounds like something that would only come from a strange Sci-Fi movie right? Well you're wrong! Antimatter was created when matter was created at the Big Bang. Antimatter has been defined as the mirror image of matter.So when matter was created, antimatter was created at the exact same time. Imagine a hot metal sheet in a coin factory ('energy'). When you stamp out a coin from a metal sheet, you are left with a coin and a hole in the sheet.You could call this hole an "anticoin". But, you cannot bring matter and antimatter together because when you do, burst back into energy, like putting the coin back into the hole in the sheet. So at the beginning of the Universe, these particles had an all out war against each other and the matter and antimatter annihilating each other.
Why is the Universe not just a burst of energy then you ask? Well for reasons still unknown to scientists, at the beginning, there was a tad bit more matter than antimatter which allowed the matter to overcome the antimatter and when the Universe cooled down enough so that no more matter or antimatter could be created, matter was all that was left and continued to expand and create the universe you see today. The result of the battle can be seen still today because the leftover radiation can be seen all throughout the Universe. This radiation is called Cosmic Background Radiation.