Welcome sports fans!
As the champions battle it out in the Tour de France, we invite you to get on your own bike for a rather special ride. 
As you make a supreme effort to keep the pedals turning, do you ever wonder about the energy you’re expending 
or the power you are developing?
Or maybe as you approach the summit of a big mountain pass in the searing midday heat,
your mind turns to more existential questions,
like “What am I doing here?”, “Where do we come from and where are we going?”
Well, the LHC, the Large Hadron Collider
 is attempting to answer these questions. 
What is the LHC? 
In a 27-kilometer tunnel straddling the Franco-Swiss border, it might look like the world's biggest velodrome,
but it’s actually, the world's largest scientific instrument.
In the outskirts of Geneva, 100 metres underground,
a kind of giant 27km long velodrome containing 2 beams of particles circulating in opposing directions 
at close to the speed of light, 
each comprising nearly 3000 proton bunches.
There are approximately a hundred, thousand million 
protons in a bunch.
A proton is a positively charged subatomic particle.
 And yes, they are allowed to be positive!
Thousands of magnets direct the beams along their subatomic velodrome: 1232 dipoles and 392 quadrupoles
How are they accelerated?
To move your bike forward, you push one pedal 
while you pull the other.
In the LHC, there are radiofrequency cavities that store an electromagnetic field to attract and repel protons.  
All the RF cavities in the LHC are regulated to oscillate at a frequency
of 400MHz or 400 million cycles per second,
while the frequency of your pedalling is about one and a half cycles per second. 
A proton bunch, on the other hand, circles the LHC 11 245
times per second. 
Physicist and cycle-lover Albert Einstein predicted in his formula E=mc²
that matter transforms into energy and vice versa. 
Nothing travels faster than light. 
Nothing travels faster than light. 
However, when proton bunches in the LHC get near to light speed, they become heavier.
For cyclists though, the more you cycle,
 the more weight you are likely to lose. 
A proton bunch has an energy of about 110kJ.
A bunch of Tour de France cyclists has an energy of about 530 kJ
Remember though that  there are thousands more proton bunches in the LHC than competing cyclists!
For a cyclist, as you ramp up from 0 to 36 km/h in 10 seconds, you need 500 Watts of power
A bunch of protons ramping up in the LHC for 20 minutes needs only 85 Watts of power.
There are many more particles in a cyclist than in a bunch of protons!
Our protons will collide at 4 points around the LHC,
in detectors called ATLAS, ALICE, CMS and LHCb.
These particles are so tiny that this equates to throwing 2 needles at each other from 10 km away. 
Like the collision between two cyclists would cause pieces to detach, wheels, frames, tyres, helmets, 
the collision between protons produces a 
wealth of particles.
The giant detectors behave like bicycle computers 
recording important data.
These data are sent to huge computing centres to be analysed
similar to sporting-performance applications.
So next time you take a spin on your bike, 
think about those tiny subatomic particles in their underground velodrome whizzing around...
 to help us understand what we, and our bikes, are made of.
