As far as we know, when we collide two elementary
particles together, one of the possibilities
that can happen is that different particles
come out of that collision than went in.
So you could have to protons that come together,
collide, and out of that could come many pions,
an electron, a photon, and a muon.
And it’s not as if those particles were
somehow trapped inside the proton, or even
rearranged.
They are fundamentally different particles
that come out of the collision.
So it would be like if you were watching a
car collision, and instead of two cars coming
together, and two cars being the output of
the collision,
the two cars came together, collided, and
a kitchen sink and a chair came out.
You know, we’ve always heard this analogy
of it’s looking for a needle in a haystack,
but it’s not just the needle in the haystack
that you’re looking for,
it’s the needle in a hundred thousand or
a million haystacks, right?
You don’t even know which haystack you should
be looking at to begin with.
So how to choose which one, and how to find
that thing in the most efficient way possible,
you really have to be very clever and really
push the boundaries of technology.
