3 ms·

I imagine this would give discoveries in the LHC a boost, or at least some amazing footage of atoms colliding and exploding :) That would be amazing!

• gus_massa 8y ago
  No, for a few reasons: First they are producing too many collisions (probably many quadrillion of collisions, I can't find the exact number). Most of the are boring, so they have a lot of filters to select and save only the slightly interesting collisions, because otherwise it would be impossible to save the data. IIRC they only got a few thousand of Higgs bosons, he signal to noise ratio is almost 0. Second to film something using light, the object must be bigger than the wavelength of the light. There are some tricks to reduce this a little, but you can't film elementary particles directly. The old method was to let the particles create small bubbles or drops of water inside a recipient, and then photograph the chain of dots with visible light. In the new equipment the process is more complicated, but the interesting part of the collision is too fast and too small. They only measure the particles that are flying away after the interesting part happened, they only measure the leftovers and try to reconstruct the actual collision. Third, the interesting collisions have strong quantum effects, and the quantum effects "disappear" when you are using light that is strong enough to get an accurate position of the particles. You can imagine that if the light is strong enough, then the light itself will bounce against the particles and modify the direction and the collision. It sounds somewhat like magic, but it's possible to write this correctly and precisely using a lot of math and is one of the bases of quantum mechanics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle