Particle Accelerators

24 Sep, 2026 530 Physics

Misha Glenny and guests discuss the machines that are described as the world’s largest experiments: Particle Accelerators. A famous example of a Particle Accelerator is the Large Hadron Collider, a device which stretches for nearly 30km, deep beneath the ground in a tunnel between France and Switzerland. This enormous scale enables the particles within to be propelled to incredible speeds, reaching almost the speed of light before they smash together. The resulting debris offers insights into the fundamental building blocks of our universe, such as the Higgs Boson Particle. These Colliders are international scientific projects costing billions of pounds, but thousands of other particle accelerators exist around the world. The process has remarkable applications in medicine, archaeology and technology.

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Guests

  • Harry Cliff 3 episodes
    Particle Physicist at the University of Cambridge
  • Victoria Martin 2 episodes
    Professor of Collider Physics at the University of Edinburgh
  • Joseph Martin No other episodes
    Professor of the History of Science and Technology at Durham University

Reading list

  • A Map of the Invisible: Journeys into Particle Physics
    Jon Butterworth (William Heinemann Ltd, 2017) Google Books →
  • Smashing Physics: Inside the World's Biggest Experiment
    Jon Butterworth (John Murray, 2014) Google Books →
  • The Fly in the Cathedral: How a Small Group of Cambridge Scientists Won the Race to Split the Atom
    Brian Cathcart (Viking, 2004) Google Books →
  • Big Science in the 21st Century: Economic and Societal Impacts
    Panagiotis Charitos, Theodore Arabatzis, Harry Cliff, Gunther Dissertori, Juliette Forneris, and Jason Li-Ying (eds.) (IOP Publishing, 2023)
  • Space Oddities: The Mysterious Anomalies Challenging Our Understanding of the Universe
    Harry Cliff (Picador, 2024) Google Books →
  • How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch: In Search of the Recipe for Our Universe
    Harry Cliff (Picador, 2021) Google Books →
  • Elusive: How Peter Higgs Solved the Mystery of Mass
    Frank Close (Allen Lane, 2022)
  • Shifting Standards: Experiments in Particle Physics in the Twentieth Century
    Allan Franklin (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013)
  • Ernest Rutherford and the Explosion of Atoms
    John L. Heilbron (Oxford University Press, 2003) Google Books →
  • Lawrence and His Laboratory: A History of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory
    John L. Heilbron and Robert W. Seidel (University of California Press, 2023) Google Books →
  • Fermilab: Physics, the Frontier, and Megascience
    Lillian Hoddeson, Adrienne W. Kolb, and Catherine Westfall (University of Chicago Press, 2011) Google Books →
  • Solid State Insurrection: How the Science of Substance Made American Physics Matter
    Joseph D. Martin (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019) Google Books →
  • The Hunting of the Quark: A True Story of Modern Physics
    Michael Riordan (Touchstone Books, 1987) Google Books →
  • Tunnel Visions: The Rise and Fall of the Superconducting Super Collider
    Michael Riordan, Lillian Hoddeson, and Adrienne W. Kolb (University of Chicago Press, 2018) Google Books →
  • The Matter of Everything: A History of Discovery
    Suzie Sheehy (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023) Google Books →
  • Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists
    Sharon Traweek (Harvard University Press, 1992) Google Books →

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Programme ID: m0031vjw

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0031vjw

Auto-category: 539.73 (Particle accelerators)