Tiny particles, big knowledge: The Particle Adventure
May 27, 2009
When I first clicked on The Particle Adventure, I expected one of those sci-fi adventures where a group of scientists, one of whom is a beautiful woman, get shrunk to microscopic size to face the perils of the subatomic world.
It’s nothing like that. At all.
While it may not be the harrowing journey I hoped for, The Particle Adventure does take visitors on a tour of a world only seen through powerful microscopes — or in the case of dark matter, not at all. You can learn about the basic building blocks of matter like quarks and neutrinos, as well as theoretical stuff. Students can also learn what keeps all these tiny marbles from rolling all over the place.
If you like what you see, you can order charts, posters and other educational materials. And if your students don’t recognize any of the terms on the site, a handy glossary will clue them in.
The Particle Adventure also talks about how scientists experiment with particles, including but not limited to particle accelerators and the Large Hadron Collider. I don’t know about you, but I find acceleration and collisions inherently interesting, even when it happens at a subatomic level. If I can’t have a group of tiny scientists shooting lasers as bacteria, at least I can have a few crashes. -BILL FERRIS
Related stuff:
Symmetry Magazine Makes Particle Physics Slightly Less Difficult
