The History of Particle Colliders

Electricity and magnetism are a core part of how particle accelerators function. There was a cyclotron at Berkeley, for example, that managed to get protons moving around its ring at about 15,000 kilometers per second. It turns out that if you look up into our atmosphere, there's something of a natural particle collider taking place. Every second, tens of thousands of particles from space called cosmic rays are hitting each square meter of Earth. These cosmic rays collide with the particles in our atmosphere,. The result is a high energy particle collision.