Charmed Particles by Chrissy Kolaya Page A

do this, we use an accelerator, in which we send two particles around and around in a circle, going faster and faster until—smash!” He clapped his hands together and held them there for a moment. “We have crashed them!”
    â€œWhy?” Meena asked, her voice coming from beside him where she stood next to Lily, watching as Abhijat spoke. Hearing her father describing his work, her curiosity had overpowered her sense that these were things she ought already to know. But her father so rarely talked with her or her mother about his work. She knew the Lab as a facility with a lovely butterfly garden, a cross-country ski path, a dog park, lectures, arts events, and symphonies—not as her father knew it.
    â€œAh, yes. A useful question from our colleague, Miss Mital,” Abhijat said, looking surprised. “It is, to put it simply, to see what happens.”
    â€œAnd what does happen?” Meena asked.
    Abhijat looked at his daughter, intrigued by her curiosity. He felt for a moment as though he were speaking only to her. “You see,” he explained, “when they collide, they break apart into even smaller particles. Particles so small we can’t even see them. All we can see are the paths they make as they go spinning and flying out into the world. And those paths help us to know what kind of a particle it is we are looking at.”
    A chattering in the corner, which Mrs. Hamilton quickly shushed, broke the illusion and brought Abhijat back to the group of students.
    â€œNow, you may be wondering, why should we want to do such a thing,” he continued. “Why build such a facility just to look at such tiny, tiny things? Who among us is wondering this?”
    A few timid hands went up into the air.
    He smiled. “Well, my distinguished guests, it is for a very good reason. These tiny, tiny particles help us to learn what the world was like at the very beginning of time.” He paused here for effect, his eyes wide.
    â€œLike Adam and Eve?” one of the children, a pale, blonde-haired girl, asked.
    â€œOh, no, long before then,” Abhijat said, smiling.
    â€œAnd what was it like?” Lily asked.
    Abhijat looked out at them, eyebrows raised, his face animated. “Very curious indeed.” He clapped his hands together. “Now, if you will please follow me.”
    Lily and Meena trotted along at the head of the group, close to Abhijat. As they passed the offices of the physicists, Rose noticed the chalkboard walls filled with equations, a beautiful script that reminded her for a moment of the hieroglyphs she and Randolph had seen in the temple of Karnak.
    â€œYou see,” Abhijat continued, “every particle gives an energy signal. As Miss Winchester suggested, you might think of the particle accelerator as a kind of microscope. When the protons collide, they create mass in the form of other particles, and here, sometimes, are new particles we have before only ever imagined. In order to see these, we must use a quite ingenious machine called a detector, which is watching all day, every day for the signals from these particles. It gives us, in a nutshell, a tsunami of data. Because, you see, the accelerator is creating over a million collisions per second. So someone must look at these collisions and see what they’re telling us.”
    â€œAnd what are they telling you?” Lily asked.
    Abhijat smiled. “Well, you must be patient with us, Miss Winchester, as we work to discover that. Now, if you will please follow me, here we will look at part of the detector.” Abhijat led the children over to a bank of computers, where a number of young men sat glued to their screens. “Birali is the colleague who is making sure the machine is running correctly,” Abhijat said, indicating a younger man, who looked up from his computer screen and smiled at the children. “And he will today show us what the paths of some particles look