How does Victoria Martin explain the way a particle accelerator works on In Our Time?

Victoria Martin, professor of collider physics at the University of Edinburgh, says accelerators take charged particles, usually electrons or protons, and push them with an electric field set up between oppositely charged electrodes. Magnets cannot speed a particle up but can bend its path, so modern machines like the Large Hadron Collider combine both: electric fields to accelerate and magnetic fields to steer the beam around the ring.

• A collider is an accelerator used as an atom smasher: two beams moving close to the speed of light are crashed into each other.
• The LHC has four collision points, each surrounded by a detector that Martin describes as a very sophisticated custom-built digital camera.
• Harry Cliff adds that those detectors are not camera-sized but as big as cathedrals.

Source: our own transcription of the episode. The full conversation is on In Our Time (2026-10-22). Read the whole episode summary →

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