点击此处免费订阅此课程

Discovering origins

发现起源

By the end of this lesson, you will have read proposals on new inventions.

ADVENTURER: We're living in an exciting time guys, things are changing all around us and there's never been a better time to be alive! I'd like to talk to you about one really wild and cutting edge scientific experiment ... The Large Hadron Collider, or LHC as I like to call it, was opened recently in Switzerland. This huge machine has been designed to try and find some really tiny particles that scientists believe will answer some really big questions. One of the particles that the scientists are looking for is called the Higgs Boson.

ADVENTURER1: This is a theoretical particle that would explain how everything has a mass, which is a problem that has troubled scientists for many years. The scientists are also going to try to find out the origins of the universe using the LHC. They plan to accelerate particles called protons to speeds close to the speed of light—which is what they believe happened during the "Big Bang" when the universe was formed. By doing this, they should be able to recreate the conditions under which the universe was formed, bringing us more knowledge and understanding of how the universe came to be created. Of course, some people believe that this experiment could create a black hole or a global catastrophe, but most scientists believe it will be completely safe.

ADVENTURER2: Either way, this is the end of the world as we know it.