[E]xperiments take us to that frightening frontier of vulnerability: the real world. - Suzie Sheehy

If you look at a real one... the ISIS synchrotron. There are 10 sections that look almost identical... and you have these big yellow magnets... They're... s. They bend the beam around, and then there's two other main components. There are ... and... a radiofrequency cavity. Now this is basically a big box like your microwave, into which we pump electromagnetic waves, and this sets up a inside there, and you have to time the voltage of that standing wave with the passage of the particles in order to get them to accelerate.

But I'm not, anymore, a particle physicist. I'm a particle accelerator physicist, and so it's my job to understand how to build the machines that we use in this field. And so I briefly want to run down... how these amazing machines actally operate.

I mean you guys are a rubbish accelerator, but we do that very very precisely. ...So what happens in a synchrotron... is that you have to time that wave very very precisely with the increase in the magnetic field in order to get the particles all synchronized, and that's why we call it a synchrotron.