What I'm going to talk about today is the fascinating world, and I really think it's wonderful, of particle accelerators. - Suzie Sheehy

The amazing thing about this collection of particles, which admittedly looks arbitrary until you learn it in more detail, is that you can take the entire description of every known particle and interaction, other than gravity, in the universe, and write it down on a mug.

This... is only one in the world... there are actually about 35,000 of them...

Nowadays you wouldn't want to do that voluntarily, and you wouldn't want to do it without understanding the consequences, but there are some situations that you might want to do it in... [T]here's a very good reason for that, because if you take a much lower energy beam that the Large Hadron Collider beam, and you put it into water, or into the human body, or into tissue and you start it with the correct amount of energy, it will actually slow down and stop, and deposit almost all of its dose (or its energy) in one spot... [W]e call this the .