Word: electronics
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...apparent disparity to be a major practical problem. Classical laws work perfectly well in explaining phenomena in the visible world -- the motion of a planet or the trajectory of a curveball -- and quantum theory does just as well when restricted to describing subatomic events like the flight of an electron...
...easy to understand why even Hawking was awed: he was looking at just a portion of the largest scientific instrument ever built. Known as the large electron-positron collider, this new particle accelerator is the centerpiece of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research and one of Europe's proudest achievements. LEP is a mammoth particle racetrack residing in a ring- shaped tunnel 27 km (16.8 miles) in circumference and an average of 110 meters (360 ft.) underground. The machine contains 330,000 cubic meters (431,640 cu. yds.) of concrete and holds some 60,000 tons of hardware, including...
FOOTNOTE: *Antiprotons and positrons are examples of antimatter, a rare set of particles that mirror normal matter. A proton is positively charged, but an antiproton is negative. The counterpart of the negative electron is the positive positron...
CAPTION: CERN's Large Electron-Positron Collider...
...basic "family" of particles is supplemented by two more exotic families, each of which has a parallel structure: two quarks, a type of electron and a type of neutrino. These two extra families are all but extinct in the modern universe, but they apparently existed in the searing heat of the Big Bang, and only accelerators can re-create them. In fact, all of the quarks in all of the families have been found or re-created -- except for the one called the top, which is believed to be the heaviest of all (its mass is at least 90 times...