05 March 2010

Time again for our Website of the Week, when we showcase interesting and innovative online destinations.

The world of physics has changed a lot since I went to school. More powerful particle accelerators — atom smashers, they used to call them — have allowed physicists to learn ever more about the sub-atomic particles that are the basic building blocks of all matter. This week we feature a website where you can learn your physics from some of the people on the forefront of some of the most fundamental science out there.

"Essentially, The Particle Adventure is an interactive tour of the world of quarks, neutrinos, antimatter, extra dimensions, dark matter, Higgs boson, as well as accelerators and particle detectors," explains Michael Barnett, a physicist at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in California and one of the people behind The Particle Adventure.

When visitors go to the site, they have a choice about how to begin their adventure.

"Well, there are three basic paths they can go through. The first one is the Standard Model, which is basically the theory of what we know now. There's another path by which they can learn about accelerators and particle detectors — essentially, how do we know any of this. Finally, there's a section that talks more about the unsolved mysteries and particularly the role that the Large Hadron Collider would play in that."

The Large Hadron Collider, of course, is the world's largest particle accelerator located near Geneva.

 The website is overseen by a group of working physicists, but you don't need a Nobel Prize to join in the adventure of sub-atomic particles.

"Our target audience originally was high school students, but I think it's also the general public, people who are interested in science in general, and we certainly have had tremendous feedback from both groups. We've even heard of people as young as a fifth grader who got a lot out of the site."

For a free and highly readable introduction to the world of particle physics — available in 15 languages as well as English — transport yourself to particleadventure.org, or visit our site, VOAnews.com, for the link to this and hundreds of other Websites of the Week.