What are some examples of applications of particle physics in everyday life?
Pays my salary, or at least part of it. b) More seriously, we are trying to understand the fundamental forces in nature and basic states of matter. This is also connected with observations from the cosmos, the “dark matter” problem and the even more mysterious “dark energy” problem. The dark matter problem has been known from the 1930’s when Fritz Zwicky found that Galaxies didn’t rotate as one would expect them too, unless they were embedded in a cloud of invisible matter, called dark matter. We still don’t know what this is. c) There are also concerns in our theory, called the “Standard Model,” that we really don’t understand how particles get their mass and how the forces could translate to higher energy scales. d) There are also spin offs. Technologies that arise from particle physicists doing their research that are useful for others. Examples are new accelerators using protons that can much more effectively kill tumors than using x-rays (photons) and the construction of machines
