To make sense of what they observe, physicists have ideas. Explore them.Go to: Floor Plan, Tools: Accelerators, Tools: Detectors, Methods: Collisions and Scattering
- Nature's Scale - A quark, a cell, and a human are all part of nature's scale. Can you put the keys of her scale in the right positions and play a tune?
- Top Quark - Calculate the mass of the top quark. Why is colliding protons to make top quarks like colliding Ping-Pong balls to make steel balls? E=mc2 explains it all.
- Particle Families - Physicists sort particles into families with common characteristics. Make your own families of everyday objects. Then open the book and try the family puzzlers.
- Do Rules Matter? - Physicists believe all matter in the universe is made by combining a few basic building blocks and following a set of rules. How many objects can you make following the rules for the two universes on the tabletop?
- Standard Model: Particles - Physicists can make particles with quarks, leptons, and bosons. How many particles can you make?
- Standard Model: Forces - Four forces between particles provide the structure of the world around us. Test how forces affect the balls on the table. Play the computer game.
- Four Forces - Physicists are trying to find a unified framework to describe all four forces. Explore how electricity and magnetism are related.
- Symmetry - Physicists are fascinated with symmetry. Do you know what it means? Play with the objects on the tabletop to find out which have symmetry.
- Mirror Symmetry - When the world and its mirror image behave alike, physicists say they have mirror symmetry. Discover which objects on the tabletop have mirror symmetry. See if the red or blue universe has mirror symmetry.
- Breaking Symmetry - Physicists believe broken symmetries make the physical world the way it is today. Can you break symmetry with the objects on the tabletop?
- Primordial Soup - In the Fermilab accelerator, physicists recreate the primordial soup of the early universe. Turn the crank to add enough energy so you can make primordial soup.
- Accelerating Science video - Watch a rock video about Fermilab science.
- The Powers of Ten video - Explore how the world looks at various powers of ten by watching the famous video by Charles Eames.
The Quarks to Quasars Story: Ideas