What are collisions at extreme energies?

When particles crash into each other at super-fast speeds, it’s called collisions at extreme energies.

Imagine you're playing with marbles on a very fast pinball machine, the marbles are like tiny particles, and the pinball machine makes them zoom toward each other really, really fast. When they hit, it's like a tiny explosion that creates new things, sometimes even things we've never seen before!

At places like big science labs, scientists use machines called accelerators to make particles go extremely fast and then crash them together. These crashes can create new kinds of matter or energy, just like when you smash two marbles together really hard, sometimes they break into smaller pieces, or even make a little flash!

These super-smashes help scientists learn about the building blocks of everything around us, like why things are solid, how atoms work, and maybe even what happened right after the Big Bang.

It’s not magic, it's just tiny particles having an awesome smash party!