The recipe

The backbone of Accelerate! is a ‘recipe’ for a particle accelerator, which takes the show through the various concepts (and their associated demonstrations) which explain how a particle accelerator works. The recipe has five ingredients:

1. Particles
2. Energy
3. Control
4. Collision
5. Detection

As well as providing structure, on a more practical level this is a brilliant mantra if you ever find yourself lost for words: a recipe recap is a brilliant way to remind the audience (and yourself!) how far you’ve made it through the show.

‘So, we’ve got our particles by ripping apart hydrogen atoms, we’ve given them energy using electromagnetic waves, we’ve used enormous magnets to control the beam, and smashed the particles together in a particle collision: now, there’s no point doing all that amazing science if you can’t see what you’ve done, so next we need to talk about particle detectors.’