宇宙最小的组成部分是什么？

What Are the Smallest Pieces of the Universe? Physicists are searching for what lies underneath the particles we know BY JAY BENNETT ILLUSTRATIONS BY NEIL WEBB Sau Lan Wu was in building 32 at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva. Hundreds of feet below, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)—the world’s biggest scientific instrument—had been conducting high-energy particle collisions for more than two years. The machine accelerates protons to near the speed of light and slams them into one another to produce sprays of fundamental particles and radiation. “Suddenly there’s a lot of noise,” Wu recalls. “We heard one of my students screaming.” …