Scientists catch the highest energy particles by making them go faster than light
Not faster than 299,792,458 m/s, but faster than light moves through anything other than vacuum!
“You are both fools. You cannot see thoughts, or angels. One is an abstract, the other a fantasy. To compare the two would be silly. Of course, using inferential logic, we can detect the existence of thought by the evidence of its actions, just as I detected the existence of a new form of radiation! Seeing no evidence of God or angels, and applying Occam’s Razor we can effectively rule out God or angels with metaphysical certainty. By the way Mr. Astronaut, you have cancer.” -Pavel Cherenkov (allegedly)
If you pump more and more energy into a massive particle, it moves faster and faster, asymptotically approaching the speed of light. But if there’s too much energy in your particle, then your standard way of building a detector — to force the particle to collide with another and detect the properties of what comes out — simply won’t work. The faster particles go, the faster and more indeterminate the detector tracks are, meaning that your attempts to reconstruct the original particle’s energy, mass, charge and other properties fare worse and worse. The “brute force” solution of building larger and more sensitive detectors…
