What’s Actually Colliding in the Collider?

100 meters underground, particles smash at nearly the speed of light. Grab a drink and discover what’s actually colliding inside the Large Hadron Collider - no physics degree required.

Location: Zoku Amsterdam

Getting to the space: Take the elevators up to the rooftop on the 6th floor.

Included: One drink is included with every ticket.

About the talk

100 meters beneath the French-Swiss border lies a 27-kilometer circular tunnel where particles are hurled at nearly the speed of light - just to see what happens when they smash into each other.

It sounds like pure science fiction, but the reality is even stranger.

When the Large Hadron Collider records collisions at 13.6 TeV (the highest energy ever achieved in a laboratory), the total energy released is tiny on a human scale - roughly equal to a single sewing needle dropping a few centimeters to the floor. The catch? The machine concentrates that energy into a space ten trillion times smaller than that needle.

At that density, the rules of everyday reality shift, and scientists can forge new particles out of pure energy to answer a deceptive question: Why does matter have mass at all?

What We’ll Explore Over Drinks

The Hunt for Mass: What elementary particles are actually being hurled around this 27km ring, and what are physicists trying to catch in the crossfire?

Accidental Revolutions: How building a giant underground particle track unexpectedly gave the world modern cloud computing, big data systems, and breakthrough cancer therapies.

The Scale of the Impossible: What it takes to build and run the most complex machine in human history.

No physics background or technical jargon required. Just an evening of mind-bending science, a drink in hand, and open Q&A where no question is too basic.

About the Speaker

Dr. Sherif Kamal is an experimental physicist specializing in surface physics and atomically thin (2D) materials. During his PhD in condensed matter physics, he conducted experiments at two synchrotrons (giant circular accelerators which generate light 10 billion times brighter than the Sun) in Europe: Solaris in Poland and Elettra in Italy . He is currently a researcher at the University of Twente (Faculty of Science and Technology).