Question: What does particle accelerator mean?

Candice Basson answered on 17 Nov 2019:

Particles are what we’re all made of, they’re what make up atoms. So a particle accelerator simply ‘accelerates’ particles. Where I work we accelerate (speed up) protons near to the speed of light (the fastest anything can travel as far as we know) until we smash them together in our detectors to see what happens.