Participle Accelerator
What If CERN Smashed Words Rather Than Protons?
The high-energy particle beams we find in places like the Large Hadron Collider drive protons and other bits of matter toward fantastic collisions, at speeds up to 0.999999991 the speed of light. The result is a fantastic scattering of debris, the products of which can contain rare, short-lived elementary particles like the recently identified Higgs boson.
What if, instead of smashing protons, we could smash words? That’s what Moritz Heller wondered. By driving two words together, their individual phonetics and letters are driven apart in pre-programmed patterns. The sum of those two words’ ingredients jetting away from each other draws patterns that remind me of the beautiful neutrino bubble chambers of old.
Vowels, plosives, frikatives … they’re all there. What a super-cool idea! Check out this video for more:
