OK, that headline might be a little bit of an exaggeration, but it was in the subject line of an email sent my way, and I couldn’t resist (a) opening the email and (b) using it to get you to read this article.

For the record, there are just too many super-cool things going on at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory to say the YouTube video embedded above is the coolest.

That said, it’s hard to take your eyes off it once you hit “play.”

The 6,800-acre Fermilab site is home to a chain of particle accelerators that provide particle beams to numerous experiments and research and development programs.

The two-minute animation explains how the proton source provides the particles that get accelerated and travel through the accelerator complex at close to the speed of light.

Scientists use these beams to generate protons, neutrons, muons, pions and neutrinos for various research areas across the Fermilab site. More than 4,000 scientists from more than 50 countries use Fermilab and its particle accelerators, detectors and computers for their research.

More information is at http://www.fnal.gov/pub/science/ .

SOURCE: Fermilab