You are swept inside a proton compressed into a luminous amber-gold disc, where the “air” is really a dense churn of quark and gluon fields threading through the QCD vacuum. Ahead, another proton slams in as a flattened wall of blazing field energy, and their contact detonates into a white-hot point that briefly overwhelms everything around it. From that flash, twin blue-white jets spear outward in opposite directions, each a narrowing storm of fragmenting partons that hadronize into countless tiny sparks while softer red-orange debris fans away. The surrounding vacuum, momentarily ionized by the collision, glows with a cold blue haze before sinking back into darkness, leaving only the sense of immense energy compressed into an almost unimaginably tiny world.
Subatomic