Are atoms immortal?

CrowdScience

BBC

Science, Technology

4.8 • 985 Ratings

🗓️ 10 October 2025

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Atoms are the building blocks of our world. Many have been around since right after the Big Bang created the universe nearly 14 billion years ago. And if life on Earth is made of atoms that are from all the way back then... will those atoms keep existing forever? That’s what CrowdScience Listener Rob in Australia would like to know.

Caroline Steel investigates the immortality of atoms by travelling to CERN, the world’s largest particle physics laboratory located along the border of France and Switzerland. There, theoretical physicist Matthew McCullough explains whether the smallest atoms can decay or survive the test of time.

Physicist Marco van Leeuwen from Nikhef, the National Particle Physics Laboratory in the Netherlands, gives Caroline a behind-the-scenes tour of the ALICE experiment and the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. She learns how atoms are smashed at incredibly high speeds, and whether that might spell the end of an atom.

And all life on earth is made up of atoms, but how does a collection of tiny particles become a living being? Astrobiologist Betül Kaçar from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, breaks down how life works from an atomic point of view.

Presenter: Caroline Steel

Producer: Imaan Moin

Editor: Ben Motley

(Photo: Hands cupping a glowing atom in the studio - stock photo. Credit: Paper Boat Creative via Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.
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0:34.4	Listen on BBC Sounds.
0:48.0	Music twice weekly. Listen on BBC Sounds. So we've just walked into this massive airplane hangar looking space.
0:55.0	And if we look down, what can we see?
0:57.0	At the moment there's a concrete floor or ceiling about the experiment.
1:03.0	Welcome to Crowd Science from the BBC World Service, the show that answers your science questions.
1:09.0	It's about 60 meters below ground level, so we look down and below this floor is the experiment.
1:16.6	So sort of down this massive shaft.
1:18.6	We're visiting somewhere that's been on my bucket list for a very long time.
1:23.6	The world's biggest particle physics laboratory, CERN, home of the Large Hadron Collider.
1:30.3	And why is that such a massive layer of concrete?
1:33.3	The concrete is to stop any particles from escaping from the accelerator or from the collisions.
1:39.3	Because it's not good to interact with them as a human.
1:42.3	Yeah. It changes your atoms and that's not healthy.
1:45.6	We like to keep our atoms as they are.
	...

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