I use to compare it to a ship in a storm. You cannot accellerate matter beyond the speed of light, with using electromagnetism as a force. While the point of the science was to see what interesting things pop into existence when these high-energy particles and antiparticles collide, you needed to carefully calibrate the electromagnets and accelerating cavities to operate at just the right frequencies to account for these particles as they sped up along their way to as close to the speed of light as they could possibly get! In fact, like many undergraduate interns, it was one of my very first jobs (back in 1997 hi, Roger and Erik) to make sure the electromagnets that bent the particle beams at the Tevatron were optimized to achieve the particle energies (and luminosities) we wanted, up to 99.999956% the speed of light! Over the span of thousands and thousands of trips around the ring (with each trip taking just microseconds), they would be accelerated up to their maximum speed, with the electromagnets consistently ramping up towards their maximum field strength to accomodate them! Older accelerators, like the Tevatron (above), accelerated particles in one direction and antiparticles (with the same mass but opposite charge) in the opposite direction. Image credit: aerial photo of the Tevatron, retrieved from physis.ro.
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