Humans spend a lot of time creating things, and these activities drive a huge amount of our lives, economically and personally. We’re always in a fight to keep our creations from breaking down. Houses, roads, cars. Power lines and bridges. Solar cells and computers. Batteries. People.

Then there are the things we want to break down, like harmful pollutants in the soil or old buildings, and we’re always searching for better ways to accomplish that. We want to break down the cellulose in plant fibers, so we can make it into biofuels; we also want to break down atoms, so we can harness the nuclear energy they release.

Much of our lives revolve around creating and breaking down, and they are topics that constantly occupy the minds of scientists and engineers. An entire lab at Argonne National Laboratory is devoted to finding out what goes wrong when batteries stop working. No fewer than five accelerators designed to smash tiny things into one another are running at any given time on the campus.

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