AMA | October 2024

10977.854 - 11005.405 Sean Carroll

But the gluons are also partons, so Feynman did know what he was doing a little bit. So the things that collide in a proton-proton collision have less energy— than the proton as a whole because that energy is spread out over all these partons. So even though you're colliding at 14 TeV at the Large Hadron Collider, it's not really a 14 TeV worth of energy in each collision that's spread out.