- today
Examining the 2012 discovery of a subatomic particle believed to be the Higgs boson, or "God particle," which could explain how matter came to exist in the universe. Scientists explore the fundamental nature of the Higgs boson and how it gives mass to matter.
Morgan Freeman explains that there are two basic types of elementary particles: fermions which are "a group of massive particles that carry matter," and bosons which are "massless particles that carry force." The commentators explain that the Higgs field converts massless into massive particles.
The LHC in Geneva, Switzerland is 17 miles long. Particle are accelerated LHC. Next, more massive particles are created as a result of the collision of smaller particles.
Freeman explains, "The protons that are smashed together at the LHC...are filled with particles called quarks and gluons." When protons collide, thousands of new particles fly off. The smaller-than-proton particles that shoot out of the collision are like "shattered glass." In the aftermath of proton collisions, physicists at the LHC found Higgs bosons in July 2012.
Freeman elaborates that the Higgs boson doesn't help us understand "dark matter." Afterwards, he discusses the "hierarchy problem" in relation to the Higgs boson.
Freeman says that the W and Z bosons are "extremely heavy."
Francesco Sannino and his colleague believe that the Higgs boson is governed by something even more fundamental which they call the "technicolor force".
Ordinary quarks (a type of fermion) in different arrangements make either protons or neutron depending on the arrangement.
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Morgan Freeman explains that there are two basic types of elementary particles: fermions which are "a group of massive particles that carry matter," and bosons which are "massless particles that carry force." The commentators explain that the Higgs field converts massless into massive particles.
The LHC in Geneva, Switzerland is 17 miles long. Particle are accelerated LHC. Next, more massive particles are created as a result of the collision of smaller particles.
Freeman explains, "The protons that are smashed together at the LHC...are filled with particles called quarks and gluons." When protons collide, thousands of new particles fly off. The smaller-than-proton particles that shoot out of the collision are like "shattered glass." In the aftermath of proton collisions, physicists at the LHC found Higgs bosons in July 2012.
Freeman elaborates that the Higgs boson doesn't help us understand "dark matter." Afterwards, he discusses the "hierarchy problem" in relation to the Higgs boson.
Freeman says that the W and Z bosons are "extremely heavy."
Francesco Sannino and his colleague believe that the Higgs boson is governed by something even more fundamental which they call the "technicolor force".
Ordinary quarks (a type of fermion) in different arrangements make either protons or neutron depending on the arrangement.
Thanks for watching. Follow for more videos.
#cosmosspacescience
#throughthewormhole
#season4
#episode1
#cosmology
#astronomy
#spacetime
#spacescience
#space
#nasa
#spacedocumentary
#morganfreeman
#Godparticle
#particleofuniverse
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00Scientists have been hunting it for 40 years.
00:05The key that will unlock the secrets of the universe.
00:10And now, they've found it.
00:16Can the Higgs boson really tell us how all creation came into being?
00:22Do we owe our existence to something so elusive, yet so powerful?
00:28Is there a god particle?
00:36Space, time, life itself.
00:43The secrets of the cosmos lie through the wormhole.
00:58How did we get to be here, in this universe?
01:06Scientists say our universe began as a burst of pure energy.
01:10But somehow, that energy transformed itself into matter, which eventually became stars, planets, and the stuff that makes up you and me.
01:20Instead of being a fleeting fireball gone in an instant, our universe has stuck around for billions of years.
01:28Physicists have long suspected there must be some invisible force field spread across the universe, mysteriously turning energy into solid matter.
01:43Now, scientists have at last proven that this theoretical force field is real.
01:49They have produced from it a subatomic particle known as the Higgs boson, the so-called God particle.
01:58Can it explain the mystery of our creation?
02:02Have you ever watched a spinning top?
02:09As a kid, I remember being mesmerized watching the painted shapes spinning on mine.
02:17The pattern became a ghostly blur.
02:20It looked like I could stick my finger right through it.
02:24But once it stopped moving, the pattern became solid again.
02:29The solid nature of matter has long puzzled physicists.
02:34Over the last four decades, they have wondered if matter is solid because of the Higgs boson, the so-called God particle.
02:43You know what they really wanted to call it, right? They wanted to call it the God particle.
02:46You probably can't put that on TV, though.
02:48Given the amount of time and money we've spent looking for this thing.
02:51And we've missed it, oh, damn, where is that particle?
02:55Dan Hooper and Patrick Fox are theoretical physicists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory just outside of Chicago.
03:03Like thousands of physicists, they have spent their careers waiting for the Higgs boson to reveal itself in high-speed particle collision experiments.
03:14It's something we've been looking for for a long time.
03:16The universe would be very different if it weren't for the God particle.
03:21Physicists believe, in fact, that there was a brief moment when the universe lived without the God particle.
03:29It was at the beginning of time itself, long before there were physicists and arcades.
03:36Imagine this air hockey table is the entire universe.
03:40When it was born in the Big Bang, physicists think there were only massless particles of pure energy.
03:49So what you can see here is that all the particles are moving around at the same speed, at the speed of light.
03:54They're all essentially massless in the early universe.
03:57But the universe did not remain that way for very long.
04:00After only a fraction of a second, something changed.
04:05Almost like someone pulled a lever that made many of the particles grind to a halt.
04:13At some point, the Higgs field turned on, and that made some of the particles acquire a mass,
04:18which meant they stopped traveling at the speed of light.
04:20The photons, the yellow ones, are zipping around at the speed of light,
04:23whereas the red and the green have acquired a mass thanks to the Higgs mechanism and travel more slowly.
04:28Physicists believe that right after the Big Bang, the universe began to cool and the Higgs field turned on.
04:37Some particles began to interact with the field and acquired mass.
04:42Other particles remained massless bundles of energy.
04:47In the decades for which scientists have been smashing together particles to probe the subatomic world,
04:54they have found two basic types of particles.
04:57There are fermions, a group of massive particles that carry matter,
05:03and there are bosons, massless particles that carry force.
05:10Without the existence of the Higgs, all particles would be massless.
05:16So if there was no Higgs field, you would have had these other force carriers,
05:20they would have been massless, and therefore, like the particles of light,
05:23they would move at the speed of light.
05:25And without these masses, you could never have atoms or chemistry
05:28or any of the interesting stuff we find in our universe.
05:31The things that you and I are made up of wouldn't be able to clump and coalesce and slow down.
05:35No structure, no life, boredom.
05:37Yeah.
05:39Thanks to the Higgs, our universe hung around long enough for complex structures like human life to form.
05:46But why did the matter-creating Higgs field turn on?
05:51Many scientists, including Dan and Patrick, think the sheer violence of the Big Bang jostled the field into action.
06:00So up until now, I've been turning the Higgs mechanism on and off by hand.
06:04But of course, in the early universe, it didn't happen that way.
06:07And just like water freezes all on its own when you cool it, the Higgs mechanism will turn on all by itself as the universe cools.
06:16So this pool cue is supposed to represent how unstable the Higgs mechanism was all by itself.
06:20And as you can see, it just falls over.
06:24Scientists think the Higgs field, the force that turned a ball of energy into our physical universe, turned on all by itself.
06:32But some will say that it was no accident and it must have been turned on by a creator.
06:39That mystery of creation may be answered if we learn more about the Higgs field.
06:45Scientists have been trying to disturb the field enough to make it produce a Higgs boson so they can study it.
06:53It's an effort that has made physicists construct the most powerful machine in the history of science,
06:59science, the Large Hadron Collider, or the LHC.
07:06Lynn Evans has been responsible for building every particle accelerator at CERN in Geneva for the past four decades.
07:16All the machines he created are still working.
07:19In fact, they all work together in stages.
07:23Each older one is now responsible for giving the particles an incremental push,
07:29packing them with more and more energy,
07:32and eventually feeding them into the giant 17-mile-long ring that is the LHC.
07:40I came to CERN in 1969.
07:43My first job was working on what is called the duoplasmatron ion source,
07:48which is actually the source of the protons, and then they are accelerated.
07:52From the linear accelerator, they go into a booster to get higher energy,
07:56and then into the super proton synchrotron, which I worked on in the 70s,
08:00and finally into the Large Hadron Collider.
08:03As particle accelerators have advanced over the past few decades,
08:09they have been able to get particles to higher and higher energies,
08:14allowing them to create more and more massive new particles with each collision.
08:22The older accelerators only had enough energy to smash together two protons
08:27and make a new particle with just double the mass.
08:31But theorists predict the Higgs weighs at least 100 times as much as a proton.
08:37The laws of physics say that if you give protons extra kinetic energy,
08:42you can smash them together to form a new particle
08:46that weighs many times more than the sum of their parts.
08:52Well, it all goes back to the most famous equation in science.
08:55E equals mc squared.
08:57In the LHC, we are converting energy into mass.
09:00And if you want to make very heavy objects, you need a high energy.
09:06Think of particle physicists as golfers hitting protons instead of golf balls.
09:12Over the years, they have gotten better and better clubs.
09:18To make an analogy, I think this pitching wedge you can think of as the machines of the 60s.
09:23This will take me about roughly 120 yards, something like that,
09:29because it doesn't have enough energy to go very far.
09:35Then the next one was the proton-antiproton collider.
09:39The proton-antiproton collider was much more powerful.
09:43And, yeah, a bit like a 7-iron.
09:45Then, this time, the particles will get more energy.
09:48And, uh...
09:53And we'll go quite a bit further.
09:56And finally, of course, now we've got...
09:59At last, we've got the machine that can produce the Higgs boson.
10:03And, uh...
10:06If you want an analogy with that, this is my peaceful driver.
10:12So here we go.
10:22And that really moves it.
10:23Making a particle as heavy as the Higgs requires far more energy than any previous accelerator has ever produced.
10:33Len and the enormous team of engineers at CERN have had to push their technology to the limits.
10:40Every time the particles come around, they get a little kick, increasing their energy incrementally until we get up to the full energy of the LHC.
10:49Physicists finally have the power they need.
10:53But capturing and studying the Higgs boson is about more than brute force.
10:58It's a quest to pull a needle from a haystack.
11:02A haystack made of trillions of subatomic particles.
11:06For most religious believers, God cannot be seen or heard.
11:16But signs of his or her presence are felt all around us.
11:21The Higgs boson is almost as elusive.
11:24Which is why the chase for it has been so challenging.
11:28The Higgs can pop in and out of existence in one billionth of a trillionth of a second.
11:36And only leaves behind the faintest of evidence that it was ever there.
11:41So how do scientists find something that can never be seen?
11:50When physicist Joe Incandela was a kid, his mom and dad hoped he would become a glass sculptor.
11:57I was very much interested in art as a kid.
12:00My parents encouraged that very strongly.
12:03They'd been very interested in art.
12:04When I discovered one of my favorite glassblowers was a chemist.
12:08And so that kind of gave me an excuse to go to college and study chemistry.
12:13And so when I took chemistry, I had to take physics.
12:16And that just immediately hit me.
12:18This was really fascinating.
12:19This was the stuff I wanted to study.
12:20Joe is now the leader of one of the two major experiments at the LHC.
12:28He directs thousands of physicists from around the world who are all on the same quest.
12:35To figure out how and why we and everything we know exist.
12:42We're really trying to understand our place in the universe.
12:46You know, what is everything made of?
12:48And how did it become what it is?
12:49This sort of fundamental questions.
12:53Joe believes the LHC will answer these questions.
12:57The collisions at the LHC recreate the energy conditions that happened just after the Big Bang.
13:04Scientists are trying to gain some insight into the moment when the Higgs field turned on and spread across the entire universe.
13:15Creating matter, the stars, and eventually us.
13:20The force of the Higgs field is carried by the Higgs boson.
13:24And a boson can only be detected by creating an energy disturbance in the field.
13:30It turns out the Higgs is actually determining the whole universe in some way.
13:37What state it's in and how these particles will manifest themselves.
13:41So if we take an accelerator like the LHC and we provide enough energy and we smash two protons together,
13:49we can actually pull, if you like, a Higgs particle out of this fabric and study it.
13:54Just like these glass balls are filled with a bunch of stuff, the protons that are smashed together at the LHC are also filled with stuff.
14:05Particles called quarks and gluons.
14:09When protons collide, thousands of new particles come shooting out.
14:15Studying the aftermath is a painstaking job.
14:18Like sifting through piles of shattered glass.
14:22We're looking for certain patterns.
14:25The energy, the particles, the debris is scattered around the detector in various ways.
14:30And for Higgs you have very specific patterns depending on the decay that's involved.
14:36But the guard particle has blessed physicists with a twist.
14:39It always vanishes before it can be spotted.
14:45The Higgs decays almost instantly.
14:47Its lifetime is so short we can't measure it.
14:50And so we detect it by its decay products.
14:56To detect the Higgs, physicists like Joe have to look at the aftermath of proton collisions
15:02to figure out what the original particles were.
15:04If Joe could analyze each piece of debris in this glass collision and calculate its trajectory,
15:12he could reconstruct the crash based on the remnants that came out of it.
15:17Most of the interactions that we see, they immediately create a pattern that we recognize is not interesting.
15:23And we can reject them.
15:25So we reject by far the vast majority of the collisions.
15:29The only collisions worth studying are when the components of the protons are perfectly aligned.
15:35If a quark inside one proton makes a head-on impact with a quark inside the other,
15:41then almost all the energy of the collision is concentrated in one place.
15:46This creates a strong enough ripple in the Higgs field to make a Higgs boson.
15:52But this type of collision almost never happens.
15:58Now those are rare events, okay, really rare.
16:02So roughly speaking, a Higgs production is almost one in a trillion.
16:08Since the LHC has been running, it has produced about a thousand trillion collisions.
16:15If you had a thousand trillion grains of sand, you would fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool.
16:22But only a few hundred of those collisions might produce a Higgs.
16:26A few hundred grains of sand would just cover the tip of your finger.
16:34It is a seemingly impossible task.
16:37But to the world's astonishment, Joe and thousands of other physicists pulled off the unfathomable.
16:43There's very few events involved, and we can trace where this comes from.
16:48There's a deficit in a...
16:50On July 4th, 2012, Joe had the honor of announcing that the teams at the LHC had made a giant step forward.
16:59They had detected a new particle that weighed between 125 and 126 gigaelectron volts,
17:07the predicted range of the mass of the Higgs.
17:10It's a magnificent thing because these results are now global and shared by all of mankind, I think.
17:15So, I thank you for that.
17:18I've never seen anything like it in my career.
17:21There was a lot of excitement. People were very happy.
17:26It was just incredible.
17:27Was I going to see the Beatles or something?
17:29Everybody was crazy, and there was spontaneous applause at a physics seminar, which never happens.
17:33It's like seeing the Beatles after waiting for it for decades.
17:36Right, right, exactly.
17:38It's, I hope not the end, but it is the latest step in a long journey.
17:42It's taken us 40 years to get here, and we now have a marvelous step forward in our understanding of nature.
17:47The Higgs field is unlike anything we've ever seen before.
17:52The Higgs field is part of this fabric that we're interacting with everywhere we go.
17:57From it, we can, to some extent, even possibly understand the evolution of the universe.
18:02It's a very profound finding.
18:04It's being called the greatest scientific discovery since Einstein wrote E equals MC squared.
18:15A great piece of art is something that, you know, lasts forever.
18:19A new scientific discovery or development is something that contributes to humanity for all time.
18:27The particle that could solve the riddle of our existence has been spotted.
18:32Are we closing in on a final understanding of the universe?
18:38Dan Hooper thinks the answer may be more complicated.
18:42That there may not be one Higgs boson, but five.
18:51The Higgs boson is supposed to explain where all the matter in the universe came from.
18:58But in the last decade, we've learned that most of our universe is made up of invisible particles called dark matter.
19:07In fact, there is five times more dark matter than ordinary matter.
19:13The current theory that predicts the existence of the Higgs boson offers no explanation for this strange substance.
19:21Could the Higgs have a hidden dark side?
19:30Theoretical physicist Dan Hooper has been waiting his whole career for the announcement that the Higgs boson has been discovered.
19:39I was up streaming it on my laptop, enthusiastically waiting for the results.
19:45You wait for something this long and when it happens, no matter how prepared you think you should be for it to happen, it seems surreal.
19:55It seems unexpected, no matter how expected it should have been.
19:58The Higgs has been found.
20:03But a huge mystery still remains.
20:06What is dark matter?
20:09One of the biggest problems in cosmology is that when we look in telescopes at space, we find that only a small fraction of the total matter is made up of things like atoms and other known material.
20:20Most of it is some sort of elusive material that, for lack of a better name, we just call dark matter.
20:27Half a center of exploring the subatomic world has revealed an organizing structure called the Standard Model of Particle Physics.
20:37Scientists have discovered 12 fundamental particles of matter.
20:41The fermions, equalist blade among quarks and leptons.
20:44There are four particles that transmit force, like electricity and magnetism.
20:51These are the bosons.
20:53And then, completing the picture, is one very special boson, the Higgs boson.
20:59But the Standard Model has no explanation for dark matter.
21:04And it has another serious flaw.
21:06One of the biggest problems with the Standard Model of Particle Physics is something we call the hierarchy problem.
21:14We know that the Higgs boson has a mass of about 126 giga electron volts, or GeV.
21:20This is a heavy particle, but naively we would expect, according to the Standard Model, that the Higgs should be much, much heavier than this.
21:27And for some reason, it's lighter.
21:29The Higgs has weight issues.
21:32Just as the Higgs boson gives mass to other particles, other particles, in turn, contribute to the mass of the Higgs.
21:41When physicists work out how big the Higgs should get from these other particles, they come up with a weight billions of times heavier than it is.
21:50Scientists have had to fudge the math to make the Standard Model work, fully knowing something is off.
21:57So to explain this, something has to very, very precisely cancel one another to restore the Higgs mass to its observed value.
22:08When the Higgs and dark matter weight too heavily on Dan, he takes a mental break from physics.
22:16The only dark matter he and his band the congregation sing about are broken hearts.
22:27But Dan can't help but find parallels between the rules of music and the rules of the universe.
22:35It's amazing how many physicists I know who are also accomplished musicians, and maybe there's reasons for that.
22:45The patterns that you find in particle physics are oftentimes pretty similar to the kind of symmetries you can find in music theory.
22:52Dan believes there is a pattern in nature that can solve the small mass of the Higgs and explain dark matter.
23:03It is an idea that modifies the Standard Model. It's called supersymmetry.
23:10Looking for so long. Please stand but I'll try.
23:20For every piece of matter, every kind of fermionic particle, there has to be a bosonic particle, a force carrier.
23:26So the photon requires a photino, the electron is a selectron.
23:30In music theory, if you have a major scale, like this C major scale.
23:35Those same notes have to make up an A minor scale if you just play them in a different order.
23:44So in a supersymmetric world, you can't have a photon without a photino.
23:48And in our music theory, you can't have a major scale without a minor scale.
23:56According to supersymmetry, the particles we have observed in nature are only half of the picture.
24:04There must be massive superpartners for each one.
24:08One of these superpartners might even be dark matter.
24:14So in most supersymmetric theories, the lightest of the new particles you introduce is a very nice candidate for dark matter.
24:21So in the early universe, when the universe was very hot, these particles would have been produced in copious numbers.
24:27Most of it would get destroyed, but a little bit would survive, and that little bit could make up all the dark matter in our universe today.
24:32According to Dan, if symmetries are a fundamental part of our universe, they can set the Higgs at the correct mass.
24:46If supersymmetry exists in nature, then every contribution given from a particle like an electron gets an opposite contribution from its superpartner, this electron.
24:55And they balance, and they cancel each other out for the most part, leaving us with a pretty light Higgs boson.
25:03Supersymmetry makes sense where the standard model does not.
25:07It can explain the small mass of the Higgs and what dark matter is.
25:13But there is a catch.
25:16In order for supersymmetry to be true, there has to be not just one Higgs, but five.
25:23If nature really is supersymmetric, and there were only one Higgs boson, the theory would contain mathematical problems we call anomalies.
25:32It would contain paradoxes.
25:34And to solve this, you need to introduce extra Higgs bosons.
25:38If CERN were to discover a second or third or fourth or fifth Higgs boson, it would strengthen the case for supersymmetry, even if we hadn't observed those superpartner particles themselves yet.
25:47If we are to explain the universe as we already know it, to understand how dark matter lives alongside ordinary matter, scientists need to find evidence for five Higgs bosons.
26:02It took forty years to find one God particle.
26:08Is the ultimate truth destined to elude us?
26:13The Higgs boson is responsible for giving everything in the entire universe mass.
26:20That's a big job for one subatomic particle.
26:26Some scientists believe it's too big a job for one particle.
26:30What if the God particle isn't carrying the weight all by itself?
26:34Perhaps the real design of the universe needs more than one Higgs to play God.
26:43John Ellis is a theoretical physicist at CERN.
26:48He spends his time thinking up ideas.
26:51Ideas that experiments here often prove wrong.
26:55But that's okay by John.
26:57So, you know, my job is to think of things for the experiments to look for.
27:02And then, as I like to say, I hope they find something different.
27:06Albert de Rueck is an experimental physicist.
27:10He spends his time testing ideas, hoping to prove them wrong.
27:16I joined these experiments in pursuit of finding something to crack the standard model.
27:23Possibly kill the standard model by finding things beyond the standard model.
27:28Albert, the experimentalist, and John, the thinker,
27:33have both been part of the hunt for the Higgs since the beginning.
27:37The Higgs boson was originally supposed to solve one mystery.
27:43The mass of the W and Z bosons, which are extremely heavy.
27:48The other two bosons are massless.
27:53Physicists proposed the W and Z get heavy because they alone interact with an invisible field that is everywhere.
28:03The Higgs field.
28:05But the other bosons do not.
28:08Later, when the standard model was written,
28:11the idea of the Higgs field was extended to take on a much bigger job.
28:17To give mass to the entire universe.
28:21It was sort of added on.
28:22It was not why this mechanism was invented.
28:27But physicists like Albert and John know this one particle may not be responsible for giving mass to everything.
28:35There's myriads of theories out there of physics beyond the standard model.
28:39And it's a general feature of them that they predict something more complicated than just a single Higgs boson.
28:45John and Albert have been trying to come up with new theories building upon the standard model while fixing what is wrong with it.
28:54It means they must change their predictions for what the Higgs actually is.
29:02Several varieties of Higgs particles have been predicted.
29:07You can think of it like flavors of ice cream.
29:10If the LHC found a plain old vanilla Higgs, it confirms what physicists already know.
29:15But if it turns out to be a more exciting flavor, like mint chocolate chip, it opens up new thrilling possibilities for physics.
29:34One of these possibilities would be that there are two Higgs bosons, each with a different job.
29:41So there's been, you know, a number of ideas that say, well, maybe, you know, there's a bit of outsourcing going on.
29:48And that there is one Higgs boson for the W and the Z, and another one for the matter particles.
29:54Imagine John is a Z boson, a force carrier.
29:59Albert is a quark, a matter carrier.
30:03John is a well-known coffee addict.
30:06Albert is a well-known chocoholic.
30:09Say this cafe is one Higgs field, and this chocolate chip is another.
30:15When John passes the cafe, he will slow down and gain mass.
30:21But the other particle, myself, would just zap through until I encounter the field with which I'm interacting.
30:28And that would give me mass, in this case, a chocolate chip.
30:30The standard model doesn't include two Higgs fields, which is why this idea is so appealing to John and Albert.
30:40If we were to find that there is more than one Higgs, that would mean for sure there is physics beyond the standard model.
30:49Now, if what we're looking at is something which is not exactly, you know, your grandmother's Higgs boson, that would actually, in a way, be even more exciting.
30:59So far, there are some signs of anomalies in the way this new particle decays, suggesting an exotic flavor of the Higgs might be lurking in the data.
31:09And there are still piles of data waiting to be analyzed.
31:17I actually hope that this Higgs boson is going to be a portal to the new physics which we're going to find beyond the standard model.
31:25And that would be exciting, because each time that happens, we learn something new.
31:29The LHC may be hinting that the Higgs is only one of many players.
31:34It may not be the god particle after all.
31:39This man thinks the truth about the creation of the universe lies deeper than the long-sought Higgs.
31:46That we owe our existence to particles we have only just begun to imagine.
31:53It was the Greek philosopher Democritus who first thought of the atom.
31:58He imagined it to be the smallest possible building block of matter, one that could never be divided.
32:07His idea was good enough to last 2,000 years, until the nuclear age came along and revealed the deeper truth.
32:16The atom is made up of smaller things.
32:19Just as particles like quarks and electrons make up the atom, smaller, more fundamental building blocks might make up the Higgs boson.
32:30If we can find them, they could reveal not just how matter exists, but why it came to be.
32:38Francesco Seneno is a theoretical physicist at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense.
32:50He lives in the perfect town to let his imagination run wild.
32:56Odense is the birthplace of the famous children's story author Hans Christian Andersen.
33:03So we are in the Hans Christian Andersen neighborhood. He was born here, and he has drawn a lot from the streets.
33:13As you can see, it looks like a taken by page from a storybook.
33:18But unlike this fairytale town, our understanding of the fundamental building blocks of the universe is not picture perfect.
33:26The standard model regards the Higgs boson as a fundamental particle.
33:31But Francesco's imagination is driving him to look further, to see if he can peer inside the Higgs.
33:40According to the standard model, the Higgs is a fundamental particle. It means it's not made of something else.
33:45So look at this wall. It's white.
33:48But the truth is that there are three different lights combined together making this white.
33:52In fact, see what happens if I put my hand in front of the wall.
33:55I can resolve these three different colors, the green, the blue, and the red.
34:01Together they form the white light.
34:03Just as the white light is actually made up of three different colors,
34:08Francesco wondered if the Higgs is made up of several different particles.
34:13This would mean the Higgs is not a fundamental root of all matter.
34:16He and many of his colleagues think the Higgs itself is governed by a new force of nature, something they call the technicolor force.
34:27If you look deep inside the Higgs, you will find this made up of something else.
34:30Francesco believes the Higgs boson dances to a new tempo.
34:39Imagine these Lego bricks are ordinary quarks, and this board is the force of the gluons that holds them together.
34:48To make a proton, we need three quarks.
34:51According to the technicolor theory, the Higgs is just the same.
34:57But it is made up of different types of quarks.
35:02Technicorcs.
35:06The technicorcs are held together by a new force, a technicorce.
35:10And the energy that comes from the interactions also automatically provides the mass of the Higgs.
35:15Physicists know ordinary quarks in different arrangements make different particles.
35:23One arrangement is a proton.
35:26Another arrangement is a neutron.
35:29Technicorcs work the same way.
35:33Arrange them one way and you get a Higgs.
35:36But arrange those technicorcs another way and you get something else scientists have been looking for.
35:41A dark matter particle.
35:45So it's really like a Lego brick.
35:48You put them together and in one form that you get the Higgs and in another form you can get the dark matter.
35:56Perhaps the reason the standard model Higgs can't explain dark matter is because the Higgs is dark matter.
36:04In disguise.
36:06And both particles are held together by the technicorce.
36:11They will be definitely a new force of nature.
36:15So it will be a fantastic opportunity for mankind to face a new force.
36:21Technicorcs could be glued together in many ways.
36:25Constructing several brand new particles.
36:27Those particles could be waiting to be discovered at the LHC when it comes back online at much higher energies in 2015.
36:37Francesca hopes that the Higgs boson recently discovered is the first candidate.
36:43We just won't know it until we have enough power to crack it open.
36:46I think it's a duty of human beings to understand what is around us and what makes us.
36:53I think this is really a fantastic opportunity to push the boundary of science to that degree.
36:57Does the so-called God particle have multiple faces?
37:04Perhaps the Higgs is not as almighty as we thought.
37:08But there are much more mind-bending ideas.
37:11What makes us exist could be objects that don't really exist at all.
37:16When we look up at the night sky, our moon peers down at us.
37:25It seems to be magically suspended in thin air.
37:29Even though we know it's being held in place by the force of gravity.
37:34What if all matter in the universe is actually being anchored by something else?
37:39Something far stranger than gravity.
37:43And far stranger than the God particle.
37:49Howard Georgi from Harvard University has been a particle physicist for most of his life.
37:57But recently he has made a career change.
38:01He is now an un-particle physicist.
38:04I was trying to think about what the LHC might see that was really unusual.
38:13And it occurred to me that whether there was something that might show up at the LHC that was not particles at all.
38:20That was the beginning of my career as an un-particle physicist.
38:25Like many physicists, Howard has been trying to fix the standard model and come up with new theories.
38:30While working on his equations, he noticed some puzzling calculations.
38:37In physics, massless particles like photons show up in the math as negative whole numbers.
38:44Howard's equations were giving him negative numbers, but they weren't whole numbers.
38:49They were negative fractions.
38:52You do this analysis and you might get two and a half massless particles.
38:58And then you scratch your head and say, what, what is going on?
39:03Howard knew these half numbers weren't half particles.
39:07They were something new. He called them un-particles.
39:11There's something happening. There's some physics.
39:15But it's not the sort of physics that we're used to.
39:19Howard probed the math deeper and learned more about un-particles.
39:24He realized the reason they came out as fractions is because they have fractal dimensions, much like the branches of a tree.
39:35If you look at the tree, it's not one dimensional because the tree comes and it branches, and then the branches branch again, and the branches branches branch again, and the branches branches branches, et cetera, and so on.
39:47In a true fractal, that would go on forever.
39:51Un-particles are like the branches of this tree.
39:55The pattern is the same no matter how close or how far away you look.
40:00But normal particles are like the leaves on the tree.
40:04The closer you get, the bigger they look.
40:08I like the idea of thinking of the leaves as the objects of the standard model because they have a definite size, like a mass that a particle has.
40:19Whereas the branches of the tree don't have a definite size.
40:23All of the particles that make up our universe have mass, which physicists believe exist because of the Higgs.
40:30But perhaps those particles and the Higgs are really being governed by an invisible world of un-particles that defy the laws of known physics.
40:42It would mean all matter particles in the universe are like the leaves on this tree.
40:49An invisible tree of un-particles may be their anchor.
40:54The secret underpinning of the entire cosmos.
40:57That's really the point of un-particle physics.
41:01In order for this invisible tree to be interesting, it has to somehow interact with the particles of the standard model.
41:10The leaves will have to somehow be held up by that tree or vice versa.
41:17So far, there are no signs of un-particles at the LHC.
41:21But Howard isn't giving up as an un-particle physicist.
41:27I don't think we've got the right picture, frankly.
41:31When you have something that strange and that different from what we know, it's tantalizing.
41:39And so I think it's worth continuing to try to beat on this complicated mathematics and see if we can make some more progress.
41:47Is the Higgs boson really the god particle?
41:52Or is there something else underneath?
41:54Something more mysterious?
41:57Do we owe our existence to something we might never detect?
42:03Triumphally discovered?
42:04Hoping they will one day find out.
42:10The Higgs boson has been playing a game of hide and seek for decades.
42:15Now that we have finally found it, or something like it, we have more questions than answers.
42:22Each time physicists find the key to one door, they open it just to find another door.
42:31And then five more.
42:33Maybe the Higgs boson really is god's particle.
42:37A cosmic puzzle whose solution is just another puzzle.
42:42Destined to remain an enigma.
42:45An enigma.