Our understanding of the universe and the nature of reality itself has drastically changed over the last 100 years, and it's on the verge of another seismic shift. In a 17-mile-long tunnel buried 570 feet beneath the Franco-Swiss border, the world's largest and most powerful atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), is powering up. Its goal is nothing less than recreating the first instants of creation, when the universe was unimaginably hot and long-extinct forms of matter sizzled and cooled into stars, planets, and ultimately, us. These incredibly small and exotic particles hold the keys to the greatest mysteries of the universe. What we find could validate our long-held theories about how the world works and what we are made of. Or, all of our notions about the essence of what is real will fall apart.
Features Argonne National Laboratory's Bob Stanek and the Advanced Photon Source, Ernest Rutherford's probe into the structure of the atom through M.I.T. professor Steve Nahn's use of the LHC, antimatter, particle physicist Frank Close, antimatter investigator Joel Fajans, the Bevatron particle accelerator, the particle zoo, Fermilab and its Tevatron, experimental physicist Leon Lederman, the weak force and radioactive decay, the strong force and the proton, photons and electromagnetic force, electroweak unification, the Standard Model, theoretical physicist Peter Higgs and the Higgs boson and force particle, CERN, the CMS and ATLAS detectors, and the LHC Quench incident.
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#throughthewormhole
#season1
#episode7
#cosmology
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#spacetime
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Features Argonne National Laboratory's Bob Stanek and the Advanced Photon Source, Ernest Rutherford's probe into the structure of the atom through M.I.T. professor Steve Nahn's use of the LHC, antimatter, particle physicist Frank Close, antimatter investigator Joel Fajans, the Bevatron particle accelerator, the particle zoo, Fermilab and its Tevatron, experimental physicist Leon Lederman, the weak force and radioactive decay, the strong force and the proton, photons and electromagnetic force, electroweak unification, the Standard Model, theoretical physicist Peter Higgs and the Higgs boson and force particle, CERN, the CMS and ATLAS detectors, and the LHC Quench incident.
Thanks for watching. Follow for more videos.
#cosmosspacescience
#throughthewormhole
#season1
#episode7
#cosmology
#astronomy
#spacetime
#spacescience
#space
#nasa
#spacedocumentary
#whatarewereallymadeof
#morganfreeman
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:0050 years ago in Scotland, one man had a brilliant idea, an idea that today pits science detectives
00:09in Europe and America against each other in a $10 billion race to solve the riddle of
00:15what you, me, and everything around us is really made of.
00:21It's a journey into the heart of matter, plunging into the core of our physical being and of
00:27the physical world itself.
00:30But will this journey into the subatomic universe revolutionize our understanding of nature?
00:37Or will it reveal just how little we really know about who we are and what we're made
00:42of?
00:44Space.
00:46Time.
00:48Life itself.
00:51The secrets of the cosmos lie through the wormhole.
01:07What are we really made of?
01:09You, me, everything around us.
01:14That simple question has kept people guessing for thousands of years.
01:19In ancient times, the answer was easy.
01:22Everything in creation was made from one or more of the four elements, earth, air, fire,
01:33and water.
01:36When I was a kid, in not quite so ancient times, we were told that everything is made
01:42out of atoms.
01:44But in the last few decades, scientists have looked inside the atom and found that things
01:49are a lot more complicated.
01:52Despite all of our knowledge, we still don't understand the true nature of matter.
01:57But right now, thousands of investigators are following hunches, tracking down suspects,
02:03and getting closer than ever to learning how we and everything around us fits together.
02:10And they're doing it by breaking things apart.
02:16When I was six years old, my father gave me his old pocket watch, a timekeeper.
02:23How does this work, I wondered.
02:26I decided to find out.
02:31Taking it apart was a lot easier than putting it back together.
02:35But I learned a little about what makes things tick.
02:39And that's pretty much what particle physicists do today.
02:43They smash things up and look at the debris through extremely powerful microscopes.
02:49We do what kids do.
02:50We smash things and we look to see what comes out.
02:54And so to do that, we need to smash things harder and harder and harder to see what's
02:58smaller and smaller and smaller.
03:01At Chicago's Argonne National Laboratory, Bob Stanek builds machines that peer into
03:06the subatomic world.
03:09So this is our advanced photon source, a microscope that's about a half a mile around.
03:16And it contains 33 stations where 33 individual experiments can go on measuring tiny structures
03:25of whatever these guys feel happy measuring.
03:33If you remember way back in high school, when you looked through the microscope and you
03:36thought, wow, look at all that stuff, how neat it is.
03:40It's amazing that ordinary light and optics can bring you to such a detail level.
03:47However, for a lot of things nowadays, you need more than just that ordinary light.
03:52You need to get smaller and smaller and smaller.
03:59With the APS, we can see things much smaller than we could see with our standard microscope.
04:04We could see things a factor of 10 smaller, a factor of 1,000 smaller, a factor of 10,000
04:10smaller.
04:11In fact, we can see things that are 10 to the 10th smaller than what we could see with
04:16ordinary light.
04:18We can see molecules.
04:19We can see viruses.
04:21We can almost see the structures of life.
04:25The ability to take pictures of molecules and atoms is an incredible thing, because
04:30only 100 years ago, the atom was just a theory.
04:37At the dawn of the 20th century, it was believed that if atoms existed at all, they were either
04:44empty shells or solid little balls.
04:49Then one investigation changed everything.
04:53It was the brainchild of Ernest Rutherford, the Sherlock Holmes of particle physics.
05:00Steve Nahn is a professor at MIT and a team leader on the world's biggest particle accelerator,
05:06the Large Hadron Collider in Europe.
05:11Steve is going to reproduce one of the most important experiments in the history of science,
05:17Rutherford's probe into the structure of the atom.
05:22This experiment is the same as Rutherford's experiment.
05:26We use the same kind of gold foils and send millions of particles through these gold foils.
05:32Rutherford thought that all the particles would essentially go straight through and
05:35not deflect at all, but that's not what happened.
05:40The Rutherford experiment is like firing bullets at a haystack.
05:44The particles are like bullets, and the atoms in the gold foil are like haystacks.
05:52If the haystack is empty, the bullets go straight through.
05:57If the haystack is packed with cannonballs, all the bullets bounce back.
06:04If there are a few cannonballs in the center, some of the bullets will bounce back.
06:11And that's what happened.
06:14When Rutherford fired his particles, most went straight through, but some sharply bounced
06:19back from the center of the target.
06:23Rutherford was spending the conceived wisdom of the time.
06:29Something small and hard was down in there, deep inside the shell of the atom.
06:36This is the evidence for a very heavy, very small object at the core of the atom,
06:42the high-density nucleus surrounded by a vastness of empty space.
06:48The nucleus of the atom is 100,000 times smaller than its radius.
06:54It's equivalent to the head of a pin in the middle of a football stadium.
07:02After Rutherford, physicists probed further into the atom.
07:06They found that it is built out of three parts, the protons and neutrons that form the nucleus
07:12and the electrons that form the shell around it.
07:17Atoms stick together and form molecules.
07:23Out of the molecules, we get more complex shapes, from a strand of DNA,
07:31up to the 7,000 trillion trillion atoms that form a human body.
07:38For a time, the atomic theory of the universe seemed to explain most everything.
07:44But then physicists started breaking atoms apart,
07:48and they discovered a slew of mysterious new particles that turned their theories upside down.
07:56The most frightening was called antimatter, matter's evil twin.
08:04If just this much touches ordinary matter, it will level the city.
08:10So why are scientists trying so hard to make it?
08:14Turns out it may hold the secret to the mystery of matter.
08:25When scientists first smashed atoms apart, they uncovered their essential building blocks,
08:32protons, neutrons, and electrons.
08:36Next, they built machines that let them smash these tiny pieces together,
08:41and out came strange new particles.
08:44Perhaps the strangest is the stuff we call antimatter, matter's polar opposite.
08:52It's the most explosive substance in the universe.
08:57When matter and antimatter touch, they violently cancel each other out.
09:02Physicists say they annihilate each other.
09:06It triggers an enormous explosion.
09:09How big of an explosion?
09:12Less than half a gram of antimatter rice would produce a 13-kiloton blast,
09:19as big as the Hiroshima bomb.
09:23Professor Frank Close is a theoretical physicist at Oxford University.
09:29Antimatter is a perfect opposite to matter.
09:34If I was made of antimatter, I would look exactly the same as I do today.
09:41If you looked at the atoms that I'm made of, they would look exactly the same
09:46if I was made of antiatoms.
09:49It's only when you get inside the atoms that you see the difference,
09:52that the atoms that we're made of have little negatively charged electrons
09:57whirling around a big, bulky, positive nucleus.
10:04And the antiatoms?
10:06Ask this man, Joel Fajans, an antimatter investigator
10:12at the University of California, Berkeley.
10:15Antimatter is everywhere in the universe.
10:17For instance, this banana contains potassium-40,
10:20an isotope of potassium which emits positrons.
10:24Positrons and other forms of antimatter are difficult to study, however.
10:29And that's my job, that's what I do, is to study antimatter.
10:33I was partially inspired to do this by this experiment over here,
10:38the Bevatron Accelerator at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
10:42The Bevatron was the first giant particle accelerator.
10:46It's being torn apart now,
10:48but back in the 50s it was the center of the world for physics research.
10:52The same techniques that were used in the Bevatron to accelerate particles
10:56are now used in the enormous particle accelerators
10:59that are throughout the world.
11:05Particle accelerators, like giant machines,
11:09particle accelerators are like giant microscopes
11:13that let us peer into the subatomic world.
11:16They break matter down into its smallest components.
11:21Drilling down far enough to detect antimatter
11:24requires taking protons from an atom's nucleus,
11:27trapping them in a vacuum,
11:30then shooting them into a ring of giant electromagnets.
11:34So a particle accelerator works by
11:37starting protons going around in a circle in a ring.
11:41And every time they go around,
11:43you give them a little kick with an electric field
11:46so they get going faster and faster and faster
11:50and faster and faster
11:53until they're almost at the speed of light.
11:58Well, they're going almost the speed of light in a real particle collider,
12:02but here they're not going that fast.
12:11So protons in this direction
12:16interact with protons in this direction,
12:19and at some point they come like a car crashing together.
12:24And you can imagine what happens when a car crashes together.
12:27Pieces fly all over,
12:29and around that interaction point where the cars crash together
12:33is where we have our detector.
12:39So this happens millions and millions and millions of times every second.
12:45When you break protons apart,
12:48you release incredible amounts of energy.
12:51Strange things come out of the explosions,
12:54including tiny particles that flare into existence
12:58and disappear in billionths of a second.
13:02Particles like the antineutron
13:04and the antimatter version of the proton.
13:08Theorists had predicted they existed in the 1920s.
13:13Decades later, the bevatron proved they were right.
13:18Suddenly, the world we thought we knew
13:21got a whole lot stranger.
13:25Depositrons from things like radioactive decays
13:28like in the banana cosmic rays
13:30form one half of an antimatter universe.
13:33Antiprotons from machines like this
13:36and from cosmic rays and other natural sources
13:39form another half of an antimatter universe.
13:41Put them together and you've got a complete antimatter mirror universe
13:45which just looks like ours,
13:47except everything is backwards, everything is mirrored together.
13:50And that's a little bit surprising, shocking maybe,
13:53because matter universes and antimatter universes
13:56aren't very compatible with each other,
13:59because when you put them together, when they touch,
14:01they annihilate or blow up.
14:04So how did we come to be here?
14:06Because if there was just as much matter as antimatter in the universe,
14:10it should have all combined together
14:12and left us with absolutely nothing.
14:16The tiny bursts of light you see here
14:20are antimatter electrons, or positrons.
14:24When they leak out of this small radioactive disk,
14:27they hit the oppositely charged electrons
14:30of the normal matter in the chamber
14:32and instantly annihilate,
14:35creating these flashes of energy.
14:38Positrons and electrons are the smallest particles
14:42Positrons and electrons are the smallest particles imaginable,
14:46so the fact that you can see them explode with the naked eye
14:50gives you a hint of how much energy is being released.
14:57Antimatter is the ultimate high explosive.
15:01Some worry that in the wrong hands,
15:03it could be used to create an antimatter bomb,
15:07the ultimate superweapon.
15:12There's no way we're going to destroy the Earth using antimatter here.
15:16It's absolutely impossible to get a large amount of antimatter around
15:20simply on the basis of economics.
15:23If you wanted to make even a couple of grams of antimatter,
15:27you'd have to run this facility for, in fact,
15:30thousands if not tens of thousands of years
15:32to make even a few grams of antimatter.
15:35And this is a fundamental physics issue.
15:37This isn't an efficiency issue.
15:39It's not as if we're going to get much better at this
15:42than we currently are at it.
15:46So you can relax.
15:48The world is safe.
15:50Antimatter is what we are not made of,
15:53but the fact that it exists at all
15:56reveals how alien the universe really is
16:00and how little we understand the cosmic forces at work in the heavens
16:04and deep inside our own bodies.
16:08The discovery of antimatter was followed by deeper probing
16:11into the heart of the atom on larger, more powerful particle accelerators.
16:15But physicists didn't like what they saw.
16:19The closer they looked, the less things made sense.
16:25The accelerators exposed a bewildering array of mysterious particles,
16:30dozens of strange pieces of matter,
16:33all seemingly different.
16:36Some were incredibly heavy.
16:38Some had no weight at all.
16:40The subatomic world earned the nickname
16:43the Particle Zoo.
16:46When we were learning about the zoo of particles that were not defined,
16:51it was pretty chaotic, and it just didn't look right.
16:57And you're thinking, this is bullcrap.
17:00There's got to be something better than this,
17:03all, you know, like, just categorizing stuff,
17:06black magic, and people just didn't know what they were doing.
17:11Physics is a quest for simplicity.
17:14This was chaos.
17:17Why?
17:19To help crack this mystery in the 1970s,
17:22the United States built Fermilab,
17:25a high-energy research facility 30 miles outside of Chicago.
17:30Fermilab sits on top of the Tevatron,
17:34a four-mile-long particle accelerator.
17:37Nobel Prize-winning experimental physicist Leon Lederman
17:41conducted many of his experiments here.
17:44But for decades, he groped in the dark like everyone else,
17:48trying to make sense of the messiness of the quantum world.
17:52Little by little, more and more particles got fed into the hopper.
17:56Until there were a couple of hundred particles,
17:59as, you know, in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s,
18:02and then people started organizing these particles into family groups,
18:07and out of this, late 70s, early 80s,
18:10came the organization called the Standard Model.
18:14But it was a gradual process,
18:17and it's like a jigsaw puzzle.
18:20You've got the right piece, and everything fell together,
18:23and there was the painting on the box cover.
18:26After studying thousands of these jigsaw puzzles,
18:30physicists began to understand what they were looking at.
18:36Rob Roser runs the giant detector that takes pictures
18:39of matter and antimatter collisions inside the Tevatron.
18:44Behind me is an event display of a proton-antiproton collision
18:48occurring inside the CDF detector.
18:50You can imagine the proton coming from one direction
18:53in and out of the screen and colliding at the center point.
18:56And so by looking at the bend or curvature of the particle,
18:59if it's curved in one direction, that particle is positively charged.
19:02If it's bent in an opposite direction, that particle is negatively charged.
19:06So if we just break this event down, you can see a single long pink object
19:10pointing to a big pink cluster.
19:12The more the color, the more energy that particle had.
19:15So you can see here is a single particle that gave up a bunch of energy
19:18right in the initial part of the calorimeter.
19:21That's indicative of an electron.
19:23Over here, you see a single line that's giving up energy
19:26in the back half of the detector,
19:28more characteristic of what a muon object would look like,
19:31a muon being a heavy electron.
19:33So we can start to get a lot of information
19:36by just looking at a couple of very simplistic ideas
19:39in terms of where the particles traveled, how much they curved,
19:42and where they deposited energy in the detector.
19:46Today, after years of reading these subatomic tea leaves,
19:50physicists feel they are getting closer to answering the question,
19:54what are we really made of?
19:57The stuff that we are made of today
20:00only requires maybe a handful of little particles.
20:03The atoms on the outside are electrons
20:07whirling around like planets, if you like.
20:11There's a nucleus in the middle of the atom
20:14which we used to believe was made of protons and neutrons.
20:17Well, it is, but deeper down, they in turn,
20:20like going to the heart of the cosmic onion,
20:23are made of little things called quarks.
20:25And two types of quark, an up quark and a down quark.
20:28And that's it.
20:30An up and a down quark joined together in different ways
20:33ultimately make the atomic nucleus.
20:35An electron whirling around the outside makes the atom.
20:38Throw in a neutrino, which is created in radioactive processes,
20:42and that's the basic particles
20:44that make up everything that you see around you.
20:47There's also the photon of light,
20:50which we are seeing with right now,
20:53and that pretty well is it.
20:56Most of the atoms in our body are made of nuclei and electrons,
21:00and the nuclei themselves are made of protons and neutrons,
21:04and the protons and neutrons are made of quarks.
21:07And, of course, you say, what are the quarks made of?
21:10And that's where we're stuck.
21:12For the last 40, 50 years, we've been studying the quarks.
21:16Try to find something inside,
21:18and we get the same results we had for the electron.
21:21There's nothing inside. The quarks don't have any size.
21:24The size, the radius of the quark is zero.
21:28It's a little bit like Alice in Wonderland.
21:30Remember when Alice saw the Chesser cat
21:33sitting on the branch of a tree with a big smile?
21:37And much to Alice's great astonishment,
21:41right in front of her eyes,
21:43the Chesser cat started to disappear,
21:46and finally, poof, it was gone.
21:49But it left behind one component, its smile.
21:55That quark's smile is a tiny box stuffed full of energy.
22:01All matter is actually made of energy
22:04that has congealed into particulate form.
22:08So that appears to be what we are made of,
22:12at least as far as we can see right now.
22:15But knowing this opens up an even greater mystery,
22:18which is, why does the stuff we are made of
22:22behave the way it does?
22:25Our explorations of matter reveal that everything is nearly hollow.
22:30You, me, and everything in the universe.
22:33All empty space with a few pinpricks of matter
22:36floating in a void like rocks adrift in the vastness of space.
22:41But how do these pinpricks of matter
22:44form into shapes and structures?
22:47There must be something holding it together,
22:50some sort of glue in the ocean of emptiness.
22:54The question is, what?
23:04Today, we think we know what we're made out of,
23:08the incredibly small building blocks
23:11that form all the matter in the universe.
23:14But finding these bits and pieces of matter
23:17revealed another, even more challenging mystery.
23:21Why are things solid?
23:24Why do they have mass?
23:27Matter is mostly empty space.
23:30Every now and then, you find the point of an atom,
23:33but most of the time, it's empty space.
23:36So that point of atom and that point of atom and so on,
23:39how are they held together?
23:41How are you held together? How am I held together?
23:44It's not glue. You know it's not glue.
23:47It has to be some exchange of fundamental properties.
23:50That exchange of forces has to happen, even though you don't see it,
23:54has to happen at the global level everywhere.
23:58Empty space isn't empty at all.
24:01It's filled with forces.
24:03When these men toss this basketball back and forth,
24:06they're transferring the momentum of the ball from one to the other,
24:11which pushes them apart,
24:13a complex exchange of invisible forces talking to each other.
24:18So there are four fundamental forces,
24:20the gravitational force that everybody knows about,
24:23the electromagnetic force, which mostly everybody knows about,
24:26the magnetic force, which you don't know about,
24:28and the strong force, which you don't know about.
24:31The weak force is what determines radioactive decay,
24:35how uranium decays into whatever it decays into.
24:38That's governed by the weak forces.
24:40The strong forces are what holds the proton together,
24:44what holds the quarks into three pieces that form a proton.
24:48So us guys are doing the weak forces and the strong forces,
24:51and what we don't understand is the gravitational force,
24:54but I think we understand the electromagnetic force.
24:58Just as we can't see the things we're made of,
25:01we can't see the fundamental forces around us,
25:04but we know they're there.
25:07Finding out how these forces work
25:09and where they came from in the first place
25:12is the great quest of modern physics.
25:15Solving this mystery
25:17could reveal the universe's most closely held secrets,
25:21not just what we're made of,
25:23but why the stuff inside us holds its shape.
25:27The key breakthrough in particle physics
25:30was the discovery that certain particles are actually force carriers.
25:35For instance, photons, particles of light,
25:38carry the electromagnetic force.
25:41All the forces have these carriers.
25:43We haven't found them all yet,
25:45but we've found enough to know they're there.
25:48And we know enough about how they interact
25:51to realize that at extremely high temperatures,
25:54around a million billion degrees,
25:56the electromagnetic and the weak force begin to merge.
26:00This merging is called electroweak unification.
26:04You don't have to understand it.
26:06I certainly don't.
26:08But to physicists, it was like finding the missing link.
26:16It led the way to one of the most successful theories
26:19in the history of science,
26:21the Standard Model of particle physics.
26:24It's been proving correct again and again over the last 40 years.
26:30But there is a problem with the Standard Model,
26:33a big problem.
26:37And it goes back to the particle zoo,
26:40strange particles that turn up
26:42when you smash together protons to see what's inside.
26:47Subatomic particles have a huge range of weight, or mass.
26:52For instance, one point-like quark
26:55can weigh 200 times more than the point-like electron.
26:59And these particles have even heavier cousins
27:02weighing 100,000 times more.
27:05The Standard Model cannot explain
27:08why there is such a wild range of masses,
27:11or even why particles have any mass at all.
27:17Fixing this problem became the next great quest of modern physics.
27:22Salvation came in the unlikely form of this man.
27:28Meet Peter Higgs, an unassuming professor
27:32who set off one of the largest and most expensive investigations
27:36in the history of science.
27:38There was a gaping hole in the Standard Model of the universe.
27:42Peter Higgs put a plug in it.
27:46Higgs theorized that a vast field stretching to infinity
27:50runs through everything.
27:52When certain kinds of particles interact with the field,
27:56that interaction is what gives those particles mass.
28:01If Higgs' theory becomes fact,
28:04we may finally understand why things are solid.
28:10But at first, Higgs had trouble getting his theory accepted.
28:14The paper outlining the idea was rejected by CERN.
28:18I was indignant because I thought what I'd done
28:21had possibly important consequences.
28:23So I rewrote the paper by adding on some extra paragraphs,
28:28and instead of sending it back to Geneva,
28:30where I thought the people at CERN
28:32didn't understand what I was talking about,
28:35I sent it across the Atlantic to Physical Review Letters,
28:38the corresponding American journal, and it was accepted.
28:42The paragraphs Higgs added predicted that the mass-giving field
28:46would have a matching particle,
28:48a force carrier called the Higgs boson.
28:52And this matching particle could theoretically be created
28:56in a particle accelerator.
28:59Gradually, experimental physicists became excited by Higgs' idea.
29:04What happens with the theory is, of course,
29:07a small number of theorists push this idea, they love it,
29:11and little by little, more and more theorists climb on board.
29:14You know, it's like the train.
29:16We're going, we're taking off from the station.
29:20In one of the great ironies of modern science,
29:23CERN, the organization that rejected Higgs' paper,
29:27has just spent $10 billion
29:30building a machine to find the Higgs particle.
29:35But what exactly is the Higgs?
29:39Ask a half-dozen physicists,
29:41and you'll get a half-dozen different answers.
29:44The Higgs.
29:45It's a tricky thing to come up with an analogy for the Higgs boson.
29:48It's, um...
29:50There's the analogy with something being dragged through treacle,
29:54but for me that's misleading because this is a dissipation of energy,
29:58and it isn't like that.
30:00That's a pretty bad analogy for the Higgs.
30:03What I've read on the Higgs is, in my mind, very confusing.
30:09Here's the way I understand it.
30:11A bunch of reporters standing in a room, crowded room.
30:14And so me and President Obama want to make it
30:17from the entrance of this room to the exit of this room.
30:21So we go in, and what happens?
30:23Of course, all the reporters glom on Mr. Obama.
30:26And old Bob over here, he just makes a beeline right to the exit door.
30:30So basically, with no inertia, I can make it to that door.
30:34Of course, Mr. Obama has a lot of inertia, a lot of mass.
30:38So this Higgs field affects one particle more so than another particle.
30:43Must be able to come up with more.
30:45Well, when we see what they look like, we'll come up with a better analogy.
30:49Another analogy, yeah.
30:51Something involving cars or something.
30:53No, I don't know.
30:57However you describe it, the Higgs solves a slew of problems,
31:01starting with the particle's zoom.
31:05It's a very elegant idea because if you accept it,
31:08then our whole picture of particles becomes simpler.
31:11There are not so many particles.
31:13It's the mass that makes it look as if there are many particles.
31:16A little bit like a kaleidoscope where you look in with a lot of mirrors,
31:20and there's only one little pattern, but it's reflected and reflected in mirrors,
31:24and it looks very complicated.
31:26The Higgs phenomenon is a very satisfying way of simplifying our standard model.
31:33The Higgs gives mass to the basic seeds of matter,
31:37such as the electron in atoms and the quarks inside protons.
31:42Because the mass of the electron helps determine the size of the atom,
31:46the Higgs gives structure and form to everything we know.
31:52If you turned it off, you, me, your dog, and the planet
31:58would fly apart at the speed of light.
32:03So how do you find an invisible, seemingly undetectable force of nature?
32:08All the forces have related particles that we can see, given enough energy.
32:13With the right tool, we can create those force particles,
32:17although, as it turns out, it's taken nearly 50 years
32:21to develop a tool that may spot the Higgs.
32:25This is CERN's Large Hadron Collider.
32:29At full power, it can channel 7 trillion electron volts,
32:34making it by far the highest energy particle accelerator ever made.
32:40The higher energy levels of the LHC produce bigger collisions
32:44that spurt out more massive particles.
32:47This raises the odds that out of the millions of collisions
32:50produced each second,
32:52the LHC will find things humans have never seen before.
32:57Things like the Higgs.
33:00But the LHC will do much more than find a tiny particle,
33:04because what they've really built at CERN is a Big Bang machine.
33:10While trying to solve the mystery of matter,
33:13physicists realize that they're on the trail of the Big Bang.
33:18Physicists realize that they're on the trail of a much bigger mystery,
33:22perhaps the ultimate mystery.
33:25What happened in the first moments of creation?
33:31Right now, thousands of science detectives hunt the Higgs boson,
33:37the elusive particle that gives everything mass,
33:41the thing that makes heat matter glued together.
33:45The mystery they are trying to solve
33:47is much, much bigger than anyone first imagined.
33:51The Higgs boson is a supermassive particle
33:55The mystery they are trying to solve
33:57is much, much bigger than anyone first imagined.
34:01To solve it, they have to go back to the beginning
34:05and recreate the first moments of the universe.
34:10In the first moments, just after the Big Bang happened,
34:15it was incredibly hot.
34:18Billions of billions of degrees.
34:21And heat is energy,
34:23and that energy congealed into forms of matter,
34:27many of which we have already discovered,
34:29many of which we only believe exist because of our equations.
34:35Most of these things only lived for a trillionth of a second themselves.
34:39They were made, they died away,
34:41and left children, grandchildren and so forth in them.
34:46This cascading down from these ephemeral particles
34:49into the stable stuff took place very quickly.
34:53The stable stuff then ends up congealing
34:56to make the stuff that you and I and everybody is made of today.
34:59So what we're doing is recreating in the lab
35:03the first moments of the universe,
35:05and then by surrounding the site of the collisions
35:08with these special cameras, detectors,
35:10we can record what happened.
35:13And so we are simulating just after the Big Bang,
35:17making mini-bangs, if you like, in the lab.
35:20And from what we find there, we begin to get a sense
35:24of how matter, the stuff that we ultimately,
35:2715 billion years later, are made of, first came to be.
35:33John Butterworth is a physicist at the University College of London.
35:38Adam Davison is a postdoctoral student.
35:42They're two of the 6,000 scientists conducting experiments back at CERN,
35:47the European Organisation for Nuclear Research.
35:53CERN itself is quite... Yeah, it's not terribly pretty.
35:56It looks like someone dropped a load of rusty bricks on the ground.
35:59I get the impression there was never much of an architectural plan for CERN.
36:02Until you go underground, of course,
36:04and then it's like something out of a James Bond villain set.
36:08This, as a piece of engineering, is a miracle.
36:12It is the pyramids of our time.
36:18The heart of CERN is the Large Hadron Collider,
36:21a $10 billion, 17-mile-long particle accelerator.
36:25It is quite possibly
36:28the most sophisticated scientific instrument ever built.
36:33The LHC creates the primordial explosions.
36:38Then, four enormous detectors along the accelerator ring
36:42take pictures of the collisions.
36:45The two largest detectors are called ATLAS and CMS.
36:51MIT's Steve Nahn leads a team
36:54that helped design and now runs the CMS detector.
36:58We build our detectors to take pictures of the events
37:01which happen once every 25 nanoseconds.
37:04That's 40 million times a second.
37:07We have an interaction that we want to take a picture of.
37:11So with this terabytes and terabytes of data on disk,
37:14we have to write algorithms which sift through
37:17and find that event, that 1 in 10 million,
37:201 in 100 million, 1 in a billion event that you're looking for.
37:25On the other side of the LHC,
37:28Butterworth and Davidson have developed a way to comb
37:31through the enormous amounts of data
37:33generated by CMS's arch-rival, the ATLAS detector.
37:38The two men are trying to create maps
37:41of what they think the subatomic universe looked like
37:44just seconds after its creation,
37:46then matching their imaginary maps up to reality.
37:50Somewhere in there, they hope they'll find the Higgs.
37:54It's kind of like a border around an unknown country.
37:57And we know that it's there.
37:59We've had experiments that have gone to high enough energy
38:02to tell us there is a border and there is a land beyond it,
38:05but we've not had really much of a glimpse of the land.
38:08So the LHC really is going to let us over that border
38:11and let us have a look at this land and survey it and see.
38:14And this is why people, when people ask,
38:17you know, what are we going to find
38:19when you're going to get your Nobel Prize, we just don't know.
38:22We know that if the Higgs exists,
38:24it will be in that country somewhere
38:26and our kit is good enough to find it.
38:28It may take a few years, but we'll find it.
38:33Meanwhile, back in America, Fermilab hasn't given up.
38:38It's a race against the clock to find the Higgs
38:41before CERN's LHC powers up.
38:44Of course, we're here in Chicago,
38:47and we'd love to have that machine in Chicago,
38:50so we look at the success of our European colleagues
38:53with mixed feelings.
38:55You know, it's a little bit like watching your mother-in-law
38:58drive off a cliff in your BMW.
39:03September 2008.
39:05The physics world holds its collective breath
39:08as the LHC powers up for the first time.
39:14The first low-powered beams shoot through the 17-mile ring,
39:19and all is well.
39:21They're ready to tear the veil off the universe
39:24and try to catch sight of the Higgs.
39:27Now they raise the power,
39:30one more notch on the way up to 7 trillion volts.
39:34And then...
39:38the LHC explodes.
39:45An enormous blast destroys hundreds of the superconducting magnets
39:50that shoot protons through the accelerator.
39:56It was pretty dramatic.
39:58Yeah, absolutely. It took a year to fix.
40:00It must have been quite an electrical arc to melt through.
40:03Imagine the face of the guy who opened the door to the tunnel.
40:07I just don't want to know.
40:09Yeah, I can imagine waiting to get in there, right?
40:12They must have been really, really nervous to see what had happened.
40:15It was desperately disappointing for everyone involved.
40:18As CERN rebuilds its broken magnets,
40:21Fermilab's Terratron steps up the pace.
40:26But they don't see the Higgs.
40:29This means that the Higgs particle,
40:32the force carrier that allows matter to clump together,
40:35has a high mass,
40:37and the higher the mass,
40:39the more outside energy it takes to crack it open.
40:43At this point, Fermilab just can't generate enough energy.
40:51December 2009.
40:54CERN's LHC restarts.
40:58Within weeks, it powers up well past Fermilab's capacity.
41:02Eventually, it will be seven times more powerful.
41:09With both machines running,
41:11the Higgs particle could be found in the next few years.
41:16Unless everyone's secret fear comes true.
41:19What if it's not there at all?
41:22What if the standard model is wrong,
41:25and the Higgs doesn't exist?
41:29If it turns out that the experimental evidence
41:34is strongly that there is no such thing,
41:36then I'm simply baffled
41:38It means that a great deal of physics,
41:41and which I think I now understand,
41:43I would no longer understand.
41:47If the Higgs theory is wrong, of course,
41:49many theoretical physicists will jump out of second floor windows.
41:52That's about as high as they go.
41:55Nature knows how it works.
41:59Soon, we will know how it works.
42:02We have our ideas on how it works,
42:05which may be proved correct.
42:07They may be proved wrong.
42:10Whichever it is, we will learn.
42:13If you're asking me to place my bets,
42:16I think that something like the Higgs boson
42:19is out there, waiting to be discovered.
42:21What would be more exciting is, in fact,
42:24we find things that we don't understand.
42:27So we understand that the Higgs is going to be there,
42:29and so we find it, so hooray, hooray, now what do we do?
42:31But if you find something you don't understand,
42:33well, now people have a job.
42:35My job every day is to go to work
42:37and understand things that I don't understand.
42:39If I have more stuff to not understand,
42:42that's job security.
42:49So, what are we really made of?
42:53Dig deep inside the atom,
42:55and you'll find tiny particles
42:57held together by invisible forces
42:59in a sea of empty space.
43:02Dig even further,
43:04and we discover that everything is made up
43:07of tiny packets of energy
43:09born in cosmic furnaces.
43:12It's energy that cools down,
43:14gets dragged through a mysterious force
43:16named the Higgs,
43:18and clumps together,
43:20forming all the things we call matter.
43:24It has an evil twin called antimatter,
43:28but most of that has long since disappeared.
43:32As we get closer to recreating the heat
43:34of the Big Bang and our accelerators,
43:37we get closer to understanding
43:39how and why all this happened.
43:42Perhaps someday, not long from now,
43:46we'll finally solve the last remaining riddles of matter
43:50and fully comprehend
43:52the inner workings of creation.
43:58NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology