Speaker 1: Man made black holes, low energy vacuum bubbles, strange lits.
Speaker 1: These are some of the ways that an ill conceived
Speaker 1: physics experiment could pose an existential risk, not just for humanity,
Speaker 1: but for all life on Earth and possibly for every
Speaker 1: atom in the universe if things go particularly badly. Physics
Speaker 1: experiments seem like an unlikely place to find a clutch
Speaker 1: of existential risks, but it makes sense. Really. There are
Speaker 1: no other branches of science that explores the places where
Speaker 1: something is magic. Is accidentally creating a tiny black hole
Speaker 1: could happen. Physics is the purest branch of science. Back
Speaker 1: in the thirties, physicist Ernest Rutherford put it something like
Speaker 1: all science is either physics or stamp collecting. Physics, in
Speaker 1: particularly particle physics, is the place where the leading edge
Speaker 1: of science explores new frontiers of the universe. It's as
Speaker 1: literal as that. But we are still at an early
Speaker 1: spot in our understanding of particle physics, in the place
Speaker 1: in human history where you and I live. Now, those
Speaker 1: forays by the leading edge of science are blind pokes
Speaker 1: in the dark, and we face a dilemma because of this.
Speaker 1: We can't understand the universe without poking at it, but
Speaker 1: we can't really say if poking at it is safe
Speaker 1: until we poke it. The idea that particle physics could
Speaker 1: end the world sounds like nothing more than paranoid fantasy,
Speaker 1: born from something like fear of science and it's big,
Speaker 1: hulking machines that blast invisible particles into one another, but
Speaker 1: concerned that dangerous exotic stuff could be created inside a
Speaker 1: particle collider come from the physics community itself. Physicists are
Speaker 1: aware that they know enough about physics to build machines
Speaker 1: that can simulate nature, but don't know enough to say
Speaker 1: for certain just what will happen inside those machines. We
Speaker 1: don't know enough to know that those experiments were running
Speaker 1: are existentially safe, but we're doing them, pushing the envelope
Speaker 1: anyway and hoping for the best. To understand how things
Speaker 1: like low energy vacuum bubbles and man made microscopic black
Speaker 1: holes could accidentally be made here on Earth, you have
Speaker 1: to know a few things about physics first, and I
Speaker 1: will tell you everything you need to know. To start,
Speaker 1: I'll need you to hold your hand up in front
Speaker 1: of your face. I want you to focus on, say,
Speaker 1: the back of your hand. Hold it up in front
Speaker 1: of you. Gaze upon it, kind of lose yourself in it.
Speaker 1: Let your eyes come in and out of focus, so
Speaker 1: that your hand becomes the only thing in the world. Now,
Speaker 1: find some little spot on your hand and focus on it.
Speaker 1: Let your self be drawn into that spot, drawn into
Speaker 1: your hand. As you travel into that tiny point on
Speaker 1: your hand, you will grow smaller and smaller and smaller,
Speaker 1: so that you can pass easily through your own skin,
Speaker 1: past your bone, and into your veins, further and further inward,
Speaker 1: growing smaller as you descend, shrinking through your blood and
Speaker 1: plunging into one of the giant, gummy disc red blood
Speaker 1: cells in it, growing smaller and smaller, so that you
Speaker 1: pass right through the cell walls untouched, smaller and smaller
Speaker 1: among the galaxy of a hundred and twenty trillion atoms
Speaker 1: that make up a single red blood cell. Plunging into
Speaker 1: the electric cloud that envelops one single fuzzy oxygen atom,
Speaker 1: you are surrounded by the electrical field, like a fog
Speaker 1: that encapsulates the nucleus and binds the electrons to it
Speaker 1: A million miles away. Here inside the atom, you will
Speaker 1: learn the truth of the universe. Everything looks different than
Speaker 1: what you've always learned in school. There is no atomic
Speaker 1: solar system, with the nucleus as the sun and the
Speaker 1: electrons like planets in orbit. The electrons are everywhere and
Speaker 1: yet nowhere at once and at the center. There is
Speaker 1: no proton, no neutron. There are no particles like tiny
Speaker 1: pieces of matter, like crumbs of the universe. There are
Speaker 1: only vibrations of energy. These are the true building blocks
Speaker 1: of the universe, the corks and the gluons and all
Speaker 1: of the other elementary particles that make up everything that
Speaker 1: the material world is built from. You are here in
Speaker 1: the quantum world, and now that you look around, you
Speaker 1: see that there are vibrations everywhere. All around you, you
Speaker 1: see fields of different kinds of energy passing through each other,
Speaker 1: interacting with one another. And within those energy fields are
Speaker 1: countless moving, pulsating vibrations. Look back upward, now up from
Speaker 1: your place in the quantum field, pass the atoms to
Speaker 1: the cells and out of your hand. Look up to
Speaker 1: your own face and to the sky and the sun
Speaker 1: behind you. All of those things, you, the sky, the
Speaker 1: sun are made up of spectacularly complex arrangements constructed from
Speaker 1: the energetic vibrations of complimentary force fields, entangled by irresistible
Speaker 1: forces until time runs its course for them and their
Speaker 1: arrangement collapses when they break down and travel along their
Speaker 1: fields until they are attracted into some new arrangement. From
Speaker 1: a frog as it dies, to the algae of a
Speaker 1: pond that decomposing, to the belly of a fish, to
Speaker 1: the mouth of a mother, to the iris of a
Speaker 1: newborn child. The cycle of life and death is nothing
Speaker 1: more than the movement of energy along a universe of
Speaker 1: force fields. You can see now that everything, every site
Speaker 1: you've ever seen, everything you've ever touched, everything you've ever
Speaker 1: smelled or tasted, every emotion you've ever felt, all of
Speaker 1: it is made from the interaction of the energy fields
Speaker 1: that make up our universe. Even you, you can see
Speaker 1: now that you are a bundle of discrete vibrations held
Speaker 1: together by attractive forces in the hyperlocal area of the
Speaker 1: universe that until a few moments ago you always thought
Speaker 1: of as your body. Pinch your thumb and your index
Speaker 1: finger together tightly. The sensation of pressure that you feel,
Speaker 1: there's nothing more than the electromagnetic force pushing back against itself.
Speaker 1: Physicists have known all of this for more than a century,
Speaker 1: and now you see the true nature of the universe.
Speaker 1: Every thing is energy. All of the vibrations in the universe,
Speaker 1: and so all of the matter in the universe are
Speaker 1: remnants of the energy left over from the Big Bank.
Speaker 1: Almost every vibration unleashed, and the first trillions of a
Speaker 1: second after the Big Bank came in equal and opposite pairs,
Speaker 1: and they canceled each other out. They annihilated each other,
Speaker 1: almost all of them, but not all. This is Don Lincoln.
Speaker 1: He's a physicist at Fermi Lap near Chicago. Very early
Speaker 1: on in the universe, there was some asymmetry, some little
Speaker 1: difference between the two of them. And what happened is
Speaker 1: there was a very slightly larger number of matter vibrations
Speaker 1: than antimatter vibrations, something to the tune of three billion
Speaker 1: to three billion and one. And then the three billions
Speaker 1: canceled and the one was left over. And that's the
Speaker 1: matter of abrations that are left that make up the
Speaker 1: what we see now in our universe. Why there is
Speaker 1: something and not nothing is one mystery that particle physicists
Speaker 1: have run across while plumbing the void. Another is exactly
Speaker 1: where our universe came from. It's looking increasingly likely that
Speaker 1: there was nothing that came before that our universe erupted
Speaker 1: randomly from an aberration in an energy field, like a
Speaker 1: bubble of steam rising in a pot of boiling water,
Speaker 1: and in fact, the basis of a theory by physicist
Speaker 1: Roger Penrose from Oxford University called conformal cyclic cosmology, says
Speaker 1: that this is just the way that universes are formed.
Speaker 1: One bubbles up, lives, dies, and leaves nothing behind but
Speaker 1: the remnants of the black holes that formed in it,
Speaker 1: which are scooped up in the structure of the next
Speaker 1: universe that bubbles up to replace the old one. To
Speaker 1: us living in this universe, such a process would take
Speaker 1: the longest scales of time a man tenable, but to
Speaker 1: someone with a different perspective of time, perhaps watching universes
Speaker 1: bubble up, collapse, and bubble up again might be like
Speaker 1: watching a pot of water simmer. All of this is
Speaker 1: to say that if our universe arose from an aberration
Speaker 1: in an energy field, or from the remnants of the
Speaker 1: collapsed universe that came before ours, then it could happen again.
Speaker 1: Our universe could be reborn in a different form within
Speaker 1: itself and from a closer look at the Higgs field,
Speaker 1: it appears that it's constantly trying to do just that.
Speaker 1: One of the energy fields that make up our universe
Speaker 1: is the Higgs field. It is the field that gives
Speaker 1: mass to other energetic vibrations. Without the Higgs field, nothing
Speaker 1: would have mass, which means that the Higgs field is
Speaker 1: the energy field that allows you and all other matter
Speaker 1: in the universe to physically exist. Without mass, there cannot
Speaker 1: be matter to be bound together, and without matter, there
Speaker 1: cannot be chemistry, which binds that matter together and creates
Speaker 1: new forms of matter. And so without chemistry there can
Speaker 1: be no life, which means without the Higgs field, there
Speaker 1: can be no life, which is one reason the Higgs boson.
Speaker 1: The particle that carries the energy of the Higgs field
Speaker 1: and interacts with other particles, is called the God particle.
Speaker 1: The other reason is that God particle was originally short
Speaker 1: for the God damned particle, which is what physicists called
Speaker 1: it because it eluded them for so long. It seems
Speaker 1: a bit heavy, but think of mass is just another
Speaker 1: property that a vibration can have, like how a ball
Speaker 1: can be read, round and bouncy all at the same time.
Speaker 1: When you know what properties of ball has, you can
Speaker 1: predict what it will do in any given situation. Like
Speaker 1: if you drop the ball, you can say that it
Speaker 1: will probably bounce a couple of times and then roll away.
Speaker 1: And since it's red and round, you know what to
Speaker 1: look for when you go try to find it in
Speaker 1: the grass to get it again. The same goes for
Speaker 1: sub atomic particles too. Their properties, like their electrical charge
Speaker 1: and their mass, let physicists predict how particles will interact
Speaker 1: with particles from other energy fields. And since everything is energy,
Speaker 1: if you can understand how every energetic particle interacts, you
Speaker 1: can understand everything. And since Einstein showed the world with
Speaker 1: his E equals MC squared equation that mass and energy
Speaker 1: or just two sides of the same equal sign, you
Speaker 1: can just look at mass like it's just another type
Speaker 1: of energy, which it is. When a vibration arises, let's
Speaker 1: say a cork from the cork field, it interacts with
Speaker 1: the boson from the Higgs field, almost like it's coded
Speaker 1: by it. And now that cork has mass, so it
Speaker 1: can be acted on by other fields like the gravity field.
Speaker 1: These fields, the cork field, the gravity field, the Higgs field,
Speaker 1: all of the fields, they are everywhere, at every point
Speaker 1: in the universe. The Higgs is the only field that
Speaker 1: can give mass to other vibrations, and it has another
Speaker 1: unique property too. It is the only field that still
Speaker 1: has an energy when it's turned down to zero, which
Speaker 1: is surprising. If you could turn down all of the
Speaker 1: energy fields in the universe to zero on some master
Speaker 1: universe style, there would be no electrons at all in
Speaker 1: the electron field, no corks, no glue ons, all of
Speaker 1: the energetic vibrations would cease, and yet energy would still
Speaker 1: persist in the Higgs field. It's like if you turn
Speaker 1: down the volume on this show to zero, yet you
Speaker 1: could still make out faint pops and crackles in your headphones.
Speaker 1: It would lead you to believe that there was some
Speaker 1: setting below zero that you could turn the volume down to. Well.
Speaker 1: Physicists have arrived at the same conclusion about the Higgs field,
Speaker 1: but this opens up an unsettling possibility. If the Higgs
Speaker 1: field isn't currently at its lowest energy state, and the
Speaker 1: Higgs field is what gives matter mass, then if the
Speaker 1: Higgs field ever slipped into that lowest energy statement, the
Speaker 1: mass of everything in our universe would suddenly change. In
Speaker 1: other words, we would all disintegrate. This is theoretical physicist
Speaker 1: Ben Schlayer from the University of Auckland in New Zealand.
Speaker 1: Particle physics and the corresponding chemistry would be suddenly very different,
Speaker 1: and in particular, matter would no longer be at the
Speaker 1: right size. The different sizes of the atoms that make
Speaker 1: up matter are based on the distance between the electrons
Speaker 1: and the outer periphery and the nucleus at the center.
Speaker 1: If electron suddenly got heavier, adams would shrink into smaller size,
Speaker 1: which means everything in our universe would suddenly shrink. All
Speaker 1: of the matter around us would suddenly find itself unstable
Speaker 1: to a great shrinking, and as it shrank, it would
Speaker 1: give off a huge amount of electromagnetic energy. So they'd
Speaker 1: be an explosion of X rays and that would be
Speaker 1: a pretty violent event. Two theoretical physicists, Sidney Coleman Frank
Speaker 1: DeLucia determined back in that this new lower energy state
Speaker 1: of the universe would not support chemistry, which means that
Speaker 1: life would not have the chance to re evolve in
Speaker 1: this new version of our universe. They called this vacuum
Speaker 1: decay and said that it was the ultimate ecological catastrophe.
Speaker 1: But things can actually get worse from there because the
Speaker 1: shrunken universe is denser than it was before. That means
Speaker 1: gravity acts on all of the mass throughout the universe
Speaker 1: more forcefully, too, so that vacuum bubbles outward. Expansion will
Speaker 1: eventually be and then reversed as it's pulled backward, returning
Speaker 1: to where it started, like an implosion, forcing all matter
Speaker 1: into an infinitely dense, infinitely tiny ball, possibly the very
Speaker 1: same place where our universe started from. This is called
Speaker 1: the Big crunch. It's the antithesis of the Big Bang.
Speaker 1: Spacetime ends and the universe ends. In a big crunch,
Speaker 1: it would be like our universe never happened. That the
Speaker 1: Higgs field has balanced between its current state and the
Speaker 1: lower energy version of itself means that it poses a
Speaker 1: natural existential risk to us. If it moved into that
Speaker 1: lower energy state, that would be it for not just
Speaker 1: human existence, but for everything in the universe. So the
Speaker 1: Higgs field actually poses a universal existential risk for now
Speaker 1: and for the foreseeable future. At least, the Higgs field
Speaker 1: is in a state called meta stable. The good analogy
Speaker 1: is a puddle in a valley at the bottom of
Speaker 1: the hill. On the other side of the hill, say
Speaker 1: there's an even lower valley, and the Higgs puddle would
Speaker 1: be happy to settle into that lower one. But it
Speaker 1: would take a tremendous amount of energy for the puddle
Speaker 1: to move itself up the hill to the other side,
Speaker 1: energy that the puddle doesn't have, so the Higgs field
Speaker 1: won't be moving up the hill. But there's another way
Speaker 1: that it could slide into that lower energy state. Unnervingly,
Speaker 1: the Higgs is constantly trying to tunnel through that metaphorical
Speaker 1: hill to get to the lower valley on the other side,
Speaker 1: and this attempt to tunnel through comes in the form
Speaker 1: of indescribably small pockets of this other lower energy version
Speaker 1: of the Higgs field that at every moment bubble up
Speaker 1: from it like a simmering pot. But these lower energy
Speaker 1: Higgs bubbles are too weak to overcome the external pressure
Speaker 1: or universe exerts on them, so they wink out of
Speaker 1: existence just as fast as they arise. The trouble is
Speaker 1: that if one of those lower energy bubbles ever does
Speaker 1: manage to stick around long enough to stabilize and grow,
Speaker 1: it would swallow our universe and bring about that vacuum
Speaker 1: decay that Coleman and DeLucia wrote about and disintegrate our
Speaker 1: version of the universe. It would be a big crunching deal,
Speaker 1: you could say, But probability is on our side. Under
Speaker 1: normal circumstances, the chances of one of those lower energy
Speaker 1: version bubbles growing are so low it's not expected to
Speaker 1: happen over the estimated lifetime of our universe, so we
Speaker 1: appear to be in the clear again. Though that's under
Speaker 1: normal circumstances. We humans have a tendency to alter normal circumstances,
Speaker 1: and there's a way that the Higgs field campose an
Speaker 1: anthropogenic existential threat. A vacuum bubble could grow with the
Speaker 1: help of a microscopic black hole, which we might actually create.
Speaker 1: Inside one of our particle colliders. Here on Earth, m
Speaker 1: about a hundred meters beneath the countryside where Switzerland juts
Speaker 1: up from the southeast into France. Above sits the Large
Speaker 1: Hadron Collider, the largest highest energy particle collider in the world.
Speaker 1: Hadron is a name for sub atomic particles like protons
Speaker 1: and neutrons that are made up of quarks and gluons.
Speaker 1: Those energetic vibrations that make up matter. If you could
Speaker 1: go inside the LHC reduce yourself back again to the
Speaker 1: scale of those energetic vibrations, you would see something spectacular.
Speaker 1: The protons in the Large Hadron Collider are created by
Speaker 1: passing a laser through a cloud of hydrogen gas, which
Speaker 1: breaks the atoms apart. Those stripped protons are directed into
Speaker 1: the LHC's vacuum tubes by an electrical current, and they're
Speaker 1: separated into two beams that are kept apart and sent
Speaker 1: in opposite directions around the elliptical collider. Over the course
Speaker 1: of days, the beams are accelerated until they reach unimaginably
Speaker 1: fast speeds point nine nine nine one percent the speed
Speaker 1: of light, where a single proton can make the trip
Speaker 1: around the seventeen mile circumference of the collider more than
Speaker 1: eleven thousand times in a single second. At these speeds,
Speaker 1: the protons carry with them as much as five trillion
Speaker 1: electron volts of energy, an extraordinary amount for something so small.
Speaker 1: It's like a mosquito with the kinetic energy of a planet.
Speaker 1: When the beams are at their highest speeds, they're directed
Speaker 1: into each other so that they cross inside of one
Speaker 1: of the collider's enormous sensitive detectors. Every second a billion
Speaker 1: collisions take place, and the energy from those impacts turns
Speaker 1: into mass, which creates particles for just a fleeting moment
Speaker 1: that we're around right after the Big Bang. So the
Speaker 1: LHC is a way to rewind nature, to study its origins.
Speaker 1: To me, it's like I think of using particle colliders
Speaker 1: to understand the universe as an exploration. We're like looking
Speaker 1: for new stuff and you never know what you find.
Speaker 1: You know, this is particle physicist Daniel Whiteson from the
Speaker 1: University of California, Irvine, And one strategy we have to
Speaker 1: understand these things is just to look for patterns among
Speaker 1: the particles. And the way to look for patterns is
Speaker 1: to see more of them. That's the goal of using
Speaker 1: the LHC to explore the universe. We want to find
Speaker 1: more particles, get more clues, see sort of a larger
Speaker 1: window into the reality that we're seeing currently, and hopefully
Speaker 1: get some insight. The Large Hadron Collider was first brought
Speaker 1: online in two thousand nine after decades of planning and construction,
Speaker 1: and it woke up in a world where the field
Speaker 1: of particle physics had hit a wall. The LHC was
Speaker 1: designed to break through that wall. It was designed, you
Speaker 1: could say, to break physics. The work of particle physics
Speaker 1: can be divided between two groups. On the one hand,
Speaker 1: you have theoretical physicists. They come up with all the
Speaker 1: ideas about how the universe might work, and on the
Speaker 1: other hand, you have experimental physicists who test those ideas
Speaker 1: in machines like the Large Hadron Collider. The work of
Speaker 1: these two groups forms in aura borros, the mythical snake
Speaker 1: that eats its own tail. The experimental physicists find support
Speaker 1: for the theoretical physicist theories, or they say that they're wrong.
Speaker 1: The experimental physicists also come up with new data that
Speaker 1: the theoreticians can use to create entirely new theories that
Speaker 1: the experimental physicists can then test. As a deeper understanding
Speaker 1: of particle physics develops, the snake grows fatter. In the nineties,
Speaker 1: sixties and seventies, the theoretical physicists dropped a huge amount
Speaker 1: of new work on the desk of the experimental physicists.
Speaker 1: A group of theoreticians wrote down everything science knew about
Speaker 1: the quantum world and What they came up with is
Speaker 1: a set of formulae known as the Standard Model of
Speaker 1: particle physics. Over the decades, the Standard Model has been
Speaker 1: proven correct again and again. The Standard Model does a
Speaker 1: really good job at describing the particles that exist in
Speaker 1: the quantum world and the forces that govern them. The
Speaker 1: strong nuclear force binds protons and neutrons into the nucleus
Speaker 1: of an atom. The weak nuclear force causes atoms to
Speaker 1: decay over time. The electromagnetic force binds atoms together into
Speaker 1: higher structures like you and meat, and the sun, and
Speaker 1: mosquitoes and red blood cells. Every particle that the Standard
Speaker 1: Model predicted should exist by now has been discovered. It is,
Speaker 1: as scientists put it, an extremely reliable model to describe
Speaker 1: the quantum world. The last of the bunch was the
Speaker 1: Higgs boson, which the LHC found in two thousand twelve,
Speaker 1: and with that discovery the experimental physicists exhausted the theoreticians
Speaker 1: standard model. But as good as the Standard Model is,
Speaker 1: as reliable as it is, it's been incomplete from the
Speaker 1: very beginning. It has no place for gravity, and vice versa.
Speaker 1: With Einstein's famous theory of relativity. It's proven extremely reliable
Speaker 1: at describing how gravity governs the interaction of large scale
Speaker 1: things like people and planets. But the other three fundamental forces,
Speaker 1: electromagnetism and the weak and strong nuclear forces don't fit
Speaker 1: into the equation partum field theory. It really doesn't deal
Speaker 1: with the universe as a whole, and it's well known
Speaker 1: that general relativity does not merge in mill well with
Speaker 1: a quantum realm. So what physics has on its hands
Speaker 1: are the standard model and the theory of relativity too
Speaker 1: totally accurate but totally incomplete pictures of the universe that
Speaker 1: won't fit together to form a cohesive whole. It's almost
Speaker 1: like they repel one another. Particle. Physicists built the large
Speaker 1: hay Drown Collider to figure out why that is. They
Speaker 1: hope that the incredibly high energy collisions will produce new
Speaker 1: particles that don't fit into the standard model to show
Speaker 1: where physics should start looking next. One of the biggest
Speaker 1: mysteries of all that physicists are hoping to solve is
Speaker 1: why gravity is so weak compared to the other three
Speaker 1: fundamental forces. It's strange. Gravity is the force that keeps
Speaker 1: planets in orbit around massive stars and can catch light
Speaker 1: by the ankles and prevent it from escaping a black hole.
Speaker 1: Yet the other three forces are stronger, and you can
Speaker 1: see this for yourself if you just lay a paper
Speaker 1: clip on a countertop and hold a regular old refrigerator
Speaker 1: magnet over it. As you bring the magnet closer, the
Speaker 1: paper clip will eventually rise to meet and stick to it.
Speaker 1: What you've just seen is the electromagnetic force and that
Speaker 1: tiny magnet overcoming the gravitational force exerted by the entire
Speaker 1: mass of planet Earth. Like I said, strange. To make
Speaker 1: sense of this, and to unify relativity in the standard
Speaker 1: model into a theory of everything, some physicists have taken
Speaker 1: to adding new dimensions to our universe. Some models see
Speaker 1: our four dimensional world of length, with height and time
Speaker 1: as just a tiny membrane floating within an infinitely larger
Speaker 1: fifth dimension that we can't sense, called the bulk. Others
Speaker 1: include as many as eleven total dimensions, most of which
Speaker 1: are curled up into extremely tiny coils at the corners
Speaker 1: of every point in the fabric of spacetime. These models
Speaker 1: explain why gravity is so weak by allowing it to
Speaker 1: spread across all of the dimensions. The other three forces,
Speaker 1: like us are trapped within our four D world, but
Speaker 1: gravity is not. And if we could sense all five
Speaker 1: or eleven, or however many dimensions there are, we would
Speaker 1: see that gravity has the same strength as the other
Speaker 1: three forces. It just seems weak to us because it's
Speaker 1: diluted by comparison inside our four D world. So one
Speaker 1: way that physicists are hoping that the LHC breaks physics
Speaker 1: is by revealing the presence of other dimensions. And a
Speaker 1: really good way to demonstrate that there are other dimensions
Speaker 1: would be to create a microscopic black hole. Those aren't
Speaker 1: supposed to exist in our four D world until the
Speaker 1: idea came along that's such a thing as microscopic black
Speaker 1: holes could exist. We used to think that we understood
Speaker 1: black holes pretty well. It was sort of a golden
Speaker 1: age of black hole understanding. We learned over time that
Speaker 1: black holes were gaping, all consuming, horrific abominations in space time,
Speaker 1: with masses so huge that they boggle the mind. Sure,
Speaker 1: but we could feel good about them. We understood them,
Speaker 1: and we were here, and they were a way out there.
Speaker 1: They had no way to touch our world, let alone
Speaker 1: end it. From studying them, we found that black holes
Speaker 1: were created when some incredibly massive star far larger than
Speaker 1: our Sun, exhaust at its fuel and collapsed under an
Speaker 1: unimaginable force of gravity into an infinitely dense, smaller version
Speaker 1: of itself that actually pushed a bottomless pit in the
Speaker 1: fabric of time and space. Encircling the rim of this
Speaker 1: black hole is the event horizon, the threshold where the
Speaker 1: gravitational poll is so strong that anything crossing it is
Speaker 1: doomed to be forever trapped inside the black hole, torn
Speaker 1: apart by the unimaginable gravity with it. Over time, we
Speaker 1: began to notice black holes everywhere we could detect them,
Speaker 1: ripping apart nearby stars, pulling them into a ring of
Speaker 1: hot gas, and circling the event horizon like water around
Speaker 1: a drain. We began to find them at the center
Speaker 1: of galaxies, including our own Milky Way, which nourishes a monstrous,
Speaker 1: supermassive black hole the size of four million of our sons.
Speaker 1: We saw that black holes could cannibalize other black holes,
Speaker 1: which forms even larger black holes, and perhaps the fate
Speaker 1: of our universe was to one day be swallowed into
Speaker 1: one giant black hole made up of every black hole
Speaker 1: that's ever existed in every universe that's ever existed, But
Speaker 1: like any good golden age, this one was not meant
Speaker 1: to last. It ran from the time black holes were
Speaker 1: predicted in Einstein's theory of relativity in nineteen fifteen until
Speaker 1: about the mid seventies, when a not yet world famous
Speaker 1: physicist named Stephen Hawking proposed some ideas about black holes
Speaker 1: that suggested that maybe we didn't understand them so well
Speaker 1: after all. For starters, Hawking and his colleagues proposed that
Speaker 1: black holes didn't have to be made of something as
Speaker 1: big as a star. Black holes could actually be incredibly tiny.
Speaker 1: This was news. It's true that anything with mass can
Speaker 1: be turned into a black hole if it's made dense enough.
Speaker 1: If the Earth were condensed to do a black hole,
Speaker 1: it would have an event horizon about as big around
Speaker 1: as your index fingernail. But as far as physicists understand it,
Speaker 1: the Earth could never actually become a black hole because
Speaker 1: it simply doesn't have enough mass for gravity to collapse
Speaker 1: it into that infinite density. It takes a truly sincerely
Speaker 1: massive object like an enormous star to undergo that sort
Speaker 1: of transformation. What Stephen Hawking and his colleagues realized back
Speaker 1: in the seventies is that there are actually times in
Speaker 1: the universe's distant past, say within trillions of a second
Speaker 1: after the Big Bang, when everything was much much denser,
Speaker 1: and so during this time, something with a mass like
Speaker 1: the Earth's could have collapsed into a black hole back then,
Speaker 1: and much much smaller things could have two, maybe even particles.
Speaker 1: Hawking called these hypothetical particle sized black holes that may
Speaker 1: have formed in the very early universe primeval black holes.
Speaker 1: Today people call them microscopic black holes. In addition to
Speaker 1: his theory that such a thing as very tiny black
Speaker 1: holes could possibly exist, there was another thing that Hawking
Speaker 1: realized that brought our golden age of understanding black holes
Speaker 1: to an abrupt end. It was actually possible for them
Speaker 1: to spit matter out. He said this was news too.
Speaker 1: Our understanding of black holes at the time was that
Speaker 1: they did nothing but consume, ceaselessly, growing eternally. The idea
Speaker 1: that they could spit stuff back out was pretty revolutionary.
Speaker 1: The idea that black holes could actually radiate energy came
Speaker 1: to be called appropriately Hawking radiation, and Hawking showed that
Speaker 1: a black hole could emit photons and gravitons, the particles
Speaker 1: that carry electromagnetic energy and gravitational energy, respectively. Normally, these
Speaker 1: particles don't have matt mass, they don't interact with the
Speaker 1: Higgs field. But what Hawking figured out is that the
Speaker 1: less massive a black hole is, the hotter the temperature
Speaker 1: of the radiation that it spits out, which means a
Speaker 1: very very tiny, microscopic black hole with a very very
Speaker 1: small mass would actually have extremely hot radiation because its
Speaker 1: mass is so small that radiation could be hot enough.
Speaker 1: Hawking realized that the photons and gravitons the black hole
Speaker 1: spit out could actually have mass themselves. And here's why
Speaker 1: temperature is a measure of heat. Heat is a form
Speaker 1: of energy, so high temperature means high energy. And since
Speaker 1: mass and energy are two sides of the same coin,
Speaker 1: E equals mc squared. Remember, mass and energy are theoretically interchangeable,
Speaker 1: which means that heat can be translated into mass. Another
Speaker 1: way you could put it is that if the energy
Speaker 1: of a normally massless particle like a photon or a
Speaker 1: graviton has a high enough energy, it will interact with
Speaker 1: the Higgs field and get coated with mass, and a
Speaker 1: microscopic black hole could produce photons and gravitons with energies
Speaker 1: that high. If Hawking was correct, then that means that
Speaker 1: over time a tiny black hole could actually lose mass
Speaker 1: itself as it spit out photons and gravitons with their
Speaker 1: own mass, and at some point, when the microscopic black
Speaker 1: hole lost enough mass, it would wink right out of existence.
Speaker 1: Black Holes aren't supposed to do this. It seems we
Speaker 1: didn't understand black holes nearly as well as we thought
Speaker 1: we did. Are comfortable Golden Age came to an end.
Speaker 1: It's about here where the story begins of how cern,
Speaker 1: which actively messes with the mass and energy of particles,
Speaker 1: took up a long time quest to prove that it's
Speaker 1: large hadron collider won't do humanity. Actually, wait, it begins
Speaker 1: a little before the LHC came along. The story really starts.
Speaker 1: In that year was, as far as anybody knows, the
Speaker 1: first time anyone seriously raised the idea that a particle
Speaker 1: collider might be able to end the world. Scientific American
Speaker 1: Magazine published a letter from a reader who wasn't so
Speaker 1: sure that the relativistic heavy ion Collider at the Brookhaven
Speaker 1: National Lab in New York nicknamed the Rick, was entirely safe.
Speaker 1: The reader was concerned that the rick might produce a
Speaker 1: microscopic black hole, the kind of thing that Hawking proposed,
Speaker 1: when particles collided inside of it. Scientific American published the
Speaker 1: reader's letter along with a response by a physicist named
Speaker 1: Frank will Check, and will Check pointed out classical six
Speaker 1: doesn't allow for microscopic black holes to exist at all.
Speaker 1: That's point one. Point two was that even if the
Speaker 1: theories that include additional dimensions, theories that are beyond classical
Speaker 1: physics and actually do allow for microscopic black holes to exist,
Speaker 1: if those additional dimensional theories turn out to be true,
Speaker 1: the energies of the particle collisions in the rick were
Speaker 1: still far too low to actually create a microscopic black hole.
Speaker 1: So no worries, Well, there was one worry. At least.
Speaker 1: Will Check did mention that it was much more likely
Speaker 1: the Rick could produce an exotic type of matter called
Speaker 1: a strangelet. Strangelets are heavy particles made of smaller vibrations
Speaker 1: called strange quarks. Despite their heavier size, they're actually lower
Speaker 1: energy than typical strange quarks, which means that the universe
Speaker 1: would prefer them over strange corps. It's just that strangelets
Speaker 1: tended as all very quickly because of their higher mass.
Speaker 1: The concern over strangelets is that if one of them
Speaker 1: didn't dissolve into elementary particles, it could conceivably set off
Speaker 1: a chain reaction, lowering the energy but increasing the mass
Speaker 1: of the matter that makes up Earth, converting our planet
Speaker 1: and everything on it, including us, into a massive, inert
Speaker 1: dead bulk. Will checks offhand comment at the end of
Speaker 1: his reply set off a separate, years long tangent of
Speaker 1: uneasiness and investigation into strangelets and whether they have the
Speaker 1: goods to pose in existential risk themselves. But at least
Speaker 1: the microscopic black hole terror was put to bed, or
Speaker 1: so it seemed. The terribly disconcerting idea of a man
Speaker 1: made black hole has a habit of winking into existence
Speaker 1: again and again. A couple of years after the Scientific
Speaker 1: American readers black hole question was asked and answered, the
Speaker 1: looming specter of a potentially world ending black hole created
Speaker 1: in a particle collider rose again, like a new universe
Speaker 1: rising to replace an old one. This time the collider
Speaker 1: in question was the Large Hadron Collider, which was beginning
Speaker 1: to be assembled in Europe. This time around, the fears
Speaker 1: weren't quite so unfounded, because the energies of the collisions
Speaker 1: in the Large Hadron Collider are an order of magnitude
Speaker 1: higher than the ricks, high enough, in fact, that if
Speaker 1: any of those multidimensional theories are correct, the LHC should
Speaker 1: be fully capable of producing microscopic black holes inside of it.
Speaker 1: So capable, in fact, that a two thousand one paper
Speaker 1: by physicists Stephen Gettings called the LHC a black hole
Speaker 1: factory and calculated that it could produce a microscopic black
Speaker 1: hole every second it's proton beams were crossed. Now it's
Speaker 1: here where CERN began its long standing quest to prove
Speaker 1: the Large Hadron Collider is safe. On the one hand,
Speaker 1: the idea that the LHC might be able to break
Speaker 1: open the current understanding of the universe and point theoretical
Speaker 1: physicists in a clear new direction is intensely exciting for
Speaker 1: the particle physics community. But on the other hand, CERN
Speaker 1: was much less excited about the idea of everybody else
Speaker 1: seeing their machine as a black hole factory that could
Speaker 1: end the world. And it's pretty easy to understand why
Speaker 1: the funding for certain at any given point is precarious
Speaker 1: enough under the best of circumstances, they count on public
Speaker 1: funds from multiple nations and work under the threat of
Speaker 1: those funds drying up at any time, and the stakes
Speaker 1: for keeping the Large Hadron Collider funded are very high.
Speaker 1: This is law professor Eric Johnson, who has written extensively
Speaker 1: on the risks that come along with high energy physics experiments.
Speaker 1: It's really hard to downplay the amount of money and
Speaker 1: the amount of professional lives that are involved with the
Speaker 1: Large Hadron Collider. Uh. CERN is a multibillion dollar institution.
Speaker 1: UH there's thousands of people who work there and in
Speaker 1: the field of particle physics. In the field of particle physics,
Speaker 1: there really aren't It's not like everyone's off doing their
Speaker 1: own experiments. Particle physics tends to be dominated by the
Speaker 1: big collider of the day and the data that it's producing.
Speaker 1: And if that collider doesn't come online, then there's nothing
Speaker 1: to study for a whole lot of people. Protecting certains
Speaker 1: enterprise is made all the more difficult by the fact
Speaker 1: that what it is doing is pure science. There's no
Speaker 1: obvious research and development that can be turned into useful
Speaker 1: products that the nations involved can expect to make back
Speaker 1: some of their investment with instead. The LHC is as
Speaker 1: unadulterated as scientific experiment as you will find on Earth.
Speaker 1: It was designed and built solely so that we can
Speaker 1: better understand the universe in our place within it. A genuine,
Speaker 1: noble public good to benefit all humankind. It can be
Speaker 1: tough to make money off of else. That is not
Speaker 1: to say that the Large Hadron Collider hasn't already produced
Speaker 1: dividends well beyond physics. You could argue and plenty do.
Speaker 1: That's certain paid for itself many times over. Back in
Speaker 1: the late nineteen eighties, when one of its computer scientists,
Speaker 1: a British man named Tim berners Lee, created a method
Speaker 1: for linking text files so that they could be shared
Speaker 1: universally over computer networks. Burners Lee called it the Worldwide Web,
Speaker 1: so that it could protect its funding, calm fears among
Speaker 1: the non scientific public, discover whether the LHC actually is
Speaker 1: an existential threat or all of those things. CERN took
Speaker 1: up its quest to demonstrate that the Large Hadron Collider
Speaker 1: will not doom humanity, who would be a long and
Speaker 1: circuitous route so at that point cern couldn't rely on
Speaker 1: the not having enough power to produce black Hall's argument
Speaker 1: for safety, and they they acknowledge the need for a
Speaker 1: new examination of hazards, and uh they went back and
Speaker 1: did some new work on that, and then they said
Speaker 1: in two thousand three that Hawking radiation will ensure that
Speaker 1: any black hole that's produced will evaporate almost as soon
Speaker 1: as it's produced, so that that will be safe. Because
Speaker 1: any microscopic black holes the colliding particles inside the LHC
Speaker 1: might manufacture would have extremely small masses. Hawking radiation says
Speaker 1: that they would emit particles and lose their mass at
Speaker 1: a blinding speed, winking out of existence instantaneously. Just how
Speaker 1: fast that would happen, called the rate of decay, would
Speaker 1: be a fraction of a fraction of a second, something
Speaker 1: like ten to the negative power of a second, a
Speaker 1: decimal point, followed by zeros, and then finally all the
Speaker 1: way down in the position a single one that fraction
Speaker 1: of a second. In this unimaginably short time, the microscopic
Speaker 1: black hole would have no chance to absorb any matter
Speaker 1: and grow larger. On this infantism le small scale matter
Speaker 1: is just too few and far between, so the microscopic
Speaker 1: black hole would be gone before we knew it was
Speaker 1: ever there, but it would leave telltale traces behind that
Speaker 1: the LHC's detectors could find and show the world that
Speaker 1: there are dimensions beyond our own. But this argument that
Speaker 1: suggests the Large Hadron Collider is safe comes with some baggage.
Speaker 1: Between the time that the research began on the safety
Speaker 1: paper and when CERN released it, the physics community's faith
Speaker 1: in the existence of Hawking radiation was shaken. In the
Speaker 1: early two thousands, the trickle of papers began to question it.
Speaker 1: It wasn't disproven, just question enough to erode it as
Speaker 1: the kind of thing that CERN could fet the survival
Speaker 1: of the planet on. So CERN looked for another way
Speaker 1: to show the Large Hadron Collider was safe, and this
Speaker 1: time they settled on cosmic rays. Cosmic rays aren't exactly
Speaker 1: what they sound like. They're actually tiny energetic particles that
Speaker 1: travel at incredibly fast speeds through space and smash into
Speaker 1: other particles, creating a spectacular cascade of energy converted temporarily
Speaker 1: into mass. And if this sounds a lot like the
Speaker 1: collisions inside the Large Hadron Collider, you're absolutely right. A
Speaker 1: particle collider is, if anything, a laboratory for stimulating cosmic
Speaker 1: ray collisions, and because they're so similar, means that since
Speaker 1: cosmic rays bombard everything in the universe all the time
Speaker 1: and have for billions of years, then the fact that
Speaker 1: the universe still exists proves that even if particle collisions
Speaker 1: can create microscopic black holes, that microscopic black holes must
Speaker 1: be harmless, because again, the universe continues to exist. That
Speaker 1: is the cosmic ray argument, and it's the second thing
Speaker 1: that's certain pinned the safety of the Large Hadron Collider too.
Speaker 1: But there's a problem with the cosmic ray argument as well.
Speaker 1: Cosmic rays aren't exactly like particle collisions inside the Large
Speaker 1: Hadron Collider, and exactness is kind of important when you're
Speaker 1: trying to show the world that your machine won't bring
Speaker 1: about the end of the universe. Cosmic rays travel at
Speaker 1: high speeds, yes, but the particles that the cosmic rays
Speaker 1: smash into, say particles in the Earth's atmosphere, are just
Speaker 1: kind of hanging out there. They're relatively stationary, which means
Speaker 1: that the collisions are a lot like rear end collision
Speaker 1: and most importantly, in a rear end collision, the momentum
Speaker 1: of the faster vehicle or particle carries it and the
Speaker 1: other vehicle or particle careening off in some direction away
Speaker 1: from the site of the crash. This is important because
Speaker 1: it means that if cosmic rays do produce microscopic black holes,
Speaker 1: the momentum of the crash would carry the microscopic black
Speaker 1: holes away from the collision to most likely they'd pass
Speaker 1: harmlessly through Earth and right out into outer space. The
Speaker 1: problem is in a particle collider, the collisions are different.
Speaker 1: They're less like rear end collisions and more like head
Speaker 1: on collisions, and then a head on collision, the two
Speaker 1: particles cancel one another's momentum out when they collide, they
Speaker 1: don't go anywhere. The upshot of all of this is
Speaker 1: that a microscopic black hole produced by the collision wouldn't
Speaker 1: go careening off away from the impact and into outer space.
Speaker 1: It would be stationary. It would stay put, which means
Speaker 1: that it would stay put here on Earth. That is
Speaker 1: a problem because if we've already thrown out the idea
Speaker 1: of hawking radiation, and along with it, the concept that
Speaker 1: a microscopic black hole would simply wink right out of
Speaker 1: existence if it was created, then that means that if
Speaker 1: we do create a microscopic black hole in a particle collider,
Speaker 1: it would hang around here on Earth, which means that
Speaker 1: it could possibly grow, which means that it actually might
Speaker 1: pose an existential threat to us. As far as safety
Speaker 1: arguments go, this is decidedly not reassuring, especially considering the
Speaker 1: idea of the two thousand one paper by Stephen Gettings
Speaker 1: that said that the LHC is a black hole factory.
Speaker 1: If that paper was correct, then a new, stable, earthbound
Speaker 1: microscopic black hole is created inside the collider every second
Speaker 1: it's proton beams are crossed. So certain looked again for
Speaker 1: a new way to show that LHC was existentially safe.
Speaker 1: What they needed was something out there in the cosmos
Speaker 1: that was dense enough to have a gravitational pull that
Speaker 1: could hang to do a microscopic black hole. Something that
Speaker 1: could do that would show again simply by existing, that
Speaker 1: microscopic black holes really are harmless. It would show that
Speaker 1: even if the Large Hadron Collider produced a microscopic black
Speaker 1: hole and the Earth hung onto it, there's still no
Speaker 1: cause for concern. It was basically cosmic ray argument two
Speaker 1: point out, and CERN finally found what they were looking
Speaker 1: for in white dwarf stars. A white dwarf is a
Speaker 1: star that's run out of fuel and has partially collapsed,
Speaker 1: so it becomes far denser and exerts a much stronger
Speaker 1: gravity on things around it, definitely more than Earth's gravity.
Speaker 1: So any microscopic black holes that a rear end cosmic
Speaker 1: ray collision could produce would still be stuck in the
Speaker 1: star that wouldn't careen off into outer space. And since
Speaker 1: white dwarfs are bombarded with those cosmic rays, and since
Speaker 1: they enough gravity that they could trap a microscopic black hole,
Speaker 1: then the fact that they continue to exist strongly suggests
Speaker 1: that microscopic black holes are not a danger. That is
Speaker 1: to say, again, if microscopic black holes even exist. Based
Speaker 1: on astronomical measurements of white dwarfs, CERN found eight of
Speaker 1: them that, in their opinion, were dense enough and old
Speaker 1: enough to sufficiently demonstrate the safety of the large Hadron
Speaker 1: collider certain issue of paper, and it was followed by
Speaker 1: another paper that concluded the first paper was sound, and
Speaker 1: they circulated both papers to the physics community, which in
Speaker 1: turn provided CERN with quotes about just how sound the
Speaker 1: conclusions of the papers are and just how utterly safe
Speaker 1: they show the LHC to be. Certain included these quotes
Speaker 1: on their website, and that's where things stand today. Classical physics,
Speaker 1: which represents our current understanding of physics, doesn't allow for
Speaker 1: microscopic black holes to form in the place. But even
Speaker 1: if those microscopic black holes could form, so long as
Speaker 1: those eight white dwarfs exist in the sky, Certain is
Speaker 1: willing to bet the whole farm on the safety of
Speaker 1: the LHC. But with physics, our understanding has a way
Speaker 1: of changing. The whole idea of particle physics is to
Speaker 1: discover new things. Particle physics works at the leading edge
Speaker 1: of human knowledge, at the leading edge of theory. That's
Speaker 1: the whole point of it is to be out there
Speaker 1: trying to figure out something new. So it does evolve
Speaker 1: all the time. And I think it would be naive
Speaker 1: to say that right now this year, we've arrived at
Speaker 1: a point where the theory is not going to change,
Speaker 1: or the assumptions are not going to change, so that
Speaker 1: we can feel satisfied that whatever conclusion particle physicists have
Speaker 1: today about the safety of a particle accelerator that that's
Speaker 1: not going to change m M. By now, you might
Speaker 1: be asking yourself exactly how might a black hole be
Speaker 1: created inside the large Hadron collider? Well, that is an
Speaker 1: excellent question. When you take a little tiny particle like
Speaker 1: a proton, and accelerated to almost the speed of light,
Speaker 1: something very peculiar happens to it. The little amount of
Speaker 1: mass that it has starts to grow, and as its
Speaker 1: mass grows, the stronger the gravity acting on it grows too.
Speaker 1: A very fast particle accelerated in the Large Hadron Collider
Speaker 1: begins to grow enough mass that it warps the fabric
Speaker 1: of spacetime around it. This warping has the effect of
Speaker 1: concentrating gravity, and in the minute fraction of a moment
Speaker 1: before two extremely fast moving particles collide, they're bent gravity's
Speaker 1: over lap and concentrate gravity even further. The sum of
Speaker 1: all these parts amounts to an unusual amount of mass
Speaker 1: and extremely high gravity concentrated within a very very tiny area.
Speaker 1: All of this together could produce a microscopic black hole.
Speaker 1: Because it would lack the kind of escape velocity that
Speaker 1: a cosmic ray might give it. The microscopic black hole
Speaker 1: would be held fast by the gravity exerted by the
Speaker 1: Earth's mass. About every half hour, the microscopic black hole
Speaker 1: would oscillate between the LHC and a point on the
Speaker 1: opposite side of the world, somewhere off the coast of
Speaker 1: New Zealand, and back inside the Earth. The black hole
Speaker 1: would grow over time, but exactly how long that process
Speaker 1: would take depends, as does everything, it seems like, on
Speaker 1: the correctness of one of the unifying theories that combine
Speaker 1: relativity with the standard model. One of the things that's
Speaker 1: so unsettling about the idea of Hawking radiation, the theory
Speaker 1: that a microscopic black hole will wink right out of
Speaker 1: existence just as fast as it's created, is that whether
Speaker 1: Stephen Hawking was right or wrong, microscopic black holes still
Speaker 1: pose an existential risk. If Hawking was wrong and there
Speaker 1: is no such thing as Hawking radiation, then a microscopic
Speaker 1: black hole could stick around and slowly eat the world.
Speaker 1: What would a black hole eating the Earth from the
Speaker 1: inside out look like, Well, it's hard not to imagine
Speaker 1: a microscopic black hole growing in the Earth's core until
Speaker 1: it emerged on the planet's surface, kind of popping out
Speaker 1: as a gaping bottomless pit that some hapless person wandering
Speaker 1: through the woods might accidentally stumble into. But this isn't
Speaker 1: what it would look like at all. Remember, if the
Speaker 1: Earth itself could be compressed into a black hole, it
Speaker 1: would have an event horizon just about a centimeter in diameter,
Speaker 1: So any microscopic black hole that consumed all of the
Speaker 1: Earth's mass would have an event horizon about the same size.
Speaker 1: A microscopic black hole then would never pop up on
Speaker 1: Earth's surface. It would still be unnoticeably tiny as it
Speaker 1: tore the planet apart. Plus, let's not forget we couldn't
Speaker 1: see it anyway, being a black hole, like couldn't escape it,
Speaker 1: so it couldn't reflect off the black hole's surface, which
Speaker 1: would make the microscopic black hole both tiny and invisible.
Speaker 1: But we would be able to clearly see the effects
Speaker 1: it had as it tore our planet apart. One of
Speaker 1: the defining traits of a black hole is, of course,
Speaker 1: the intense gravitational pull that it exerts on matter around it.
Speaker 1: Black Holes are capable of pulling matter literally apart, and
Speaker 1: as it does, it releases enormous amounts of energy. That
Speaker 1: violence produces extremely high temperatures and all of that hot
Speaker 1: torn apart matter becomes trapped in an orbit around the
Speaker 1: black hole. Eventually that matter falls past the event horizon,
Speaker 1: unable to escape. Particles that the microscopic black hole encounters
Speaker 1: in the quantum world would be among its first victims.
Speaker 1: But as it grows over time, the black hole would
Speaker 1: eventually get big enough to devour whole atoms. And as
Speaker 1: the black hole grows, so too will its strength. The
Speaker 1: more it increases in mass, the more of the Earth
Speaker 1: it will draw into it, pulling Earth apart and into
Speaker 1: that gaseous stew of hot matter that circles around it.
Speaker 1: Over time, the magma, the bedrock, the soil, the lakes,
Speaker 1: the very planet itself would be pulled apart. There would
Speaker 1: be no place left for life to live on Earth,
Speaker 1: which would be a moot point anyway, since every bit
Speaker 1: of life on Earth would be pulled apart as irresistibly
Speaker 1: as the planet itself, drawn into that roiling circle of
Speaker 1: plasma around the black hole, which would slowly feed on
Speaker 1: our planet for a very long time. Under classical physics,
Speaker 1: the time it would take for a tiny black hole
Speaker 1: produced in the LHC to gain enough mass to become
Speaker 1: a threat to life on Earth is longer than the
Speaker 1: current age of the universe, more than thirteen billion years,
Speaker 1: but that time shortens dramatically when new dimensions are added.
Speaker 1: The additional dimensions allow for stronger gravity on those quantum scales,
Speaker 1: which would allow a microscopic black hole to attract and
Speaker 1: consumed particles early in its life much more quickly. Such
Speaker 1: a black hole could destroy the Earth in as little
Speaker 1: as three hundred thousand years, which is a bit alarming
Speaker 1: considering the possibility the LHC has been creating a microscopic
Speaker 1: black hole every second it's been colliding protons to as
Speaker 1: it came online back in two thousand nine. Humanity might
Speaker 1: still very much place a high value on our home
Speaker 1: planet a few hundred thousand years from now, and prefer
Speaker 1: that it continued to exist. It's probably a good bet
Speaker 1: that our descendants would not want the planet ruined by
Speaker 1: haphazard physics experiments conducted by their ancestors. I imagine the
Speaker 1: rest of life on Earth would have similar feelings on
Speaker 1: the matter too. But what if Hawking was right and
Speaker 1: microscopic black holes do evaporate, It could still pose an
Speaker 1: existential threat because in evaporating microscopic black hole could give
Speaker 1: a low energy vacuum bubble from the Higgs field just
Speaker 1: the boost it needs to grow and ruin the universe.
Speaker 1: If we can rewind back to the moment in the
Speaker 1: LHC when those two particles collided head to head at
Speaker 1: amazing speeds and they're concentrated gravity overlapped, Let's say that
Speaker 1: the microscopic black hole they produced didn't grow up to
Speaker 1: tear Earth apart, but instead it evaporated, just as Stephen
Speaker 1: Hawking predicted. As it evaporated, it could become the nucleus
Speaker 1: for a low energy vacuum bubble to grow, in a
Speaker 1: very similar way to how tiny impurities in a metal
Speaker 1: pot become the places where water can undergo a phase
Speaker 1: transition from liquid to gas within itself. This is what
Speaker 1: we call forming a bubble. An evaporating black hole could
Speaker 1: serve as a nucleation site for the Higgs field to
Speaker 1: undergo a transition from its current state to the lower
Speaker 1: energy version of itself, which again would bring about vacuum decay,
Speaker 1: the ultimate ecological catastrophe, which, again, at the risk of
Speaker 1: restating the obvious, would be very bad for the current
Speaker 1: arrangement of our energetic vibrations. This would not take a
Speaker 1: few hundred thousand years to notice. It would happen so
Speaker 1: fast that we likely wouldn't notice we just suddenly be gone.
Speaker 1: So we have then at least two possible catastrophic outcomes
Speaker 1: from the creation of man made microscopic black holes here
Speaker 1: on Earth. And what's unsettling about them is that there's
Speaker 1: a catastrophe for each possibility. Where Stephen Hawking was either
Speaker 1: right about evaporating black holes or where he was wrong.
Speaker 1: Take your pick. One day in two thousand and eight,
Speaker 1: a bird that lived in the countryside along the border
Speaker 1: between Switzerland and France found itself a bit of crusty bread.
Speaker 1: Around that same time, one of the electrical supply stations
Speaker 1: that cools the Large Hadron collider's magnets with liquid helium
Speaker 1: suddenly went offline. When workers went to investigate, they found
Speaker 1: a bit of crusty bread and some feathers. The press
Speaker 1: reported on it, took liberties with it, and that story
Speaker 1: grew to enormous proportions. Words spread that a single bird
Speaker 1: with some baguette had knocked out the Large Hadron Collider,
Speaker 1: the fastest and largest particle collider on Earth. A pair
Speaker 1: of theoretical physicists named Hulger Nielsen and Massao Ninomia had
Speaker 1: been taking note of the accidents in weird setbacks like
Speaker 1: this that plague the LHC as it was being built.
Speaker 1: They had come to believe that something, possibly God, was
Speaker 1: reaching back from the future two sabotage the Large Hadron
Speaker 1: Collider and prevent it from ever reaching full power. It
Speaker 1: might mean that the LHC would create something, the physicists said,
Speaker 1: that could destroy the universe. They took the bird in
Speaker 1: the baguette as further evidence for their hypothesis. Nielsen and
Speaker 1: Ninomia proposed issuing a challenge to the future to determine
Speaker 1: if we should shut down the Large Hadron Collider and
Speaker 1: abandon it forever. We could present the LHC with some
Speaker 1: luck of the draw, maybe something like ten million cards,
Speaker 1: all of them hearts, except one, just a single spade.
Speaker 1: And if we asked the Large Hadron Collider to pick
Speaker 1: a card, and the Large Hadron Collider picked that one
Speaker 1: single spade, an extraordinarily unlikely event, then the particle physics
Speaker 1: community should take it as a sign that the future
Speaker 1: was communicating a warning to us. Sir, never took the
Speaker 1: physicists up on their card draw proposal. Nielsen and Ninomia
Speaker 1: suspected that the future was trying to prevent the Large
Speaker 1: Hadron Collider from creating a Higgs boson, that particle that
Speaker 1: gives everything that has mass mass. It was widely hoped.
Speaker 1: In fact, it was largely the reason it was built
Speaker 1: that the LHC would produce the Higgs boson, which again
Speaker 1: was the last undiscovered particle predicted by the standard model.
Speaker 1: And in two thousand and twelve, the Large Hadron's computers
Speaker 1: found something that had been created for a fraction of
Speaker 1: a fraction of a second inside the collider that fit
Speaker 1: the parameters for the Higgs boson. There was no catastrophe,
Speaker 1: The world didn't end, and to an extent, the discovery
Speaker 1: of the Higgs frustrated physicists even more since it further
Speaker 1: supported the stubbornly accurate Standard model they've been hoping to break.
Speaker 1: But finding reassurance in the survival of the universe after
Speaker 1: the successful creation of the Higgs boson in the LHC
Speaker 1: is actually a logical fallacy. Specifically, it produces what's called
Speaker 1: the normalcy bias. We tend to assume that because no
Speaker 1: catastrophe has befallen us, yet none will. It's the same
Speaker 1: false belief that drives investors to buy stock based on
Speaker 1: past performance. But any financial advisor worth their salt will
Speaker 1: tell you there is no certainty about the future to
Speaker 1: be found in the past, and so too will a
Speaker 1: particle physicist tell you that. One of the tenets of
Speaker 1: quantum physics is that there is no such thing as certainty.
Speaker 1: We are incapable of certainty. Instead, particle physicists deal improbability.
Speaker 1: As one certain physicist explained it to me, you can,
Speaker 1: for example, take the number of times that a car's
Speaker 1: engine has ever been started and calculate the probability that
Speaker 1: the next time you start your car it won't create
Speaker 1: a chain reaction that ignites Earth's atmosphere. What you have,
Speaker 1: then is what's called the lower bound probability that it
Speaker 1: would happen in an odd, roundabout way. When cars were
Speaker 1: first invented, they actually had a higher probability of igniting
Speaker 1: the atmosphere compared to cars today, simply because fewer cars
Speaker 1: had ever been turned over back then. The large Hadron
Speaker 1: collider is in a similar position with the LHC. We
Speaker 1: simply have a smaller data set from the fewer times
Speaker 1: that it's been turned on. This is in a perfect analogy,
Speaker 1: though there aren't any quantum theories that suggest a car
Speaker 1: could ignite the atmosphere, like there are that suggests the
Speaker 1: LHC might be capable of creating a black hole or
Speaker 1: a strange lit But ironically, the more times we press
Speaker 1: our luck and run the LHC, the lower the probability
Speaker 1: that something terrible will happen. Get the thing is, no
Speaker 1: matter how many times we run the Large Hadron Collider,
Speaker 1: we will never be certain that something terrible won't happen.
Speaker 1: This is the curse of the universe that quantum physics
Speaker 1: carries with it. We are doomed to uncertainty. Eight white
Speaker 1: dwarfs still hang in the sky, but we still can't
Speaker 1: be certain that one of them won't begin to come
Speaker 1: apart tomorrow from the microscopic black hole growing within it.
Speaker 1: It's a matter of faith, faith, and probabilities when it
Speaker 1: comes to the existential safety of physics. Uncertainty curses. All
Speaker 1: of us physicists face a dilemma when they talk about
Speaker 1: the safety of their work to people like you and me.
Speaker 1: The general public. If they speak openly about it, they
Speaker 1: may cause a panic and possibly even undermine their own
Speaker 1: field of research. If they don't, they appear like they're
Speaker 1: hiding something. Here's physicist Daniel Whiteson again. And I think
Speaker 1: the reason is that they don't believe that there's a
Speaker 1: lot of and that there's a lot of numerous e
Speaker 1: in the public and in journalism, and that a nuanced
Speaker 1: position where you're saying, um, there's no none of the
Speaker 1: threats we understand are significant. However, there's a possibility of
Speaker 1: a thing we don't know that we hadn't considered that
Speaker 1: could of course destroy the world, but you know that's
Speaker 1: unlikely and unknowable and so not something to consider. That
Speaker 1: kind of nuanced position, I think it is very difficult
Speaker 1: to convey. So physicis systs may decide that the general
Speaker 1: public can't really understand probabilities, and we'll stop hedging when
Speaker 1: they speak about the safety of their work, erasing those
Speaker 1: remote possibilities of catastrophe and presenting a full certainty that
Speaker 1: particle physics is perfectly safe, that there is no risk.
Speaker 1: This is a dangerous position when it inevitably comes out
Speaker 1: that there is in fact a risk and that scientists
Speaker 1: are well aware of it. Trust is lost in the
Speaker 1: very people who carry out existentially risky experiments, and the
Speaker 1: most sensational and unfounded stories start to gain traction among
Speaker 1: the general public. And it's also directly a dangerous position
Speaker 1: as far as existential risks go, because existential risks are
Speaker 1: by definition remote. They are the risks that get erased
Speaker 1: when physicists speak with certainty about the safety of their work.
Speaker 1: But as you know by now, those same existential risks
Speaker 1: are the ones that can erase humanity should the ability
Speaker 1: surrounding an experiment suddenly skew towards the remote Unexpectedly. Pretending
Speaker 1: those risks are not there is the most dangerous route
Speaker 1: we can take. But scientists who do have the integrity
Speaker 1: to admit that they can't be certain their field doesn't
Speaker 1: pose existential risks frequently find that they're misquoted or misrepresented
Speaker 1: in the media, which can lead to them being ostracized
Speaker 1: by their colleagues for stirring up problems for the field.
Speaker 1: So they may become defensive, which is never good for
Speaker 1: keeping lines of communication open. But I think the experience
Speaker 1: of a lot of scientists is that they say Oh,
Speaker 1: that's very unlikely, but of course possible. And then they
Speaker 1: read an article where they say certain scientists says end
Speaker 1: of the world possible, you know, and so it's it's um,
Speaker 1: I think you're right that they're defensive, but I think
Speaker 1: that comes from some experience and some caution about the
Speaker 1: level of the discourse in the public arena. It is
Speaker 1: with this in mind that CERTAIN is to be commended
Speaker 1: for working to show that the large Hadron collider is
Speaker 1: a safe machine, even considering that it was a reactive
Speaker 1: procedure rather than a proactive one. CERTAIN is a great institution,
Speaker 1: and one thing that I admire so much about them
Speaker 1: is how open they are. And much of what I
Speaker 1: was able to do in my research is thanks to
Speaker 1: them being very open. They're very very open in terms
Speaker 1: of sharing their data, sharing their papers, being accessible in
Speaker 1: terms of talking to them. That's part of what makes
Speaker 1: me admire them so much as an academic myself. I
Speaker 1: just think that that's a great model for building and
Speaker 1: sharing knowledge, and it's to their credit that they have
Speaker 1: looked at these issues with a great deal of transparency.
Speaker 1: It is extremely important that the physics community follows CERN's
Speaker 1: lead and its willingness to investigate the safety of its
Speaker 1: work has their experiments grow more and more powerful in
Speaker 1: the future. There's a different interpretation to the cosmic ray argument,
Speaker 1: a more nihilistic one. It says that the presence of
Speaker 1: cosmic rays doesn't prove that particle colliders are safe. It
Speaker 1: just shows that our particle colliders can't make anything more
Speaker 1: precarious than they already are. Turning on a particle collider
Speaker 1: is safe because we can't turn cosmic rays off, so
Speaker 1: we're not going to be causing any new danger by
Speaker 1: turning them on. But what about some decades or a
Speaker 1: century from now, when our experiments begin to reach levels
Speaker 1: that exceed cosmic rays. If the Large Hadron Collider is
Speaker 1: an early incarnation of a long line of particle colliders
Speaker 1: to come, as physicists hope, there will likely be a
Speaker 1: point where the energies of future colliders rub up against
Speaker 1: and then eventually exceed, the energies of cosmic rays, the
Speaker 1: very same cosmic rays that we use today as some
Speaker 1: sort of proof that our colliders are safe. And over time,
Speaker 1: as physicists develop a greater mastery over the rules of
Speaker 1: our universe, particle colliders may transition into laboratories that physicists
Speaker 1: use to bend the laws of physics to their will.
Speaker 1: Those nearly blind pokes and prods into the darkness of
Speaker 1: our understanding that physicists today carry out are providing the
Speaker 1: body of knowledge that physicists to come in the future
Speaker 1: will build upon. And if humanity can survive our infro
Speaker 1: to physics, a tremendous amount of promise lies in store
Speaker 1: for us from it. An odd thing about the universe
Speaker 1: has been bothering physicists for a while now, and it's
Speaker 1: something that the discovery of the Higgs didn't help. It
Speaker 1: seems more and more that our universe appears to be
Speaker 1: finely tuned to allow for life to exist. The Higgs field, gravity,
Speaker 1: all of it is right within the narrow bounds that
Speaker 1: allow for atoms, chemistry, and life. When the Higgs boson
Speaker 1: was finally founded two thousand twelve, it appeared right in
Speaker 1: the very middle of where it was predicted, as perfectly
Speaker 1: finely tuned as the rest of the fundamental particles. One
Speaker 1: answer to the strange situation is that our universes finally
Speaker 1: tuned for life simply because of random chance. There's a
Speaker 1: remarkable implication of string theory, one of those theories that
Speaker 1: seeks to unify gravity with the quantum forces. String theory
Speaker 1: says that if you take all of the particles and
Speaker 1: forces and dimensions that the theory predicts, you can come
Speaker 1: up with ten to the five power different possible combinations
Speaker 1: among them. If you consider each of those combinations as
Speaker 1: a set of rules for a potential universe, including the
Speaker 1: combination that governs our own universe, then you have as
Speaker 1: many possible universes as ten to the five power. Our
Speaker 1: universe just so happens to be one with the combination
Speaker 1: of those dimensions and particles and forces that allow for life.
Speaker 1: That's the basis of what's called the anthropic principle. The
Speaker 1: kind of universe where life could evolved is the only
Speaker 1: type where we would find ourselves wondering about why things
Speaker 1: seem so finely too fine tuning may really not mean
Speaker 1: anything at all. By learning about the reality of our universe,
Speaker 1: physicists will answer questions like this, and when they do,
Speaker 1: they will be able to do amazing things like predict
Speaker 1: anything that could possibly happen with absolute accuracy, and perhaps
Speaker 1: future physicists will learn to construct new universes within their
Speaker 1: particle colliders grow them from seat. Exactly how we may
Speaker 1: someday be able to do this has already been roughly
Speaker 1: sketched out, and now the data must catch up to
Speaker 1: the theories. To some people physicists creating new universes where
Speaker 1: life might arise organically, it's actually a dreary sad idea.
Speaker 1: Any universe we might create in the lab would almost
Speaker 1: certainly have its own space time, and so it would
Speaker 1: be totally detached from our own universe, And so those
Speaker 1: physicists who created that universe would have no way to
Speaker 1: alleviate the profound suffering that life in that other universe
Speaker 1: might experience. To people who believe that the purpose of
Speaker 1: life is to reduce suffering, creating a universe like this
Speaker 1: would be a profoundly irresponsible act by a creator God
Speaker 1: with no power to interview. But there is also a
Speaker 1: tremendous amount of promise in the idea of lap grown universes.
Speaker 1: Perhaps we will be the life that populates them. Perhaps
Speaker 1: future humans will be able to grow new universes to
Speaker 1: move into when our universe begins to expire. Perhaps, unbeknownst
Speaker 1: to us, those physicists of the future will be carrying
Speaker 1: out the same kind of experiments that produced our universe,
Speaker 1: or perhaps they will be creating our universe. For phaps,
Speaker 1: that is how we will make our escape back to
Speaker 1: the beginning. Perhaps that's what we've always done. On the
Speaker 1: next episode of the End of the World with Josh Clark,
Speaker 1: the future is what's called a transgenerational global commons. We
Speaker 1: share it not just with everyone alive today, but everyone
Speaker 1: to come as well. And for the first time in
Speaker 1: human history, it is in the power of those of
Speaker 1: us alive to save it or destroy it permanently. And now,
Speaker 1: if you think about what the existential risk mitigation is,
Speaker 1: not all that is it the global public good existential
Speaker 1: risk mitigation, but it's also of transgenerational public good. But
Speaker 1: to take on the existential risks we face, we will
Speaker 1: have to overcome our own worst impulses.