WEBVTT - Working with the Large Hadron Collider 0:00:04.120 --> 0:00:07.160 Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how 0:00:07.200 --> 0:00:14.240 stuff Works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to Tech Stuff. 0:00:14.280 --> 0:00:17.360 I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with 0:00:17.400 --> 0:00:19.600 How Stuff Works in I heart radio and I love 0:00:19.680 --> 0:00:23.680 all things tech, and today we have a very special 0:00:23.880 --> 0:00:29.720 guest on our show, someone who has worked on really 0:00:29.800 --> 0:00:33.360 interesting problems. Is a rare occasion that I get to 0:00:33.400 --> 0:00:38.800 talk to someone who has experienced in high energy particle physics. 0:00:38.800 --> 0:00:41.839 So I want to introduce to all of you, if 0:00:41.880 --> 0:00:45.320 you haven't listened to his amazing podcast yet, Daniel Whitson. 0:00:45.440 --> 0:00:49.440 Dr Daniel Whitson that Welcome to the show. Hi, thanks 0:00:49.479 --> 0:00:51.680 a lot for having me on. I am so glad 0:00:51.720 --> 0:00:55.440 to have you here now. Daniel, you are one half 0:00:55.800 --> 0:00:59.680 of the podcast team of Daniel and Jorge Explained the Universe, 0:00:59.720 --> 0:01:03.000 and thank you for taking time away from explaining the 0:01:03.080 --> 0:01:07.440 universe to grace my humble show with your presence. I 0:01:07.520 --> 0:01:10.520 greatly appreciate it. Well, thanks a lot for having me on. 0:01:10.600 --> 0:01:13.040 You guys talk about really fascinating stuff, so it's a 0:01:13.040 --> 0:01:16.640 pleasure to be here. It's been a pleasure listening to 0:01:16.720 --> 0:01:18.600 your show. We'll talk a little bit more about that 0:01:18.640 --> 0:01:21.240 towards the end of the episode, but just so that 0:01:21.360 --> 0:01:26.080 my listeners kind of understand where you you're coming from 0:01:26.120 --> 0:01:29.920 before we get into work with the Large Hadron Collider 0:01:29.920 --> 0:01:33.680 and CERN and particle physics. Tell us a bit about yourself, 0:01:33.959 --> 0:01:36.800 all right, Well, I'm devastatingly good looking, which is why 0:01:36.800 --> 0:01:42.440 I have a podcast, and m familiar my my. The 0:01:42.440 --> 0:01:44.399 most important thing to know about me in this context, 0:01:44.440 --> 0:01:47.000 I guess, is that I am a high energy physicist, 0:01:47.360 --> 0:01:50.440 which means that I'm interested in studying the universe at 0:01:50.440 --> 0:01:54.440 the smallest scale, and I do so by smashing stuff 0:01:54.480 --> 0:01:56.960 together at the highest energy. It's like, you know, you 0:01:57.000 --> 0:01:59.760 want to understand how things work, take them apart, and 0:01:59.800 --> 0:02:01.600 that basically what we do is we try to take 0:02:01.640 --> 0:02:04.720 the whole universe apart and understand how it works. So 0:02:04.920 --> 0:02:08.080 I'm a professor at the University of California at Irvine 0:02:08.120 --> 0:02:11.520 that's in Orange County and m I work there, and 0:02:11.560 --> 0:02:14.000 I work also at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva 0:02:14.160 --> 0:02:17.519 where the actual collider is, and we have a big 0:02:17.520 --> 0:02:20.200 team of people smashing particles together and trying to figure 0:02:20.200 --> 0:02:22.440 out what is the smallest bit of matter and how 0:02:22.480 --> 0:02:25.440 does it all fit together? And where, how did everything start? 0:02:25.520 --> 0:02:27.720 And how is it going to end? And we basically 0:02:27.720 --> 0:02:31.440 try to tackle those really big sexy questions. Yeah, I 0:02:31.440 --> 0:02:34.840 I love the way you describe that, the idea of 0:02:34.880 --> 0:02:39.520 taking apart the very basic particles that make up stuff 0:02:39.800 --> 0:02:43.280 and and and finding out what makes that work. It's 0:02:43.400 --> 0:02:47.279 very relatable to all the stories of the various innovators 0:02:47.280 --> 0:02:50.720 who got their start taking apart the various pieces of 0:02:50.760 --> 0:02:55.200 technology they have, often to the detriment of their family, 0:02:55.400 --> 0:02:57.560 and then learning how it works and then hopefully being 0:02:57.600 --> 0:03:00.080 able to put it back together again. Except we're looking 0:03:00.080 --> 0:03:05.040 at reality here, how the the very fabric that makes 0:03:05.120 --> 0:03:08.880 up existence works. And uh I also I watched a 0:03:09.280 --> 0:03:13.400 great presentation that you and Jorge gave in which you 0:03:13.680 --> 0:03:17.720 talked about your book and you talked about the gaps 0:03:17.800 --> 0:03:21.959 and scientific knowledge, and that also made me feel like 0:03:22.480 --> 0:03:25.400 I am all a smart person, only because in the 0:03:25.440 --> 0:03:29.519 past I have described our understanding of the universe like 0:03:29.639 --> 0:03:32.399 we're staring through a key hole and we can only 0:03:32.440 --> 0:03:35.600 see a little bit of the illuminated room that's beyond 0:03:35.640 --> 0:03:38.120 the keyhole, and there's stuff and shadows, So there are 0:03:38.160 --> 0:03:41.120 things that we don't really see, and there are elements 0:03:41.160 --> 0:03:43.360 that are out of you and to us. That's that's 0:03:43.400 --> 0:03:45.720 our understanding of the universe. We only see a very 0:03:45.800 --> 0:03:51.320 narrow band of what really exists out there, and our 0:03:51.400 --> 0:03:55.680 goal is to expand that over time. That's right, and 0:03:55.720 --> 0:03:58.720 the most amazing thing in my perspective is that we've 0:03:58.760 --> 0:04:02.160 only recently disc covered that we are looking through the keyhole. 0:04:02.240 --> 0:04:03.640 I mean, for a long time we thought we were 0:04:03.640 --> 0:04:05.920 saying everything. We thought, well, we've seen the way the 0:04:06.000 --> 0:04:07.800 universe is now, we just need to figure out how 0:04:07.840 --> 0:04:10.000 to explain it. We made a lot of progress and 0:04:10.040 --> 0:04:13.160 the last fifty year, in the last twenty or fifty years, 0:04:13.440 --> 0:04:15.520 we've discovered that there's a lot of stuff out there 0:04:15.520 --> 0:04:19.240 that we don't have any understanding of, dark matter, dark energy, 0:04:19.760 --> 0:04:24.000 huge chunks of the universe which completely defy our our explanation. 0:04:24.200 --> 0:04:26.279 That doesn't mean it can't be explained. You don't have 0:04:26.320 --> 0:04:28.839 to go to like weird woo woo crystal energy stuff. 0:04:28.839 --> 0:04:31.360 It just means that there's a lot more science left 0:04:31.360 --> 0:04:34.080 to do. And for me, those are wonderful moments in 0:04:34.080 --> 0:04:36.240 the history of science when you you know, you pull 0:04:36.279 --> 0:04:39.120 back a layer of reality and discover, oh my gosh, wow, 0:04:39.200 --> 0:04:42.039 things are totally different from what we expected, or you know, 0:04:42.040 --> 0:04:44.440 it turns out we were only studying the the tail 0:04:44.480 --> 0:04:45.960 of the elephant, and we need to look at the 0:04:45.960 --> 0:04:48.719 rest of it. And and that's exciting. Not because the 0:04:48.760 --> 0:04:51.680 science is humbled and realizing that we don't understand everything, 0:04:51.720 --> 0:04:54.719 that's that's a wonderful experience. It's exciting because it means 0:04:54.720 --> 0:04:57.520 there are discoveries left to come, right. I mean that 0:04:57.680 --> 0:05:01.719 maybe some of the most dramatic, most insightful realizations about 0:05:01.720 --> 0:05:04.040 the nature of the universe might still be ahead of us. 0:05:04.600 --> 0:05:06.600 I like thinking about how in the future and a 0:05:06.640 --> 0:05:10.920 hundred years people might look back with great knowledge of 0:05:10.920 --> 0:05:13.840 how the universe works and wonder what it was like 0:05:13.960 --> 0:05:16.600 to be us when we lived in such ignorance, right 0:05:16.920 --> 0:05:19.440 when we didn't know so many things about so many 0:05:19.480 --> 0:05:23.039 basic things about the universe. Um and what you said 0:05:23.040 --> 0:05:25.680 earlier really resonate with me about trying to figure things 0:05:25.680 --> 0:05:28.280 out by taking them apart. I think that there's an 0:05:28.320 --> 0:05:30.800 innate curiosity and being human. I mean, that's what makes 0:05:30.960 --> 0:05:34.760 being human fun, it makes being being alive worth It 0:05:34.800 --> 0:05:37.200 is that we are driven by this desire to know 0:05:37.440 --> 0:05:40.000 to understand the things around us. So if you're the 0:05:40.040 --> 0:05:42.000 kind of person who's like, how does a blender work? 0:05:42.080 --> 0:05:44.320 Let me take it apart, or you know, how does 0:05:44.400 --> 0:05:46.159 this thing in my car work? Let me look under 0:05:46.200 --> 0:05:49.080 the hood and poke around. Then you're basically a physicist. 0:05:49.120 --> 0:05:51.080 You're the kind of person who wants to understand things 0:05:51.080 --> 0:05:53.240 by taking them apart, by boiling them down to the 0:05:53.240 --> 0:05:56.880 most essential elements, and using that to explain your car, 0:05:57.000 --> 0:05:59.039 and then also your blender, and then other things you 0:05:59.120 --> 0:06:04.599 haven't seen. But for right, it's about learning generalizable, universal truths. Yeah, 0:06:04.680 --> 0:06:07.920 and and I would also argue that the history of 0:06:07.920 --> 0:06:10.960 of humanity has been one in which we have attempted 0:06:11.000 --> 0:06:15.200 to explain the why things are the way they are 0:06:15.279 --> 0:06:19.159 for for all of our history, and the as we 0:06:19.320 --> 0:06:23.360 eliminate gaps piece by piece, and knowing that we still 0:06:23.400 --> 0:06:26.599 have enormous gaps left to fill in, we start to 0:06:27.440 --> 0:06:30.480 really hone in on that over time we're able to 0:06:30.600 --> 0:06:34.560 replace things where we had the explanation of a uh. 0:06:34.560 --> 0:06:39.119 Well though, that that's the gods battling it out in Olympus, 0:06:39.160 --> 0:06:42.160 and that's where the thunder comes from. To know now 0:06:42.200 --> 0:06:44.320 we have a deeper understanding to the point now where 0:06:44.360 --> 0:06:47.960 we even are able to get a grasp on the 0:06:48.000 --> 0:06:51.920 idea that as humans, as as we are the way 0:06:51.920 --> 0:06:55.920 we have evolved, we have limitations in our perception. There 0:06:56.000 --> 0:06:58.880 are things that we are capable of perceiving because we 0:06:58.920 --> 0:07:02.880 have evolved. It is advantageous, it made sense in our environment, 0:07:03.160 --> 0:07:06.159 but that doesn't mean that's everything there is out there, 0:07:06.240 --> 0:07:09.320 which kind of leads into discussions that I've heard about, 0:07:10.160 --> 0:07:13.560 you know, the various dimensions that we were capable of perceiving. 0:07:13.600 --> 0:07:16.600 Some of those obviously we can we can observe the 0:07:16.600 --> 0:07:19.440 physical dimensions, and then once you start figuring that out, 0:07:19.680 --> 0:07:22.760 you say, well, it may be a leap to you 0:07:23.040 --> 0:07:26.600 to think there are so many more dimensions or potentially 0:07:26.600 --> 0:07:29.440 more dimensions than the ones we can perceive. But we 0:07:29.520 --> 0:07:33.520 also know that we can't see things in the infrared 0:07:33.680 --> 0:07:38.440 or ultra violet UH wave forms. But with technology, we 0:07:38.480 --> 0:07:40.720 can convert that into light that we can see. And 0:07:40.760 --> 0:07:43.200 once you start looking at things like that level where 0:07:43.240 --> 0:07:45.320 you say, oh, yeah, I guess we have developed tools 0:07:45.880 --> 0:07:50.320 that let us go beyond our limitations in our perception, 0:07:50.640 --> 0:07:53.040 then it kind of opens up your mind into the 0:07:53.120 --> 0:07:56.520 idea of now I kind of understand how there can 0:07:56.680 --> 0:07:59.800 be things like dark energy and dark matter that are 0:07:59.840 --> 0:08:03.960 beyond our current capability of detecting it, because it took 0:08:05.040 --> 0:08:06.960 thousands of years for us to get to the point 0:08:06.960 --> 0:08:11.720 where we could, uh could even indirectly observe stuff like 0:08:11.840 --> 0:08:14.440 being for red in the ultraviolet. So that's sort of 0:08:14.440 --> 0:08:16.560 the approach I take with people as well, the idea 0:08:16.640 --> 0:08:19.840 that it feels like you're taking a big leap when 0:08:19.840 --> 0:08:22.160 you start going into things like particle physics, when you 0:08:22.160 --> 0:08:26.320 start talking about quantum quantum effects, because everything seems so strange. 0:08:26.360 --> 0:08:29.640 It doesn't it doesn't work the way the classical physics work, 0:08:30.360 --> 0:08:32.920 and it's it feels like you're asking people to take 0:08:32.920 --> 0:08:34.840 a leap of faith. But once you start to build 0:08:34.840 --> 0:08:37.000 on those blocks, they say, okay, all right, now I'm 0:08:37.000 --> 0:08:39.960 with you. Now I got it. And that kind of 0:08:40.000 --> 0:08:43.120 brings us over to the work that we see over 0:08:43.160 --> 0:08:46.040 at at CERN and the large Hey drunk collider. Now, 0:08:46.640 --> 0:08:49.000 one thing I like to remind people about as well 0:08:49.000 --> 0:08:50.880 before we get there. I thinks he's touched on a 0:08:50.880 --> 0:08:53.800 really interesting topic there. You know, Um, I think people 0:08:53.840 --> 0:08:56.280 have been thinking about mysteries for a long time, right, 0:08:56.760 --> 0:08:59.480 And for a long time, the world was really mysterious. 0:08:59.480 --> 0:09:01.120 It was obvious that there were mysteries. You could just 0:09:01.120 --> 0:09:03.200 go outside and there were things you didn't understand. What 0:09:03.320 --> 0:09:05.920 is lightning? Right? Um? And it's sort of it was 0:09:05.920 --> 0:09:09.040 a common feeling that the world was mysterious, you know, 0:09:09.120 --> 0:09:11.640 like there are more things in the heavens and earth 0:09:11.640 --> 0:09:13.920 than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Right, it's it's 0:09:14.000 --> 0:09:16.520 even in literature. But we've sort of lost that. I 0:09:16.520 --> 0:09:18.800 think a lot of people these days when they walk around, 0:09:19.160 --> 0:09:21.760 they feel like they mostly understand stuff, like, yeah, we 0:09:21.800 --> 0:09:23.880 know how weather works. Maybe we can't predict it exactly, 0:09:23.880 --> 0:09:26.439 but we understand the mechanism of it and gravity we 0:09:26.520 --> 0:09:29.960 have an understanding of that. And the sense of experiencing 0:09:30.040 --> 0:09:33.200 mystery on a daily basis is sort of gone because 0:09:33.200 --> 0:09:36.160 science has made so much progress in explaining the various 0:09:36.200 --> 0:09:39.120 bits around us. And I want to remind people that 0:09:39.480 --> 0:09:43.560 the bigger questions, the larger questions questions we're asking ourselves, 0:09:43.559 --> 0:09:45.480 like why are we here? How should we live? How? 0:09:45.720 --> 0:09:48.200 What is the history of everything? Those questions are still 0:09:48.240 --> 0:09:51.440 totally unanswered. And uh, And as you said, I think 0:09:51.600 --> 0:09:54.560 is really insightful about how we don't even know what 0:09:54.600 --> 0:09:56.960 we don't know, because there's a lot of things that 0:09:57.040 --> 0:09:59.760 we've only recently discovered. We don't we we didn't understand 0:09:59.840 --> 0:10:02.440 right that there's things happening around us that we're not 0:10:02.559 --> 0:10:05.920 aware of, various kinds of particles moving, and even different 0:10:06.000 --> 0:10:07.960 kinds of light that's invisible to us, as you said, 0:10:08.440 --> 0:10:10.600 And there's really no limit on how much of that 0:10:10.640 --> 0:10:13.080 there can be, right, I mean, we know certain things. 0:10:13.120 --> 0:10:15.920 We know dark matter is invisible, we know neutrinos are invisible. 0:10:16.240 --> 0:10:18.040 There could be other things out there that are also 0:10:18.080 --> 0:10:20.480 invisible that we just haven't even yet discovered that they're 0:10:20.480 --> 0:10:23.000 there through some sort of very slight hints. Right. So 0:10:23.400 --> 0:10:26.480 the amount of discoveries left remaining in the future is enormous, 0:10:26.480 --> 0:10:29.240 which is the kind of thing that gets me all excited. Yeah, 0:10:29.320 --> 0:10:32.920 I I have a feeling, Well, first of all, I 0:10:32.960 --> 0:10:34.760 have a feeling I'm gonna need to fly out to 0:10:34.840 --> 0:10:37.960 California and have have like just maybe a four hour 0:10:38.080 --> 0:10:40.640 long conversation with you, because I haven't feeling that's exactly 0:10:40.720 --> 0:10:43.360 what's going to be needed, because I this is the 0:10:43.400 --> 0:10:45.720 source of stuff I love to talk about, just to 0:10:45.840 --> 0:10:49.000 anyone who will, you know, be patient enough to let 0:10:49.040 --> 0:10:52.040 me chatter at them, let me ask you a question 0:10:52.040 --> 0:10:54.680 that you you mentioned about how we used to explain 0:10:54.720 --> 0:10:56.520 things in terms of gods, and I think that makes 0:10:56.559 --> 0:10:58.760 a lot of sense because humans are good at like 0:10:58.800 --> 0:11:04.080 identifying agency and willfulness in places where there aren't any, Right. 0:11:04.160 --> 0:11:05.880 But there's another element to that, which is the sort 0:11:05.920 --> 0:11:08.960 of the narrative. Right, These gods don't just have personalities 0:11:08.960 --> 0:11:11.360 and wheels that had stories that reasons why they were 0:11:11.360 --> 0:11:14.360 doing what they were doing. And I feel like storytelling 0:11:14.440 --> 0:11:16.480 is a big part of who we are as a species. 0:11:16.679 --> 0:11:18.680 And it's still even though we're not explaining things in 0:11:18.760 --> 0:11:22.040 terms of God's it still drives our science. Like you know, 0:11:22.080 --> 0:11:24.520 if you asked me, um, what would you do if 0:11:24.520 --> 0:11:26.679 you knew the final answer to particle physics, Like if 0:11:26.720 --> 0:11:30.440 you could explain the whole universe in terms of one particle, Um, 0:11:30.520 --> 0:11:32.280 you know that, I would say, then we would want 0:11:32.280 --> 0:11:33.840 to tell a story, right, We want to tell a 0:11:33.840 --> 0:11:36.680 story about what that means about the universe and why 0:11:36.720 --> 0:11:38.680 the universe? Why is the universe this way and not 0:11:38.760 --> 0:11:40.600 the other way? First we have to figure out what 0:11:40.760 --> 0:11:42.720 way is the universe, and then we want to know, 0:11:42.800 --> 0:11:45.800 like why that way. In the end, we're still telling 0:11:45.880 --> 0:11:48.640 stories to ourselves about how the universe came to be 0:11:48.760 --> 0:11:50.760 and what it means and how we should live our lives. 0:11:51.000 --> 0:11:54.199 So it's a very human endeavor. Well, certainly, I mean, 0:11:54.240 --> 0:11:57.480 we we call it matter, and we know about anti matter, 0:11:57.800 --> 0:12:01.800 but we chose the optimist route right when we describe, 0:12:01.840 --> 0:12:04.680 when we describe these things that are antithetical to one another, 0:12:04.760 --> 0:12:08.160 and they they annihilate one another when they come into contact. 0:12:08.160 --> 0:12:10.640 And for some reason that we don't fully understand, we 0:12:10.679 --> 0:12:14.160 had slightly more matter than we had antimatter, and therefore 0:12:14.200 --> 0:12:17.600 we've got stuff. I mean, if we had been pessimists, 0:12:17.600 --> 0:12:20.560 we would call the stuff we have the antimatter, right, 0:12:21.360 --> 0:12:25.080 So clearly there's a narrative issue there. So here, seriously, 0:12:25.120 --> 0:12:27.360 here's the question. Then the question is do you think 0:12:27.400 --> 0:12:30.240 if we met an alien species of physicists, do you 0:12:30.240 --> 0:12:33.040 think they would be asking the same questions or would 0:12:33.040 --> 0:12:35.520 they be satisfied with our answers, or do you think 0:12:35.520 --> 0:12:38.920 the kind of questions we're asking are inherently human in 0:12:38.960 --> 0:12:42.920 some way that we don't even understand? What an excellent question. Now, obviously, 0:12:42.960 --> 0:12:45.080 from the scientific perspective, I have to tell you that 0:12:45.120 --> 0:12:47.520 I have a very small sample size of intelligent life 0:12:47.559 --> 0:12:51.840 forms that I can work from. I only have the one. Really, you, 0:12:51.840 --> 0:12:53.840 you mean you're the only intelligent life form, you know, 0:12:53.920 --> 0:12:57.400 I mean of entire I'm talking about entire species. I 0:12:57.440 --> 0:13:00.240 guess I'm not not only. I mean, I could get 0:13:00.280 --> 0:13:04.000 super nihilistic and and and very egotistical and say, well, 0:13:04.080 --> 0:13:06.880 I can only experience my own experience, and therefore I 0:13:06.880 --> 0:13:12.319 know I'm intelligence. But I'm just granting everybody else that consideration. Um, 0:13:12.400 --> 0:13:18.320 that's very this This gets into philosophy and then, which 0:13:18.320 --> 0:13:21.280 I also fascinated by. But I'm a pragmatist, so eventually 0:13:21.320 --> 0:13:25.280 I get very irritated. Um, that's an excellent question, and 0:13:25.280 --> 0:13:29.520 and honestly, the it's one that I haven't given a 0:13:29.520 --> 0:13:34.000 lot of consideration too, largely because I have accepted the fact, 0:13:34.280 --> 0:13:38.480 or at least accepted the notion that any sufficiently intelligent 0:13:39.080 --> 0:13:43.360 species that may exist somewhere else could be so very 0:13:43.440 --> 0:13:47.720 different from what we experience that that the word alien 0:13:47.880 --> 0:13:52.839 only begins to describe how we would uh define such 0:13:53.080 --> 0:13:57.440 a species, And that perhaps their approach to understanding and 0:13:57.520 --> 0:14:00.920 explaining the universe to themselves would be very different. But 0:14:01.440 --> 0:14:05.600 it seems like it would follow a similar pattern but 0:14:05.679 --> 0:14:08.240 I say that only because that's what that's what has 0:14:08.280 --> 0:14:11.600 happened here. I don't have anywhere else to draw any 0:14:11.600 --> 0:14:15.680 conclusions from. So, um, it's so hard to imagine outside 0:14:15.720 --> 0:14:18.520 of your experience, right, It's it's very, very difficult. Yet 0:14:18.559 --> 0:14:21.280 in science, when we discover something new, we're always describing 0:14:21.280 --> 0:14:24.000 it in terms of the things we know. Like we 0:14:24.040 --> 0:14:27.600 want to know what is light? Is it a little particle? 0:14:27.800 --> 0:14:30.120 Is it a little way? Because of the things we know? Right, 0:14:30.120 --> 0:14:33.000 when we find something that's totally new and different, we 0:14:33.000 --> 0:14:35.040 don't even really have the words to describe it. So 0:14:35.280 --> 0:14:37.920 imagining what it's like to be an alien scientist, I 0:14:37.960 --> 0:14:40.480 think it's an impossible question. So yeah, and that's that's 0:14:40.480 --> 0:14:42.520 why I posed it to you. It's why it's why 0:14:42.720 --> 0:14:47.000 I while I find science fiction endlessly entertaining, I love 0:14:47.080 --> 0:14:51.320 science fiction. I also always I roll my eyes a 0:14:51.400 --> 0:14:54.000 little bit when I see the star Trek approach of 0:14:54.120 --> 0:14:57.320 every alien race is a humanoid with slightly different bumps 0:14:57.320 --> 0:15:01.600 on their head, and they speak English the same way. Yeah, 0:15:01.680 --> 0:15:05.320 the Universal Translator has no problem picking up what their 0:15:05.320 --> 0:15:07.520 speech patterns are. So that like, even when you use 0:15:07.560 --> 0:15:11.440 the Universal translator, uh, the you know, d o Sex 0:15:11.520 --> 0:15:14.000 Macina coming in and saying, oh, yeah, this is going 0:15:14.040 --> 0:15:17.440 to translate everything magically. You think you kind of need 0:15:17.480 --> 0:15:20.720 a sample size, don't you, before you really get a 0:15:20.760 --> 0:15:22.640 grasp on it. But I mean, we have a hard 0:15:22.720 --> 0:15:26.160 enough trouble, hard enough time even on Earth sometimes understanding 0:15:26.320 --> 0:15:29.840 human cultures from around the globe, you know, so understanding 0:15:29.880 --> 0:15:32.440 how to interact with aliens. I think it's gonna be helpless. 0:15:32.440 --> 0:15:34.760 Like if we ever heard a message from aliens, and 0:15:35.280 --> 0:15:37.440 you know, even decoding it would be a huge problem 0:15:37.480 --> 0:15:39.960 if you could even get past that. I have challenges 0:15:40.160 --> 0:15:42.840 understanding some of my relatives, and we all speak the 0:15:42.880 --> 0:15:45.920 same language and arguably come from the same culture. Are 0:15:45.960 --> 0:15:47.320 you sure they all come from Earth? I mean, that 0:15:47.400 --> 0:15:49.800 might be an explanation. I got an uncle that's questionable, 0:15:49.840 --> 0:15:51.760 but pretty much everyone else I got a pretty good 0:15:51.800 --> 0:15:55.840 handle on. This is This is great. This is gonna 0:15:55.840 --> 0:15:57.920 be an eighteen partner. Guys, I'm just gonna sit here 0:15:57.960 --> 0:16:02.440 and and and and monopolized annuals. Time for the rest 0:16:02.440 --> 0:16:05.200 of you. Want to talk about the large Adran Collider 0:16:05.320 --> 0:16:08.880 rather than philosophy of alien civilization, I wouldn't say. Rather, 0:16:09.760 --> 0:16:13.400 I'll just say that my questions were about, well, you know, 0:16:13.440 --> 0:16:17.160 there's one topic which connects them um, which is the 0:16:17.160 --> 0:16:20.480 one way we might discover an alien civilization is by 0:16:20.720 --> 0:16:26.120 first detecting their particle physicists. I have not heard this. 0:16:26.320 --> 0:16:29.560 It might be if somebody's if aliens are building like 0:16:29.840 --> 0:16:32.920 enormous particle colliders like the size of a solar system, 0:16:32.960 --> 0:16:36.000 and we might eventually like sweep through the essentially the 0:16:36.040 --> 0:16:40.240 pollution from that part from that particle accelerator and discover 0:16:40.360 --> 0:16:42.280 them in that way. That would be pretty crazy way 0:16:42.520 --> 0:16:44.600 to find an alien species, But that would be awesome 0:16:44.600 --> 0:16:46.440 because it would it would tell us that, hey, look, 0:16:46.720 --> 0:16:48.840 particle physics is not just a human thing, it's a 0:16:48.960 --> 0:16:51.760 universal thing. Everyone wants to know what the universe is 0:16:51.800 --> 0:16:54.080 made out of, and everyone's figuring it out by smashing 0:16:54.080 --> 0:16:57.160 stuff together. So that would be pretty exciting discovery. It 0:16:57.200 --> 0:17:00.240 is interesting I had not heard about that particul are 0:17:00.240 --> 0:17:03.000 a kind of an idea. I've heard of, of course, 0:17:03.360 --> 0:17:07.359 enormous constructs that could especially when you talk about things 0:17:07.400 --> 0:17:09.320 like the Kardashov scale and you're thinking about like the 0:17:09.400 --> 0:17:12.640 dice and sphere and that kind of stuff. These hypothetical 0:17:13.200 --> 0:17:16.800 UM machines that would need to exist in order to 0:17:16.800 --> 0:17:20.720 to take advantage of, say, an entire solar system's energy output, 0:17:21.320 --> 0:17:23.520 which would be necessary to reach those higher levels of 0:17:23.520 --> 0:17:27.440 civilization that we've heard about. But I hadn't heard about. 0:17:27.600 --> 0:17:31.359 I hadn't thought about a particle accelery the size of 0:17:31.359 --> 0:17:33.919 a solar system. To be perfectly honest, the large Hadron 0:17:33.920 --> 0:17:36.480 collider is is a big enough beast for me to 0:17:36.480 --> 0:17:39.240 try and get my mind wrapped around. I mean, they're 0:17:39.240 --> 0:17:42.280 talking about pretty expensive. So yeah, the solar system sized 0:17:42.320 --> 0:17:45.160 collider is going to take another level of civilization before 0:17:45.160 --> 0:17:47.800 we can afford that kind of equipment. Yeah. Hey, guys, 0:17:47.840 --> 0:17:51.360 this is Jonathan from the Future just breaking into Jonathan 0:17:51.400 --> 0:17:53.600 from the past to explain that we're going to take 0:17:53.600 --> 0:17:56.119 a quick break with our conversation with Daniel Whiteson to 0:17:56.320 --> 0:18:09.080 thank our sponsor. So getting to the large Hadron Collider. Uh, 0:18:09.320 --> 0:18:11.680 that would you know? And CERN as well. A lot 0:18:11.680 --> 0:18:14.760 of people think of of CERN is just because the 0:18:14.840 --> 0:18:17.400 Large Hadron Collider got so much press a few years 0:18:17.400 --> 0:18:19.680 ago when it was when they were preparing to bring 0:18:19.680 --> 0:18:21.479 it up online and they were starting to stub up 0:18:21.480 --> 0:18:23.399 the energy levels. I think a lot of people just 0:18:23.440 --> 0:18:27.119 associated those two as being. Uh, the only real like 0:18:27.200 --> 0:18:29.480 they CERN is just that's the agency to oversee the 0:18:29.560 --> 0:18:32.840 Large Hadron Collider. I like to remind people that CERN 0:18:33.000 --> 0:18:37.840 is also the organization where because CERN exists, we have 0:18:37.920 --> 0:18:40.960 a worldwide web. I mean the web started from Tim 0:18:40.960 --> 0:18:44.920 berners Lee, who was working for CERTAIN at the time. So, uh, 0:18:45.160 --> 0:18:47.600 I like to remind people that it's beyond that. But 0:18:47.680 --> 0:18:50.920 let's talk a bit so. So CERN is a European agency. 0:18:51.520 --> 0:18:56.160 That UM is a scientifically oriented agency looking into things 0:18:56.200 --> 0:18:59.720 like these, these high energy reactions. And the large Hadron 0:18:59.760 --> 0:19:03.399 Collider is a particle accelerator. Uh, can I give us 0:19:03.400 --> 0:19:07.840 an overview of what the LHC is for for someone 0:19:07.880 --> 0:19:11.240 who has heard the term but they don't really get 0:19:11.359 --> 0:19:15.880 they don't grock it entirely, alright, Sure, UM, the large 0:19:15.920 --> 0:19:18.760 hay Droun Collider. The basic idea is, let's figure out 0:19:18.800 --> 0:19:23.720 what's inside matter. Let's figure out what's inside matter, and 0:19:23.800 --> 0:19:27.000 let's do that by smashing particles together. So what you 0:19:27.040 --> 0:19:30.040 do with the large Hadron collider the word large it 0:19:30.080 --> 0:19:33.160 obviously just means it's really big. Hadron is a kind 0:19:33.200 --> 0:19:36.119 of particle, and proton is the example of it. So 0:19:36.200 --> 0:19:39.240 you could also call it the Large Proton Collider. UM. 0:19:39.280 --> 0:19:42.560 And we take protons, which are essentially just the nucleus 0:19:42.560 --> 0:19:44.879 of hydrogen. So you start with hydrogen gas which is 0:19:44.880 --> 0:19:48.280 easy to get, heat it up, so the electrons boil off, 0:19:48.320 --> 0:19:50.359 and you left with just the nucleus, which is protons. 0:19:51.040 --> 0:19:52.880 And what we do is we give those protons a kick. 0:19:53.200 --> 0:19:56.320 We use electromagnetic waves to push them, and we push 0:19:56.359 --> 0:19:59.160 them faster and faster and faster and faster until they're 0:19:59.160 --> 0:20:03.080 going about in ninety niono the speed of light. And 0:20:03.080 --> 0:20:05.679 then we smash them into each other. And the idea is, 0:20:05.960 --> 0:20:09.000 see what comes out, See what kind of weird mysterious 0:20:09.080 --> 0:20:11.800 quantum mechanical magic happens to give you new kinds of 0:20:11.840 --> 0:20:15.040 matter and new weird particles. Um. But as you said, 0:20:15.160 --> 0:20:18.080 the Large Hadron Collider is so to the flagship property 0:20:18.320 --> 0:20:22.280 flagship Experimenter, but certain is much broader than that. It's 0:20:22.320 --> 0:20:25.600 a it's a European organization, but it's also international. I mean, 0:20:25.640 --> 0:20:28.080 I've I've been there many summers and you sit at 0:20:28.080 --> 0:20:30.640 a table at the restaurant and there's people speaking all 0:20:30.680 --> 0:20:32.800 sorts of languages. You know, this Italian at this table 0:20:32.840 --> 0:20:35.280 and Russian at that table and tie at the other table, 0:20:35.320 --> 0:20:38.440 and Chinese over here, and you meet people from hundreds 0:20:38.440 --> 0:20:41.200 of countries, well not hundreds, but more than a hundred countries, 0:20:41.600 --> 0:20:44.399 and it's a it's a super international place, which is 0:20:44.440 --> 0:20:46.520 really wonderful, and right now it really is the center 0:20:46.560 --> 0:20:49.000 of the world and the Solar System, and you know, 0:20:49.080 --> 0:20:52.840 maybe the galaxy in terms of particle physics. But we 0:20:52.880 --> 0:20:55.720 do more than just the Large Hadron Collider. We also 0:20:55.760 --> 0:20:58.720 have experiments studying the mysterious particle called the new trino. 0:20:59.320 --> 0:21:01.879 Neutrinos are produced by the Sun and the surface of 0:21:01.880 --> 0:21:04.600 the Earth is just bombarded with neutrinos, but they're mostly 0:21:04.640 --> 0:21:07.239 invisible to us. They don't interact with us, but they 0:21:07.280 --> 0:21:09.960 have a lot of really interesting properties that we don't understand. 0:21:10.280 --> 0:21:12.480 So CERTAIN does a lot of neutrino physics as well. 0:21:12.920 --> 0:21:15.640 Um they do cosmic ray physics, looking at weird particles 0:21:15.640 --> 0:21:18.760 from space. They do a big variety of particle physics. 0:21:18.960 --> 0:21:21.440 And CERTAIN has played a big role in politics as well. 0:21:21.680 --> 0:21:23.560 I don't know if you're aware, but Certain was founded 0:21:23.800 --> 0:21:26.920 after World War Two, the idea being let's get all 0:21:26.920 --> 0:21:30.280 the scientists of Europe to work together on projects rather 0:21:30.320 --> 0:21:32.360 than hiding in their own labs and hating each other 0:21:32.760 --> 0:21:35.920 and sort of like using science as this common human bridge, 0:21:36.000 --> 0:21:38.720 like let's get connected. Let's not have our own like 0:21:38.920 --> 0:21:42.040 individual weapons projects. Let's find something we can all work 0:21:42.040 --> 0:21:44.280 together on in a positive way. And I think it's 0:21:44.280 --> 0:21:47.679 really credited with tying European science together in a way 0:21:47.720 --> 0:21:50.440 that's made it more effective. And you know, building harmonies 0:21:50.440 --> 0:21:53.600 between nations is also good, and I know that personally 0:21:53.640 --> 0:21:55.720 at certain I've eaten a lot of weird food from 0:21:55.720 --> 0:21:58.960 different countries and that's helped me understand, you know, um, 0:21:59.320 --> 0:22:01.359 why the Belgians is like horse meat and why the 0:22:01.440 --> 0:22:04.400 Chinese eat these weird things. And it's a fun cultural 0:22:04.400 --> 0:22:08.440 experience as well as scientific. Well yeah, and and uh, 0:22:08.560 --> 0:22:10.600 you know, getting into some of the fun stuff. Well 0:22:10.600 --> 0:22:13.560 we'll talk about later. But I love reading about, uh, 0:22:14.080 --> 0:22:17.480 things that remind us that scientists are also human. I 0:22:17.520 --> 0:22:20.119 mean it's it's easy to kind of forget from a 0:22:20.440 --> 0:22:23.720 layman perspective. You you hear about science, and you hear 0:22:23.720 --> 0:22:29.280 about scientists, and it tends to almost be another For 0:22:29.520 --> 0:22:33.160 people who are not necessarily involved in science, or are 0:22:33.200 --> 0:22:36.080 not they don't work with scientists, and so they start 0:22:36.160 --> 0:22:39.320 to think of that as their own category of living thing. 0:22:39.640 --> 0:22:44.240 There's a scientist kind of like doctors. There's doctors, they're scientists, 0:22:44.320 --> 0:22:46.760 and uh, it's like that time that you meet your 0:22:46.760 --> 0:22:50.840 middle school science teacher at the grocery store buying cereal 0:22:50.880 --> 0:22:53.520 and you're like, what you know, breakfast, this is not. 0:22:54.680 --> 0:22:59.280 This is not. Scientists have families and ambitions and disappointments 0:22:59.359 --> 0:23:02.240 and and rock rock groups, as it turns out, in 0:23:02.320 --> 0:23:05.000 rock groups, and you know, ankle injuries and all the 0:23:05.040 --> 0:23:09.000 same sort of things that people have. Absolutely, so what 0:23:09.200 --> 0:23:14.760 experiment at the LHC did you are you working with? Specifically, 0:23:14.800 --> 0:23:18.520 they're different because they're different ones that are associated with 0:23:18.600 --> 0:23:21.520 different points along the LHC. As I understand it, where 0:23:21.520 --> 0:23:24.680 it's different essentially collision points that are looking at very 0:23:24.720 --> 0:23:30.360 specific uh, byproducts of these high energy collisions. That's right. 0:23:30.400 --> 0:23:33.720 So we have two beams of protons um, one going 0:23:33.840 --> 0:23:35.520 one way around the circle and the other going the 0:23:35.560 --> 0:23:38.160 other way. And if somebody out there is wondering, well, 0:23:38.160 --> 0:23:40.440 why is it a circle? The reason is the circle 0:23:40.520 --> 0:23:42.560 is that it takes a while to get protons up 0:23:42.600 --> 0:23:44.760 to high enough speed. That's what we want to do, 0:23:44.800 --> 0:23:47.720 is we want to reuse those little boosters. The circle 0:23:47.760 --> 0:23:50.480 is essentially a string of little boosters. Each one gives 0:23:50.520 --> 0:23:52.480 a little kick and gets it going faster and faster. 0:23:53.160 --> 0:23:55.679 And so if you can spin it around multiple times, 0:23:55.680 --> 0:23:57.960 that you can get it going faster and faster. It's 0:23:57.960 --> 0:24:00.119 like when your kids on the merry go round or 0:24:00.160 --> 0:24:02.200 nothing merry around. What is that thing called the at 0:24:02.200 --> 0:24:04.640 the playground that spins around? Yeah, I know what you're 0:24:04.640 --> 0:24:07.760 talking about. I honestly don't know the name of that either. 0:24:07.960 --> 0:24:12.040 The vominator the vominator um uh and and you put 0:24:12.080 --> 0:24:13.600 them on there and you spend it, you keep pushing, 0:24:13.600 --> 0:24:15.440 it goes faster and faster. So that's why it goes 0:24:15.480 --> 0:24:18.000 in a circle. Um. And in order to bend them 0:24:18.000 --> 0:24:20.439 in a circle, we have these really strong magnets. So 0:24:20.520 --> 0:24:22.800 the way the collider works is it's a kick to 0:24:22.800 --> 0:24:25.199 make it faster and then a magnet to bend it 0:24:25.359 --> 0:24:28.000 to go in a circle. And because we want to 0:24:28.040 --> 0:24:30.359 collide the protons, we actually have two of these. We 0:24:30.400 --> 0:24:32.840 have one going one way and other than protons going 0:24:32.920 --> 0:24:36.360 the other way, and so four places around the ring 0:24:36.760 --> 0:24:39.840 we cross those beams, right, we try to collide them. 0:24:40.240 --> 0:24:42.520 And and also it's not individual proton. It's not like 0:24:42.560 --> 0:24:45.320 we put one proton in the in one beam and 0:24:45.359 --> 0:24:47.199 another proton the other beam, and we zoomed around. We 0:24:47.200 --> 0:24:50.080 smashed one proton. It's really hard to get protons to 0:24:50.160 --> 0:24:52.959 hit each other because they're so small um, and so 0:24:53.000 --> 0:24:55.720 we actually have like a little gas of protons. It's 0:24:55.720 --> 0:24:57.960 a we call it a technical term, is a bunch 0:24:58.000 --> 0:25:01.439 of protons, and it's in tend to some number of 0:25:01.440 --> 0:25:05.080 protons that we passed through another gas of protons hoping 0:25:05.119 --> 0:25:08.400 to get some collisions. And so there's four places around 0:25:08.400 --> 0:25:11.440 the ring that this happens, and each one is surrounded 0:25:11.640 --> 0:25:15.480 by a massive set of detectors um to observe what happens. 0:25:15.480 --> 0:25:18.040 Think of it like a really big digital camera. And 0:25:18.160 --> 0:25:20.080 I work on one of those. And the name of 0:25:20.080 --> 0:25:24.040 the detector is the Atlas detector, which has like which 0:25:24.080 --> 0:25:27.200 sets the record from maybe the worst scientific acronym ever, 0:25:27.960 --> 0:25:30.480 because it has an acronym inside. I think Atlas stands 0:25:30.520 --> 0:25:38.160 for a large toroidal LHC apparatus. It's the most tortured 0:25:38.160 --> 0:25:41.600 acronym ever. Anyway, Atlas surrounds one of the collision points 0:25:41.640 --> 0:25:44.800 and we smash the protons together there and that's where 0:25:44.800 --> 0:25:47.520 the magic happens. And you might be thinking, uh, you know, 0:25:47.560 --> 0:25:49.840 if you smash protons together, all you can learn about 0:25:49.880 --> 0:25:52.040 is what's inside protons, right the way, if you take 0:25:52.080 --> 0:25:55.120 your blender apart, you can learn about what's inside blenders. 0:25:55.160 --> 0:25:57.600 That's true, and we can learn about what's inside blenders, 0:25:57.640 --> 0:26:00.800 but as what's inside protons um. But we can also 0:26:00.920 --> 0:26:03.679 do something else because of the magic of quantum mechanics. 0:26:04.000 --> 0:26:07.280 What happens when you collide a proton and another proton 0:26:07.720 --> 0:26:10.439 is that the particles inside them interact. So inside a 0:26:10.440 --> 0:26:13.679 proton we have quirks of quirks and down corks, and 0:26:13.760 --> 0:26:16.760 those quirks can interact and they can actually annihilate, which 0:26:16.800 --> 0:26:19.760 means that they convert from mass from little bits of 0:26:19.800 --> 0:26:24.480 stuff flying through the particle collider into energy. Okay, so 0:26:24.560 --> 0:26:27.520 the particles are gone, the stuff that made them up 0:26:27.600 --> 0:26:30.640 is destroyed. It's turned into energy, and then that energy 0:26:31.000 --> 0:26:33.840 gets turned back into mass because a little blob of 0:26:33.920 --> 0:26:36.240 energy is very unstable, doesn't like they hang out very long, 0:26:36.840 --> 0:26:39.520 and so it turns back into mass and it doesn't 0:26:39.520 --> 0:26:41.920 have to turn back into the same kind of stuff 0:26:41.960 --> 0:26:44.680 that it's started from. So you can turn for example, 0:26:44.680 --> 0:26:47.280 two up corks. You can annihilate them together, turn them 0:26:47.280 --> 0:26:49.120 into a ball of energy, and then they can turn 0:26:49.160 --> 0:26:53.720 into muans or electrons or other weird kinds of particles, 0:26:54.160 --> 0:26:56.280 and it's not required that it's made of the same 0:26:56.280 --> 0:26:59.359 stuff because the stuff has disappeared, it's been annihilated. So 0:26:59.560 --> 0:27:02.720 it really is like modern day alchemy. You know, we're 0:27:02.760 --> 0:27:06.320 turning one kind of stuff into another kind of stuff, 0:27:06.960 --> 0:27:10.359 and that's magical because it means we can create any 0:27:10.440 --> 0:27:13.399 kind of stuff that's sort of on the universe's menu. 0:27:13.800 --> 0:27:16.240 We don't have to know it's there in advance. We 0:27:16.359 --> 0:27:20.160 just pour enough energy into the collisions and eventually all 0:27:20.160 --> 0:27:23.520 the kinds of stuff will pop out. So it's it's 0:27:23.560 --> 0:27:26.680 really like an exploration machine. It's like saying, what's out there, 0:27:26.720 --> 0:27:29.680 what's on Nature's list of particles? What can we make 0:27:29.720 --> 0:27:32.479 if we put enough energy into the collider. And so 0:27:32.520 --> 0:27:35.080 that's how we smash protons together to try to figure 0:27:35.080 --> 0:27:38.040 out what is the list of particles that the universe 0:27:38.119 --> 0:27:41.080 has on the list of sort of allowed states. And 0:27:41.119 --> 0:27:43.119 that's that's what we're doing to try to get inside 0:27:43.119 --> 0:27:45.719 into this question of what is the universe made out of? 0:27:45.920 --> 0:27:50.480 That's incredibly cool, like I've never heard it described that way. 0:27:50.560 --> 0:27:55.119 So too, the thought of of smashing these protons together 0:27:55.119 --> 0:27:58.040 at incredibly high energies and then you end up as 0:27:58.080 --> 0:28:02.280 part of that uh at almost like the proto energy 0:28:02.400 --> 0:28:05.520 that can convert into various different types of things based 0:28:05.560 --> 0:28:09.960 on possibly criteria that we don't fully understand, I mean obviously, 0:28:10.720 --> 0:28:12.280 And those are the laws we're trying to figure out, 0:28:12.320 --> 0:28:15.760 you know, we're trying to write down mathematical equations that 0:28:15.920 --> 0:28:18.719 predict how often you'll see this kind of particle, how 0:28:18.760 --> 0:28:21.120 often you see that kind of particle, And the kinds 0:28:21.119 --> 0:28:23.800 of particles that we've studied, you know, electrons and muance whatever. 0:28:23.960 --> 0:28:26.560 We understand how those are made, and we can calculate 0:28:26.760 --> 0:28:30.400 very precisely how often we should see them and uh 0:28:30.400 --> 0:28:32.320 and what energies, and so that's the kind of thing 0:28:32.400 --> 0:28:34.720 we study. We we understand in pretty and pretty good 0:28:34.720 --> 0:28:37.800 detail why some particles are made and when and how often. 0:28:38.040 --> 0:28:40.600 What we're looking for is the weird stuff, the stuff 0:28:40.640 --> 0:28:43.680 we haven't predicted, or the stuff we hadn't anticipated, or 0:28:43.920 --> 0:28:45.960 you know, the things that people have predicted but we 0:28:46.000 --> 0:28:48.520 haven't seen yet. And those things tend to be more rare, 0:28:48.960 --> 0:28:51.520 which is why we smash the particles together so often. 0:28:51.880 --> 0:28:55.680 We do it every twenty five nanoseconds, all day, all 0:28:55.800 --> 0:28:58.320 year long. And the reason is most of the stuff 0:28:58.360 --> 0:29:02.160 that happens is boring. We've seen it before. Occasionally, very rarely, 0:29:02.280 --> 0:29:04.800 something weird will happen and that will give us a 0:29:04.840 --> 0:29:08.840 clue about maybe a new kind of rare particle. So 0:29:09.080 --> 0:29:13.840 I imagine if you're doing this that frequently with that 0:29:13.920 --> 0:29:17.720 many protons, knowing not that all of them are are colliding, 0:29:17.720 --> 0:29:20.160 but still a good amount of them are UM and 0:29:20.280 --> 0:29:23.720 you have these four different points where they're all gathering 0:29:23.840 --> 0:29:26.880 data that you're you're getting getting a few zeros and 0:29:26.960 --> 0:29:29.080 ones out of there. There's a lot I'm guessing a 0:29:29.080 --> 0:29:33.520 lot of information gets generated all the time through these experiments. 0:29:34.080 --> 0:29:37.200 It's a it's a tidal wave of data. Every time 0:29:37.200 --> 0:29:39.880 we have a collision, we read out the whole detector, 0:29:39.920 --> 0:29:43.240 which has a hundred million different detector channels. So it's 0:29:43.240 --> 0:29:47.040 a massive basically digital image of the detector every every 0:29:47.080 --> 0:29:50.960 every twenty five nanoseconds UM and so that's pretty it's 0:29:50.960 --> 0:29:54.000 a pretty large volume of data UM and we it's 0:29:54.040 --> 0:29:56.760 so big that we can't even save it all, right. 0:29:56.800 --> 0:29:59.280 We if we saved it all, it would take huge 0:29:59.280 --> 0:30:01.280 amount of resource, says, and we wouldn't have no time 0:30:01.320 --> 0:30:03.640 to go through it. So what we and most of 0:30:03.640 --> 0:30:07.160 it is not very interesting. Of what happens is just 0:30:07.200 --> 0:30:09.360 like two protons come in, they kind of bounce off 0:30:09.400 --> 0:30:12.200 each other, two protons come out. You know, it's rare 0:30:12.240 --> 0:30:14.400 that you actually have them, like a deep collision that 0:30:14.680 --> 0:30:17.760 interacts with the particles inside that makes something weird. And 0:30:17.800 --> 0:30:19.840 so what we do is we have this system we 0:30:19.880 --> 0:30:22.280 call it the trigger, that makes a keep or kill 0:30:22.360 --> 0:30:25.480 decision on the fly, and it says was it interesting 0:30:25.560 --> 0:30:28.440 enough to save? If so, then shunt it down the 0:30:28.560 --> 0:30:32.080 down the view the wires towards the disk. If no, 0:30:32.600 --> 0:30:35.640 throw it away. And so we have to make these 0:30:35.720 --> 0:30:38.120 keep or kill decisions every twenty five nanoseconds. And when 0:30:38.160 --> 0:30:40.640 it's gone, it's gone. It's not like it's saved to 0:30:40.720 --> 0:30:42.560 back up and you can go through it another time. 0:30:42.640 --> 0:30:45.440 It's just we just toss it out. And so that's 0:30:45.480 --> 0:30:48.040 a really vital system. That's actually the part that my 0:30:48.120 --> 0:30:51.320 group works on. Is this trigger system interesting? Yeah? I 0:30:51.560 --> 0:30:54.840 always thought when I was learning more about this, I 0:30:54.920 --> 0:30:58.040 wrote an article about how the large Hadron collider works 0:30:58.120 --> 0:31:00.880 as part of my work for how stuff works, And 0:31:01.480 --> 0:31:04.440 while I was working on it, it struck me just 0:31:04.520 --> 0:31:11.120 how amazing the actual apparatus is of creating these beams 0:31:11.120 --> 0:31:15.400 and steering them and creating the collision points. And then 0:31:15.480 --> 0:31:19.520 it occurred to me that as challenging as it is, 0:31:19.760 --> 0:31:25.280 you know, as much learning and engineering and all the 0:31:25.360 --> 0:31:27.800 expertise that would be required to make such a thing happen. 0:31:28.200 --> 0:31:33.000 As impressive as that is, it's it's also incredibly impressive 0:31:33.120 --> 0:31:36.440 to think about how do you deal with the information 0:31:36.480 --> 0:31:39.479 that you generate from such a thing. It's so large, 0:31:39.640 --> 0:31:44.720 and the ability to differentiate between what is interesting versus 0:31:44.760 --> 0:31:47.080 what has already been known and therefore like this is 0:31:47.560 --> 0:31:52.320 something that we don't necessarily need to consider because it's 0:31:52.440 --> 0:31:54.200 this is this is like we might as well have 0:31:54.240 --> 0:31:56.360 this etched on the side of a mountain already. We're good, 0:31:56.680 --> 0:32:00.400 let's just concentrate this other stuff. Um. And as you 0:32:00.440 --> 0:32:03.480 start to look at the challenges that people have with 0:32:03.600 --> 0:32:09.200 big data in general, which is orders of magnitude smaller 0:32:09.240 --> 0:32:12.200 than one is being generated at the LHC. But you 0:32:12.240 --> 0:32:15.160 look at those challenges just like businesses who are saying like, 0:32:15.400 --> 0:32:17.680 we don't even know what what data we have at 0:32:17.680 --> 0:32:21.440 this point, and you think, well, that's troubling. Then you realize, well, 0:32:21.560 --> 0:32:25.360 if we're having trouble with that, imagine the challenge of 0:32:25.480 --> 0:32:28.960 sifting through all that information to find these gems, these 0:32:29.480 --> 0:32:34.360 these indications of something unknown or not fully understood. And 0:32:34.440 --> 0:32:37.760 it boggled my mind. So to me, that is one 0:32:37.800 --> 0:32:42.440 of the the huge achievements was not just the incredible 0:32:43.000 --> 0:32:47.080 technological triumph of building a particle accelerator as large and 0:32:47.120 --> 0:32:50.360 as powerful as the LHC, but then creating the way 0:32:50.400 --> 0:32:53.400 to deal with the information that's generated as a result. 0:32:53.920 --> 0:32:57.160 And I think a lot of people don't necessarily appreciate 0:32:57.200 --> 0:33:01.560 that or understand that because they're just thinking of, uh, 0:33:01.640 --> 0:33:05.520 there's probably conceptualizing. You know, these these particles hitting each 0:33:05.560 --> 0:33:08.080 other really at high speed, and then there's maybe a 0:33:08.080 --> 0:33:10.200 flash of light or something, and then there's a little 0:33:10.200 --> 0:33:12.520 squiggly line that goes off into the distance and you think, oh, 0:33:12.680 --> 0:33:16.160 that was a cork, right. It's it's because these are 0:33:16.200 --> 0:33:20.200 so far outside the normal experience, it's hard to think of, well, 0:33:20.240 --> 0:33:22.600 i'll tell you some details about it. That's actually the 0:33:22.880 --> 0:33:26.120 part of it that I'm most interested in UM. But 0:33:26.200 --> 0:33:28.240 first of the human side of it is that this 0:33:28.280 --> 0:33:31.880 apparatus is so complex that everybody who participates and it's 0:33:31.920 --> 0:33:34.520 you know, tens of thousands of scientists all working together. 0:33:34.840 --> 0:33:37.960 Certainly not my project by myself. Everybody who participates only 0:33:38.000 --> 0:33:40.720 does a little bit. You know, the people who specialize 0:33:40.720 --> 0:33:43.280 in getting the beams to go really high speed, and 0:33:43.320 --> 0:33:45.920 people who specialize in focusing the beams, and people who 0:33:45.920 --> 0:33:49.240 specialize in building the detectors that surround the beam, and 0:33:49.240 --> 0:33:52.400 people who specialize in um in the trigger, and people 0:33:52.400 --> 0:33:55.000 who specialize in analyzing the data. And one of the 0:33:55.000 --> 0:33:57.480 cool things is that you can specialize. You can say 0:33:57.760 --> 0:33:59.920 I really like climbing around the detector with a wrench 0:34:00.000 --> 0:34:01.480 and I want to spend my days doing that, or 0:34:01.520 --> 0:34:03.720 you can say, oh, I'm really interested in the data 0:34:03.800 --> 0:34:06.640 reduction problem. And so we sort of get to attract 0:34:06.640 --> 0:34:08.800 all types and people who are good at different things, 0:34:08.840 --> 0:34:10.680 and everybod gets to do the part they want rather 0:34:10.680 --> 0:34:13.359 than having to do all of it by themselves. UM. 0:34:13.480 --> 0:34:16.319 So I think that's really fun. And the part that 0:34:16.360 --> 0:34:19.240 I'm most interested in is exactly what you were just mentioning, 0:34:19.360 --> 0:34:21.120 is how do you go from this huge pile of 0:34:21.200 --> 0:34:24.200 data to saying things about the universe right to say, 0:34:24.360 --> 0:34:26.319 I've got all these zeros and ones. How do I 0:34:26.360 --> 0:34:28.640 then say, oh, look, we have the Higgs boson, we 0:34:28.719 --> 0:34:31.560 know it exists, or we found dark matter or something 0:34:31.600 --> 0:34:34.440 like that. And and one of the problems is that 0:34:34.480 --> 0:34:36.680 we don't create these particles and then like have them 0:34:36.680 --> 0:34:39.200 in a jar. It's not like we're producing a pile 0:34:39.280 --> 0:34:41.200 of higgs bosons and we can point them to them 0:34:41.239 --> 0:34:43.759 and say, look, these are higgs bosons. You can tell 0:34:44.000 --> 0:34:45.840 you can touch them, or they have some weird property 0:34:45.920 --> 0:34:48.440 or something right the way, like in condensed matter, they 0:34:48.440 --> 0:34:50.680 can make new kinds of goo and then they can 0:34:50.719 --> 0:34:53.000 show it to you. And then, as with strange effects 0:34:53.080 --> 0:34:56.359 or something, the higgs bosons that we produce only last 0:34:56.400 --> 0:34:59.560 for like ten to the minus twenty something seconds. So 0:34:59.640 --> 0:35:02.200 this this picture I told you where the corks collide, 0:35:02.239 --> 0:35:05.080 they turned into something um some energy. Then they turned 0:35:05.120 --> 0:35:07.400 into a new particle. That's true, but that new particle 0:35:07.800 --> 0:35:10.160 might only last for a really really short amount of 0:35:10.160 --> 0:35:12.040 time because a lot of these particles are very heavy 0:35:12.040 --> 0:35:14.080 and unstable, and they don't like to live very long, 0:35:14.440 --> 0:35:17.920 unlike you know, electrons or protons which can last for 0:35:18.000 --> 0:35:20.560 billions or trillions of years. We don't even know. Some 0:35:20.640 --> 0:35:23.200 of these particles are inherently unstable and they turn into 0:35:23.280 --> 0:35:25.920 other particles, and so what we see in our detector 0:35:26.000 --> 0:35:30.040 is never direct proof of that new particle. Instead, it's 0:35:30.120 --> 0:35:35.200 always indirect evidence. It's like, um, you came to a um, 0:35:35.200 --> 0:35:37.759 it came to an intersection, and you see, you know, 0:35:37.840 --> 0:35:39.680 shards in the ground. You see glass over here, and 0:35:39.719 --> 0:35:42.000 you see steel over there, and there's a dead body 0:35:42.040 --> 0:35:44.120 over here, and you have to figure out what happened. 0:35:44.440 --> 0:35:46.799 It's always like that that we're we're looking at what 0:35:46.920 --> 0:35:49.200 came out of the collision and trying to figure out 0:35:49.200 --> 0:35:51.360 what happened in the middle. And so a lot of 0:35:51.400 --> 0:35:54.680 what we do is is really complicated statistical inference. We say, 0:35:54.920 --> 0:35:57.680 given the data that we saw, which theory of the 0:35:57.719 --> 0:36:00.200 universe is more likely in the theory with the Eggs 0:36:00.200 --> 0:36:03.120 boson or without the Higgs boson. So most of the 0:36:03.160 --> 0:36:06.920 actual work involved is in constructing those two hypotheses and 0:36:06.960 --> 0:36:10.480 comparing them to the data, saying how can we analyze 0:36:10.480 --> 0:36:12.839 the data, how can we um you know, plow through 0:36:12.880 --> 0:36:15.560 the data in a way so that these two hypotheses 0:36:15.600 --> 0:36:18.160 give different predictions. Like in the case of the search 0:36:18.160 --> 0:36:21.759 for the Higgs boson, we were looking for collisions that 0:36:21.840 --> 0:36:25.839 had to photons coming out. So two protons come in, 0:36:26.080 --> 0:36:28.960 two photons come out, right, two little beams of light. 0:36:29.520 --> 0:36:32.800 And that's because the higgs boson um sometimes turns into 0:36:32.800 --> 0:36:35.800 two photons, So we're looking for two photons. The problem 0:36:35.840 --> 0:36:39.000 is there are other things that also turned into two photons, 0:36:39.200 --> 0:36:41.279 lots of ways to make two photons that aren't the 0:36:41.320 --> 0:36:45.000 Higgs boson. But if you did make the Higgs boson 0:36:45.120 --> 0:36:47.960 and it turned into two photons, then it would turn 0:36:48.000 --> 0:36:50.520 into two photons with a certain amount of energy, and 0:36:50.560 --> 0:36:53.080 that amount of energy is connected to how much mass 0:36:53.160 --> 0:36:55.680 is in the higgs boson. So we did is we 0:36:55.719 --> 0:36:58.640 just said, let's look at all the collisions that turned 0:36:58.640 --> 0:37:01.520 into two photons, and let's just compare, and we made 0:37:01.520 --> 0:37:03.239 sort of a plot where we said, on the X 0:37:03.280 --> 0:37:05.920 axis is the amount of energy and the collisions, and 0:37:05.920 --> 0:37:09.040 then why excess is the number. So if you're envisioning this, 0:37:09.400 --> 0:37:11.799 we have one theory that says there should be a 0:37:11.840 --> 0:37:14.920 smooth distribution, and then what the theory with the Higgs 0:37:14.920 --> 0:37:17.319 boson says, well, there should be a smooth distribution, but 0:37:17.320 --> 0:37:18.880 then you should you should get a bump, You should 0:37:18.880 --> 0:37:22.200 get an enhancement around the mass of the Higgs. So 0:37:22.800 --> 0:37:25.360 one theory is there is no Higgs boson, and you 0:37:25.400 --> 0:37:28.080 should get a bunch of just random collisions with two photons, 0:37:28.320 --> 0:37:32.319 no special energy levels. And the other theory is you 0:37:32.520 --> 0:37:35.279 have a Higgs boson, which means you get extra production 0:37:35.360 --> 0:37:38.000 of two photon events and they should cluster and they 0:37:38.000 --> 0:37:40.439 should all have a similar energy. So if you make 0:37:40.480 --> 0:37:43.560 this uh this plot, you should get a bump near 0:37:43.600 --> 0:37:46.000 the mass of the Higgs. And so essentially we have 0:37:46.040 --> 0:37:49.640 two hypotheses. We say no Higgs boson or Higgs boson, 0:37:49.880 --> 0:37:52.200 and then we look at the data. So we've done 0:37:52.200 --> 0:37:55.960 the hard work of constructing two possible ideas and figuring 0:37:56.000 --> 0:37:59.200 out what question to ask the data. That's always the 0:37:59.200 --> 0:38:01.919 crucial thing. It's a question are you asking the data? 0:38:02.120 --> 0:38:04.360 And we've composed the question in a way that we 0:38:04.440 --> 0:38:06.880 hope the data can answer it. And that's how we 0:38:06.920 --> 0:38:10.240 discover the Higgs boson. Is the data followed one curve, 0:38:10.280 --> 0:38:11.920 the curve with a bump in it, and not the 0:38:11.960 --> 0:38:15.160 smooth curve, the curve that had no Higgs boson. So 0:38:15.200 --> 0:38:17.720 a lot of the work we do is involved in 0:38:17.719 --> 0:38:21.880 in analyzing that data, and because it's such a big project, 0:38:22.160 --> 0:38:25.319 we have people specializing in these areas, and this is 0:38:25.360 --> 0:38:28.319 my area specialty is analyzing this data. And one of 0:38:28.320 --> 0:38:32.040 my other interests is in computer science and artificial intelligence. 0:38:32.400 --> 0:38:35.240 And in the last five years we've been borrowing really 0:38:35.320 --> 0:38:38.880 heavily from computer science all these new tools they've developed 0:38:38.880 --> 0:38:43.920 to do really fantastical artificial intelligence to recognize patterns. We 0:38:44.000 --> 0:38:46.279 found ways to take those tools and apply them to 0:38:46.360 --> 0:38:49.960 these questions to say to artificial intelligence tools, can you 0:38:50.000 --> 0:38:53.160 find patterns in this data? Can you learn to find 0:38:53.239 --> 0:38:56.560 Higgs bosons in these ones and zeros um and separate 0:38:56.600 --> 0:38:58.680 them from things that are not higgs bosons but look 0:38:58.760 --> 0:39:01.160 like them. So we've a lot of fun bringing in 0:39:01.200 --> 0:39:03.200 ideas from other fields. We don't invent a lot of 0:39:03.200 --> 0:39:05.360 this stuff by ourselves. We sort of you know, we 0:39:05.400 --> 0:39:07.720 have a nail and we sift around for somebody nearby 0:39:07.800 --> 0:39:11.000 who might have a hammer. M h. Well, that to 0:39:11.120 --> 0:39:14.960 me is always a fascinating thing as well. It's it's 0:39:15.000 --> 0:39:19.359 a different level of innovation where you are thinking rather 0:39:19.440 --> 0:39:22.359 than let's let's invent a brand new tool to do 0:39:22.440 --> 0:39:25.000 this thing. You say, well, do we have any tools 0:39:25.080 --> 0:39:28.239 that perhaps are not currently being used to do this thing, 0:39:28.280 --> 0:39:31.600 but with some some work, we could repurpose them for 0:39:31.640 --> 0:39:35.879 this thing. Um to that, Usually it's a happy discovery. Yeah. 0:39:35.920 --> 0:39:38.360 I remember going over to the computer science department it 0:39:38.440 --> 0:39:42.040 was like two thousand twelve and describing this project and saying, look, 0:39:42.160 --> 0:39:44.720 here's the problem we have. We don't have a tool 0:39:44.760 --> 0:39:47.120 that can solve this problem. What do you have? And 0:39:47.120 --> 0:39:48.919 they said, oh, my gosh, we have the perfect tool. 0:39:49.440 --> 0:39:51.960 Currently we're using it to solve this other problem. And 0:39:51.960 --> 0:39:53.360 I was like, well, what problem are you solving and 0:39:53.400 --> 0:39:55.759 they said, oh, we're trying to figure out how to 0:39:55.760 --> 0:39:59.759 answer the question is there a cat in this Internet video? Right? 0:39:59.760 --> 0:40:02.040 Which is like the perfect example of how of a 0:40:02.200 --> 0:40:06.560 hard but relevant problem. Like it's not easy to say, 0:40:06.600 --> 0:40:09.160 here's a video, can you tell me if there's a cadet? 0:40:09.239 --> 0:40:10.800 It's the kind of thing it's easy for a person, 0:40:11.200 --> 0:40:13.920 but it's really hard for a computer program. Right, how 0:40:13.960 --> 0:40:16.480 do you define a cat? And then it's moving through 0:40:16.520 --> 0:40:19.600 the videos on different colors of cats, cats, of different behaviors. 0:40:19.800 --> 0:40:22.440 It's a difficult problem and it's one where there's a 0:40:22.480 --> 0:40:25.560 lot of data available. So the computer scientists latched onto 0:40:25.560 --> 0:40:28.800 this problem not because it was important or particularly interesting 0:40:28.880 --> 0:40:31.759 or useful, but just because it was hard and they 0:40:31.800 --> 0:40:33.920 had a lot of data. So when I came to 0:40:34.000 --> 0:40:36.640 them with another problem that was hard, where we had 0:40:36.640 --> 0:40:39.719 a lot of data but actually had some like scientific 0:40:39.800 --> 0:40:44.000 value and and sounded cool, they were very excited. So 0:40:44.040 --> 0:40:46.000 they're excited to get to use their tool and something 0:40:46.040 --> 0:40:49.240 that was actually relevant to society into physics and to science. 0:40:49.640 --> 0:40:51.839 And we were excited, of course to use their awesome tool, 0:40:51.880 --> 0:40:54.359 which worked really, really well. So it's usually a sort 0:40:54.360 --> 0:40:56.239 of a peanut butter and chocolate situation when you can 0:40:56.239 --> 0:40:59.640 find this sort of crossovers nice. I like, I like 0:40:59.680 --> 0:41:02.960 the peanut ab her chocolate analogy. And of course, uh, 0:41:03.040 --> 0:41:06.240 the neat thing to me about the machine learning process 0:41:06.320 --> 0:41:09.400 that you were talking about with with identifying cats and 0:41:09.520 --> 0:41:13.719 videos taking an approach like that, where again seemingly if 0:41:13.760 --> 0:41:16.799 you if you explain that to someone, they sound they say, well, 0:41:16.840 --> 0:41:19.000 that sounds like it's trivial. It's I mean, it may 0:41:19.000 --> 0:41:21.239 be a hard computer problem, but what's the purpose. And 0:41:21.640 --> 0:41:25.120 my argument to them has always been, well, a human 0:41:25.160 --> 0:41:27.400 can immediately tell if the computer was right or wrong 0:41:27.600 --> 0:41:29.640 when it or the machine was right or wrong when 0:41:29.640 --> 0:41:32.600 it comes to its conclusion, and therefore go in and 0:41:32.600 --> 0:41:36.839 tweak the waitings of the various decision points. That if 0:41:36.840 --> 0:41:39.440 you're using an our official neural network, you change the 0:41:39.440 --> 0:41:43.200 waitings of the the various values so that it can 0:41:43.480 --> 0:41:46.440 slowly hone in on what is it to be a 0:41:46.480 --> 0:41:50.680 cat and and understand what catness really is, not not 0:41:50.719 --> 0:41:53.600 the character from Hunger Games, but what catness really is. 0:41:54.239 --> 0:41:59.479 And that once you do that, yes, exactly, that's that's 0:41:59.480 --> 0:42:02.319 exactly what you want to do. Right If you're trying 0:42:02.360 --> 0:42:04.319 to create a tool like this, you want to pick 0:42:05.000 --> 0:42:08.319 a goal where a human can say, yes, the the 0:42:08.360 --> 0:42:10.920 computer has managed to hit that goal, or no, the 0:42:10.920 --> 0:42:14.320 computer has not. So that way, once you've perfected the 0:42:14.360 --> 0:42:16.759 approach and you can then start to apply it to 0:42:16.840 --> 0:42:21.160 things where uh, we don't have as full of an understanding. 0:42:21.239 --> 0:42:24.240 You know. It's the difference between supervised learning with machine 0:42:24.320 --> 0:42:27.920 learning and unsupervised learning, and and to me, that's a 0:42:28.000 --> 0:42:30.840 very fascinating area of study. I've talked about that a 0:42:30.840 --> 0:42:34.279 lot on tech stuff as well, and uh, it also 0:42:34.360 --> 0:42:37.080 gets into other issues that I won't. I won't dive 0:42:37.120 --> 0:42:40.160 into here, things like the the need for transparency for 0:42:40.200 --> 0:42:42.400 these kind of systems so that we understand how they 0:42:42.440 --> 0:42:45.560 get to their conclusions and it's not just a black box, etcetera, etcetera. 0:42:45.600 --> 0:42:50.200 But I digress. How does it know what a cat? Exactly? Exactly? Yeah, 0:42:50.360 --> 0:42:53.200 interpreting these networks is very important. Yeah. If you get 0:42:53.239 --> 0:42:55.279 to a point where you watch a video and you say, oh, 0:42:55.320 --> 0:42:56.880 I didn't see a cat in there, but the computer 0:42:56.920 --> 0:42:58.600 says there's a cat in there. The computer says, no, 0:42:58.640 --> 0:43:00.600 there absolutely as a cat in there. Just because you 0:43:00.600 --> 0:43:02.160 didn't see it doesn't mean it's not there. And then 0:43:02.520 --> 0:43:04.799 you start to get a little worried, just thinking are 0:43:04.800 --> 0:43:07.920 we are we heading toward how territory here? Let's uh, 0:43:08.080 --> 0:43:09.879 let's pump the brakes a little bit and find out 0:43:09.880 --> 0:43:11.840 how you got to this happened to seed to the 0:43:11.840 --> 0:43:14.200 computers the job of determining whether is the cat in 0:43:14.200 --> 0:43:17.839 the video? They're better than I am. You say that, 0:43:17.880 --> 0:43:23.000 but I find cat video so cathartic. Um. So this 0:43:23.600 --> 0:43:26.480 one thing I wanted to to touch on just briefly, um, 0:43:26.840 --> 0:43:29.560 And that might be difficult to do. But yeah, we 0:43:29.719 --> 0:43:33.000 mentioned Higgs boson quite a quite a bit. And uh, 0:43:33.600 --> 0:43:36.520 how would you describe what the Higgs boson is to 0:43:36.800 --> 0:43:40.719 someone who's interested in it but doesn't have that background 0:43:40.840 --> 0:43:45.520 in in physics. Yeah, so the Higgs boson is fascinating 0:43:45.520 --> 0:43:48.640 little particle, and it's a sort of part of the 0:43:48.680 --> 0:43:52.560 answer to the question what is stuff? You know, we 0:43:52.640 --> 0:43:55.200 want to understand what are things made out of? But 0:43:55.280 --> 0:43:57.319 part of that is understanding like what am I made 0:43:57.320 --> 0:44:00.840 out of? What is the substance of me? And you 0:44:00.920 --> 0:44:04.040 imagine that if you take yourself apart, you're made out 0:44:04.040 --> 0:44:06.319 of molecules. Those molecules are made out of atoms. Those 0:44:06.360 --> 0:44:09.840 atoms are made out of protons and electrons and neutrons, 0:44:09.880 --> 0:44:12.640 and the protons are made out of quarks. So at 0:44:12.640 --> 0:44:14.759 this point we can describe everything that you're made out 0:44:14.800 --> 0:44:18.120 of in terms of quarks and electrons um. But what 0:44:18.280 --> 0:44:21.120 we still don't know is what are those made out of? 0:44:21.160 --> 0:44:24.600 Like do they get a little scoop of universe stuff? 0:44:24.640 --> 0:44:28.280 You know, there's some sort of basic matter unit, and 0:44:28.320 --> 0:44:31.000 we don't understand like how do they have mass? Where 0:44:31.000 --> 0:44:34.200 does their mass come from? And it's a mystery because 0:44:34.560 --> 0:44:38.239 in our theory, these particles are not little balls. Like 0:44:38.239 --> 0:44:40.840 when I say a particle, you're probably imagining like a 0:44:40.880 --> 0:44:43.840 little spinning beach ball, right, a tiny little dot of 0:44:43.920 --> 0:44:47.799 actual stuff, but something with extent to it, something with size. Well, 0:44:47.800 --> 0:44:50.200 in our current theory, these particles don't have any size. 0:44:50.239 --> 0:44:54.719 Their dots their points in space, which means where is 0:44:54.760 --> 0:44:57.120 the stuff to them? Right? Where is the mass? Where 0:44:57.160 --> 0:45:00.200 does the mass come from? Um, there's no room for 0:45:00.280 --> 0:45:02.400 any mass in a point. Right. If there's mass, there 0:45:02.600 --> 0:45:04.719 have infinite density, which makes no sense at all. You 0:45:04.800 --> 0:45:07.600 have like all these tiny black holes. So the Higgs 0:45:07.600 --> 0:45:09.200 boson is in a way that is a way to 0:45:09.239 --> 0:45:12.000 answer that. What it does is it says that the 0:45:12.080 --> 0:45:15.800 mass the particles have doesn't come from a little scoop 0:45:15.840 --> 0:45:18.520 of universe stuff that they got. Instead, you have to 0:45:18.520 --> 0:45:21.480 think of it's sort of like a charge. Like when 0:45:21.520 --> 0:45:23.759 I tell you an electron has a negative charge, that 0:45:23.800 --> 0:45:26.240 doesn't bother you. But what if I told you electron 0:45:26.320 --> 0:45:28.680 is a point particle there's no room for it. Would 0:45:28.680 --> 0:45:31.960 you ask where does the negative charge go? Or is 0:45:32.000 --> 0:45:34.040 there room for the negative charge? You just think of 0:45:34.080 --> 0:45:36.600 negative charge is sort of like a label, something that 0:45:36.680 --> 0:45:39.120 you can apply to a tiny dot. We should think 0:45:39.160 --> 0:45:42.400 of mass the same way. Mass is not a little 0:45:42.719 --> 0:45:45.759 serving of universe stuff. It's like a charge, and a 0:45:45.840 --> 0:45:48.360 charge of something that tells us how things interact. So 0:45:48.400 --> 0:45:51.000 an electron has a negative charge, which means it, you know, 0:45:51.200 --> 0:45:53.960 um gets repelled from positive stuff, and they can interact 0:45:53.960 --> 0:45:57.960 with photons and things like that. Um particles that have mass. 0:45:58.560 --> 0:46:01.320 Um those particles that have mass us they have mass, 0:46:01.360 --> 0:46:03.400 which is a charge. It tells us how it interacts 0:46:03.400 --> 0:46:06.440 with the higgs boson. So the Higgs boson is the 0:46:06.480 --> 0:46:09.600 thing that gives these that that interacts with these particles 0:46:09.640 --> 0:46:12.600 and makes them move as if they had mass. So 0:46:12.640 --> 0:46:14.759 they have some of the label on them, and the 0:46:14.840 --> 0:46:17.239 higgs boson interacts with them if you have if you 0:46:17.280 --> 0:46:19.920 have a lot of mass, higgs boson interacts with them 0:46:19.960 --> 0:46:22.120 a lot, and that's what gives them inertia. It makes 0:46:22.440 --> 0:46:24.520 makes it hard for them to speed up or hard 0:46:24.560 --> 0:46:27.440 for them to slow down. Right, And so that's what 0:46:27.480 --> 0:46:29.719 the Higgs boson does, is it gives mass to these 0:46:29.719 --> 0:46:32.839 particles or explains how a tiny little particle can have 0:46:32.880 --> 0:46:37.000 any mass at all. And the fascinating thing is that 0:46:37.040 --> 0:46:39.600 the idea, who has been around for decades before we 0:46:39.640 --> 0:46:43.279 actually found it. Some theorist was looking at the list 0:46:43.320 --> 0:46:46.279 of particles and the math behind them and saying, this 0:46:46.320 --> 0:46:49.160 doesn't really make sense, like how do these particles? How 0:46:49.160 --> 0:46:52.000 can these particles have mass? There's no way to give 0:46:52.040 --> 0:46:54.480 them mass in our theory. Like, we have a really 0:46:54.480 --> 0:46:57.720 beautiful theory that would work perfectly if all the particles 0:46:57.719 --> 0:47:00.680 in the universe had no mass, But the particles have mass, 0:47:01.120 --> 0:47:03.040 and when you try to add mass in various ways, 0:47:03.040 --> 0:47:05.600 it just doesn't work mathematically. It breaks all sorts of 0:47:05.600 --> 0:47:08.480 other rules. So he came up with a way to 0:47:08.640 --> 0:47:11.000 give mass to these particles by having them interact with 0:47:11.040 --> 0:47:13.960 this other new particle we've never seen before. And the 0:47:14.000 --> 0:47:17.040 thing I love about that is that it's it's purely aesthetic. 0:47:17.080 --> 0:47:19.839 It's like philosophical. It's like saying, I'm looking at all 0:47:19.840 --> 0:47:22.440 these puzzle pieces and it seems to be one missing. 0:47:22.880 --> 0:47:25.120 This whole story, right, this move back to the idea 0:47:25.120 --> 0:47:27.040 of a story. This whole story would make much more 0:47:27.080 --> 0:47:29.120 sense if there was one more character in it. You 0:47:29.120 --> 0:47:31.600 would just click together, would be symmetric, would be beautiful, 0:47:31.640 --> 0:47:35.200 it would mathematically look pretty. And so he said, well, 0:47:35.320 --> 0:47:37.239 maybe there is one, right, So let's go look for it, 0:47:37.280 --> 0:47:39.319 and it was so compelling an idea that we spent 0:47:40.000 --> 0:47:42.279 decades and billions of dollars looking for it and then 0:47:42.360 --> 0:47:45.600 actually found it. Right. What a triumph for theoretical physics 0:47:45.680 --> 0:47:48.240 to say, just in my mind, I can think about 0:47:48.239 --> 0:47:51.360 the patterns of the universe and predict what else is 0:47:51.360 --> 0:47:54.959 out there that we've never seen. To me, that's incredible. Yeah, 0:47:54.960 --> 0:47:58.560 I love that. Uh it's a story where we take 0:47:58.600 --> 0:48:03.799 a look at uh, an idea that's that's largely fleshed out, 0:48:04.280 --> 0:48:07.880 and then we think, there's this would work so great 0:48:07.880 --> 0:48:10.520 if only there was this thing. You know what, I'm 0:48:10.560 --> 0:48:14.000 just gonna I'm going to create the mathematics here. I'm 0:48:14.000 --> 0:48:16.920 gonna I'm gonna figure out mathematically how this thing could 0:48:16.920 --> 0:48:21.040 exist if everything else we've assumed is more or less right, 0:48:21.680 --> 0:48:25.839 And then, wow, that looks really nice. Boy, it would 0:48:25.840 --> 0:48:28.440 be great if that thing exists. We should find out 0:48:28.440 --> 0:48:32.200 if that thing exists, and then and then a lot 0:48:32.239 --> 0:48:34.640 of time and thought is put to it. Not obviously 0:48:34.680 --> 0:48:38.000 I'm trivializing and I'm very much generalizing, but to me, 0:48:38.080 --> 0:48:40.680 it's just it is beautiful. But it's also there's like 0:48:40.680 --> 0:48:44.040 a level there's a level of beautiful absurdity to it 0:48:44.560 --> 0:48:47.440 that I find interesting from my perspective of not being 0:48:47.600 --> 0:48:51.319 a physicist right where to me, it's it's no, you 0:48:51.360 --> 0:48:53.200 sound like you kind of are an amateur physicist. I 0:48:53.239 --> 0:48:55.360 mean you think about these ways like a physicist. You know, 0:48:55.360 --> 0:48:57.399 it's not all about the mathematical training. It's so sort 0:48:57.440 --> 0:49:00.600 about the front, the way you think, and the way 0:49:00.600 --> 0:49:03.479 you ask questions. So I'm happy to bestow you upon 0:49:03.520 --> 0:49:07.560 you the dubious honor of being a deputized amateur physicist. Excellent. 0:49:07.640 --> 0:49:13.280 I cannot I cannot wait to abuse my authority certificate 0:49:13.280 --> 0:49:15.520 in the mail pretty soon. Yeah, you'll see me walking 0:49:15.560 --> 0:49:17.640 into restaurants saying, give me a good table. I am 0:49:17.680 --> 0:49:21.040 an honorary physicist, and they'll say do you Yeah. No, 0:49:21.160 --> 0:49:23.960 it doesn't work for for podcast celebrity either. I can 0:49:24.000 --> 0:49:27.440 tell you from ten years of experience. Uh. Yeah, it's 0:49:27.440 --> 0:49:29.960 the I have the level of fame that is almost 0:49:30.040 --> 0:49:33.359 but not quite completely useless, and honestly I'm okay with that. 0:49:34.080 --> 0:49:36.839 Um well, let me let me shift this a little bit. 0:49:36.840 --> 0:49:39.799 We'll kind of uh get toward the end of our 0:49:39.840 --> 0:49:43.880 conversation here to talk about some more silly fun stuff. 0:49:44.480 --> 0:49:46.080 One of the things I think a lot of people 0:49:46.760 --> 0:49:50.000 heard about when the LHC was, you know, still powering up. 0:49:50.040 --> 0:49:52.000 It was a very long process. In fact, it was 0:49:52.040 --> 0:49:54.600 longer than we had anticipated because there were some problems 0:49:54.640 --> 0:49:56.799 that we encountered along the way. I say we, as 0:49:56.840 --> 0:49:58.840 if I had anything to do with it. You're an 0:49:58.880 --> 0:50:02.520 honorary physicist. Now you to say we they're excellent. It's 0:50:02.640 --> 0:50:05.520 it's uh, it's so good to join the collective. But 0:50:05.719 --> 0:50:08.560 the there were there were some issues, and it also 0:50:08.680 --> 0:50:13.120 led to a lot of speculation, much of it completely 0:50:13.160 --> 0:50:17.400 baseless from people who had uh, little to no understanding 0:50:17.400 --> 0:50:22.239 of what was happening, but apparently access to wonderful platforms 0:50:22.280 --> 0:50:27.200 from which they could espouse these these baseless claims. But 0:50:27.480 --> 0:50:31.520 we had everything from people saying this is going to 0:50:31.560 --> 0:50:34.480 create black holes without really one understanding what a black 0:50:34.480 --> 0:50:37.840 hole is, to understanding if that were in fact to happen. 0:50:38.200 --> 0:50:41.320 The time frame we're talking about, and the size the 0:50:41.320 --> 0:50:45.600 the UH of it, and and what energy level we'd 0:50:45.640 --> 0:50:48.960 be talking about less than what a mosquito generates when 0:50:48.960 --> 0:50:51.759 it flaps its wings, for example, and at a at 0:50:51.760 --> 0:50:55.680 a at a time that's so small that is impossible 0:50:55.719 --> 0:50:57.799 for us to think of it. We can we could 0:50:57.880 --> 0:50:59.640 look at a measurement. We could look at a number 0:51:00.160 --> 0:51:03.120 with a whole bunch of zeros, you know, a dot, 0:51:03.200 --> 0:51:05.040 a bunch of zeros, and then a one after it, 0:51:05.560 --> 0:51:07.680 and think, oh, that's how long it is based on 0:51:07.719 --> 0:51:11.360 you know, point zero, zero, zero, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, one seconds. 0:51:12.000 --> 0:51:14.440 But you can't by the time you think that, so 0:51:14.640 --> 0:51:17.960 a countless number of those have passed. And so to me, 0:51:18.040 --> 0:51:22.120 that was one of those things that I found funny 0:51:22.200 --> 0:51:26.879 and infuriating at the same time, this sort of misconception about, oh, 0:51:26.920 --> 0:51:29.560 the LHC is a doomsday device that is going to 0:51:29.840 --> 0:51:33.040 end all life because we're going to create a black 0:51:33.040 --> 0:51:36.200 hole that will suck up the entire universe. There's even, 0:51:36.239 --> 0:51:40.879 as I recall, there's a website that had a very funny, 0:51:41.320 --> 0:51:46.280 very immateurish gift of a picture supposedly from a security 0:51:46.280 --> 0:51:50.440 camera outside the LHC just getting sucked in to to 0:51:50.520 --> 0:51:52.720 a single point as if a black hole had been created, 0:51:52.760 --> 0:51:56.520 and I thought, wow, that's amazing. That's amazing connection to 0:51:56.560 --> 0:52:01.759 be able to continue to broadcast while spaghetti location is happening. Now, 0:52:01.840 --> 0:52:05.560 my favorite website is called has the Large Hadron Collider 0:52:05.600 --> 0:52:09.000 destroyed the world yet dot com as we promised as 0:52:09.040 --> 0:52:12.480 physicist to always keep up to date, right, So if 0:52:12.480 --> 0:52:14.080 you go to that website and it says yes, then 0:52:14.160 --> 0:52:17.200 you know, yeah, yeah, you might wanna, you might want to, 0:52:17.320 --> 0:52:21.120 you know, might make some plans. Um, But yeah, this 0:52:21.160 --> 0:52:23.120 is a this is a common thing that's raised, and 0:52:23.280 --> 0:52:25.879 I think it's reasonable for people to wonder, like our 0:52:26.000 --> 0:52:29.279 physicists going to trigger some sort of universal apocalypse which 0:52:29.360 --> 0:52:33.320 ends society as we know it. It's a fair question, um, 0:52:33.360 --> 0:52:36.799 But it's also reasonable for us to lean on physicists 0:52:36.800 --> 0:52:39.040 expertise and answering the question. In this case, I think 0:52:39.080 --> 0:52:42.520 Serain has done an excellent job of taking this concern seriously. 0:52:43.239 --> 0:52:45.319 So for those who don't know, there there really is 0:52:45.360 --> 0:52:47.720 a theory that we could be creating miniature black holes 0:52:47.800 --> 0:52:51.520 at the Large Hadron Collider. The idea is that gravity 0:52:51.880 --> 0:52:54.560 might be very very power. Gravity, which is the weakest force, 0:52:54.680 --> 0:52:57.439 might actually be very very powerful if you bring things 0:52:57.600 --> 0:53:00.880 really close together, like the close the size you know, 0:53:00.920 --> 0:53:03.320 the width of a proton is sort of close together. 0:53:03.800 --> 0:53:06.080 So if you smash these protons together really high energy, 0:53:06.080 --> 0:53:08.839 they might get close enough where the gravity gets really 0:53:08.840 --> 0:53:11.959 really strong, and meaning you could create black holes, because 0:53:12.000 --> 0:53:14.720 black holes are essentially displaces where gravity gets really strong. 0:53:15.400 --> 0:53:18.440 And if that's the case, those black holes, if they 0:53:18.520 --> 0:53:20.839 last long enough, could sit there and sort of swallow matter. 0:53:21.200 --> 0:53:22.680 But you know, there's lots of reasons not to be 0:53:22.760 --> 0:53:24.680 worried about that. First of all, we think if these 0:53:24.719 --> 0:53:27.440 black holes are created, they wouldn't last very long. They 0:53:27.440 --> 0:53:31.520 would radiate into nothing using Hawking radiation. And if they 0:53:31.920 --> 0:53:35.759 and and we believe that collisions have been happening for 0:53:35.800 --> 0:53:38.239 a long long time, like we've been being hit by 0:53:38.280 --> 0:53:43.320 particles from space forever basically, and those particles are traveling 0:53:43.400 --> 0:53:45.800 much faster than the particles at the large age On collider. 0:53:45.880 --> 0:53:49.320 So if collisions of particles were going to cause Earth 0:53:49.440 --> 0:53:52.480 destroying black holes, it would have happened already. And so 0:53:52.560 --> 0:53:56.000 there's a pretty in depth analysis of this um And 0:53:56.080 --> 0:53:57.680 I think one thing that's funny about it is sort 0:53:57.680 --> 0:53:59.799 of the social aspect of it. Like if you ask 0:53:59.880 --> 0:54:03.160 of is this, is it possible for the LHC to 0:54:03.200 --> 0:54:07.040 destroy the universe, to destroy the Earth, The answer is technically, yes, 0:54:07.080 --> 0:54:11.120 it's possible. You don't want to talk about exactly, but 0:54:11.160 --> 0:54:14.520 there's a difference between you know, a scientific answer and 0:54:14.560 --> 0:54:18.160 a sort of a public relations answer where it's possible, 0:54:18.200 --> 0:54:20.600 but not to the level where it's really worth talking about. 0:54:20.719 --> 0:54:24.280 Like it's possible for me to disappear in quantum mechanically 0:54:24.280 --> 0:54:28.000 appear in Paris. Sure it's not impossible, but it's the 0:54:28.040 --> 0:54:30.600 real The odds are so remote nobody should factor that 0:54:30.640 --> 0:54:33.520 into their plans. And that's really what people are asking about, Like, 0:54:33.880 --> 0:54:35.520 is this possible at the level where we need to 0:54:35.560 --> 0:54:38.040 worry about it and make policy changes or you know, 0:54:38.360 --> 0:54:41.440 use it to base decisions on And the answer is no. Um. 0:54:41.520 --> 0:54:43.520 But you know, we as humans are pretty bad about 0:54:43.920 --> 0:54:46.759 thinking about dangers and making decisions based on that. You know, 0:54:47.160 --> 0:54:49.680 I should worry about being struck by lightning or being 0:54:49.719 --> 0:54:51.880 eaten by sharks, but we don't worry too much about 0:54:51.920 --> 0:54:54.759 handgun safety this kind of stuff. So as human as 0:54:54.800 --> 0:54:57.960 we we have our policies upside down. Or even you know, 0:54:58.040 --> 0:55:01.319 the likelihood of getting in even a minor accident in 0:55:01.360 --> 0:55:05.399 a car, I mean, that's incredibly likely compared to these 0:55:05.400 --> 0:55:08.640 other things. But these other things because they I think 0:55:08.719 --> 0:55:12.399 largely because they and they tap into that same part 0:55:12.440 --> 0:55:16.520 of our brains that finds fascination in the unknown. There's 0:55:16.640 --> 0:55:20.120 there's that related element, the fear of the unknown. The 0:55:20.160 --> 0:55:23.560 two are very close, and the less you know about something, 0:55:23.600 --> 0:55:27.839 the more likely you are to fear it um. And paradoxically, 0:55:27.840 --> 0:55:30.480 also the more you know about something, depending on what 0:55:30.560 --> 0:55:33.240 it is, the more you might start to fear it um. 0:55:33.280 --> 0:55:35.840 So it's it's a really interesting Oh boy, being human 0:55:35.880 --> 0:55:39.320 sure is great um. But in the end, it's all about, 0:55:39.520 --> 0:55:42.160 you know, trying to answer these questions and exploring the unknown, 0:55:42.160 --> 0:55:44.359 and to me, that's always worth it. The guys who 0:55:44.520 --> 0:55:46.520 jumped in a ship and sailed into the ocean not 0:55:46.600 --> 0:55:48.520 knowing what they were going to find, you know, they 0:55:48.520 --> 0:55:50.440 were part of that. It's a it's a long legacy 0:55:50.440 --> 0:55:52.640 of exploration and to me, that's one of the most 0:55:52.640 --> 0:55:55.719 exciting things we can do as a species. Daniel, thank 0:55:55.719 --> 0:55:58.359 you so much for joining our show. Please can you 0:55:58.560 --> 0:56:01.680 tell us a little bit about your podcast and why 0:56:01.760 --> 0:56:05.239 everyone needs to listen to it? Sure? Our podcast is 0:56:05.280 --> 0:56:08.520 called Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe. I'm one half 0:56:08.560 --> 0:56:11.120 of it. The other half is Jorge Chom, the internet 0:56:11.160 --> 0:56:15.479 famous cartoons behind PhD Comics, and we do a fun 0:56:15.640 --> 0:56:18.799 chat about philosophy and science and try to explain things 0:56:18.840 --> 0:56:21.000 about the universe and the idea there is to take 0:56:21.080 --> 0:56:23.799 big topics and break them up into pieces that are 0:56:23.840 --> 0:56:26.360 actually understandable, not just so you hear a lot of 0:56:26.360 --> 0:56:28.600 fancy words and you don't really understand, but so that 0:56:28.640 --> 0:56:30.759 you come away with a pretty good grasp of what 0:56:30.840 --> 0:56:33.120 these topics are. And we cover things like the Big 0:56:33.160 --> 0:56:37.120 Bang and teleportation and fasten the light travel and history 0:56:37.120 --> 0:56:39.080 of the universe and the future of the universe. And 0:56:39.120 --> 0:56:40.960 so check it out. It's a lot of fun. It's 0:56:40.960 --> 0:56:45.040 called Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe. Yeah, it's fantastic, guys. 0:56:45.040 --> 0:56:46.920 If you have not listened, you need to check it out. 0:56:47.120 --> 0:56:50.440 I very much enjoyed it's I consider it sort of 0:56:50.480 --> 0:56:56.239 a spiritual cousin to text stuff and and and it 0:56:56.239 --> 0:56:58.239 makes me. It makes me long for the day when 0:56:58.280 --> 0:57:00.640 I can I can get a co host who I 0:57:00.719 --> 0:57:03.040 can bounce stuff off of, and they can bounce stuff 0:57:03.080 --> 0:57:07.000 off of me. Right now, I'm playing tennis with myself, 0:57:07.080 --> 0:57:10.200 so that is always a challenge. Daniel, thank you so 0:57:10.320 --> 0:57:13.960 much for joining the show. We greatly appreciate it. Thanks 0:57:14.000 --> 0:57:15.600 very much for having me on. And hello to all 0:57:15.640 --> 0:57:18.840 your listeners. Hey, guys, Jonathan from the future again. It's 0:57:18.880 --> 0:57:23.320 pretty awesome. They're flying cars and everything. Anyway, uh, I 0:57:23.400 --> 0:57:24.760 was just here to tell you we're going to take 0:57:24.760 --> 0:57:35.320 another quick break to thank our sponsor. That was a 0:57:35.320 --> 0:57:38.080 phenomenal conversation, or at least I had a ton of fun. 0:57:38.120 --> 0:57:42.680 I hope you guys enjoyed it. Daniel Whiteson is really 0:57:42.880 --> 0:57:46.840 great at communicating science, not just someone who practices it, 0:57:47.240 --> 0:57:50.520 but it's very good at explaining the wonder behind science. 0:57:50.520 --> 0:57:53.520 So definitely check out that podcast. If you guys have 0:57:53.560 --> 0:57:56.840 any suggestions for future topics for tech Stuff, whether it's 0:57:56.840 --> 0:57:59.320 a technology, a company, maybe there's someone else I should 0:57:59.320 --> 0:58:02.800 interview on the show, let me know. Send me an email. 0:58:02.840 --> 0:58:06.800 The addresses tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, 0:58:06.920 --> 0:58:09.480 or you can visit our website that is tech Stuff 0:58:09.560 --> 0:58:12.400 podcast dot com. There you're going to find links to 0:58:12.560 --> 0:58:15.520 all of our social media as well as to our 0:58:15.600 --> 0:58:19.080 store that's over at t public dot com slash tech Stuff. 0:58:19.280 --> 0:58:21.360 Every purchase you make goes to help the show, and 0:58:21.400 --> 0:58:24.080 we greatly appreciate it, and I'll talk to you again 0:58:24.800 --> 0:58:31.760 really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. 0:58:32.000 --> 0:58:43.120 Is that how stuff works dot com,