Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Forward Thinking, Either and welcome to Forward Thinking, the podcast
Speaker 1: that looks at the future and says he's going for speed.
Speaker 1: I'm Jonathan Strickland. That was a good one. I'm Joe McCormick,
Speaker 1: and Lauren Vogelbaum. Our other host is not with us today,
Speaker 1: but she will be back with us soon. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: we thought we would take this opportunity to talk about, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, some stuff that helps us really get a
Speaker 1: grip on what's really going on out there. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: so I saw the movie Transformers for so sorry. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry to I'm sorry. I gave those people my money,
Speaker 1: and I'm I'm I'm sorry for the world. Yeah, we're
Speaker 1: we're all victims here. But one thing it got me
Speaker 1: thinking about, since a lot of the movie was taken
Speaker 1: up by things crashing into each other, really big things,
Speaker 1: really big robotic things with laser swords and stuff like that.
Speaker 1: As as you as you do crashing into each other,
Speaker 1: what happens when small things crash into each other, Well,
Speaker 1: then we can get a glimpse of how the universe works. Joe, Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: So here's a question, And I really do mean this.
Speaker 1: It sounds like I'm being flippant, but here's a real
Speaker 1: question that we are looking for, like answers for this question,
Speaker 1: why do we have stuff? Like? Why is there stuff?
Speaker 1: Why is there matter? And energy? Sure? Why why is
Speaker 1: there stuff? That's a good question. I mean, I don't
Speaker 1: know if it's possible for their not to be stuff,
Speaker 1: but at least there is stuff. See. The reason why
Speaker 1: I ask is that if you look at our theories
Speaker 1: on the the the earliest moments of the universe, keeping
Speaker 1: in mind that if we're we're following the Big Bang
Speaker 1: theory here, the further you get, the closer you get
Speaker 1: to the beginning, the less time matters. Like time, it
Speaker 1: eventually is no longer a thing, and so you can't
Speaker 1: ask what happened before that because there's no time, right,
Speaker 1: So there's no before time. Actually it goes back about
Speaker 1: thirteen point eight billion years, and then you reach the
Speaker 1: boundary of time. Yes, so you can't ask what happened
Speaker 1: before that because that's a meaningless question in the context
Speaker 1: of of the universe, because without time, there's no before. However,
Speaker 1: one of the things we we have hypothesized have theorized
Speaker 1: even is that those early moments there there was matter
Speaker 1: and anti matter, and these two just do not get along. No,
Speaker 1: they tend to completely annihilate one another, don't. Absolutely. If
Speaker 1: matter comes into contact with antimatter, you get total annihilation.
Speaker 1: Assuming you have equal parts. Then you've got nothing left
Speaker 1: of that of that interaction because they will completely annihilate
Speaker 1: one another. But we have matter. So that means something
Speaker 1: happened for some reason, there was more matter than antimatter,
Speaker 1: or something else happened to antimatter, so that for some
Speaker 1: reason we didn't have everything annihilate. And that's why we're
Speaker 1: able to have this podcast. I mean, it's not a
Speaker 1: direct line. It's not a direct line, but we're one
Speaker 1: of the things, you know. So this is one of
Speaker 1: those weird questions about the about the universe. Another one
Speaker 1: would be like, why does the universe exhibit the gravitational
Speaker 1: properties it does? Why does it expand at the rate
Speaker 1: it does? Right, Because here's the thing about expansion. See,
Speaker 1: based upon our understanding of the universe, the universe should
Speaker 1: do one of a couple of things. It should either
Speaker 1: continuously expand if there's not enough matter for the gravitational forces,
Speaker 1: to pull it all back in again, or it should
Speaker 1: expand slow, stop, and then contract because the gravity is
Speaker 1: strong enough pull everything back into the center. Uh. But
Speaker 1: one of the things we noticed is that it is expanding,
Speaker 1: and through the data we've gotten from the Hubble space telescope,
Speaker 1: it's actually expanding at a rate faster than what it
Speaker 1: was billions of years ago. So now that brings in
Speaker 1: a question, why does it do that thing? So now
Speaker 1: we've had all these questions, how are we going to
Speaker 1: solve questions like this? Well, here's the problem, right, I mean,
Speaker 1: these are questions that would most easily be answered if
Speaker 1: we could somehow travel back thirteen point eight billion years.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna stop you right there and say, even if
Speaker 1: we could do that, I'm not sure it would be
Speaker 1: all that easy to answer these questions because how could
Speaker 1: you measure it? No, but it would be it would
Speaker 1: at least we would be there to witness what was
Speaker 1: happening at the very least, if not the moment we
Speaker 1: were dying. Well, let's say that somehow we've managed to exist, uh,
Speaker 1: coexist in parallel to the budding universe. Uh, and we
Speaker 1: were somehow able to measure it. That would be our
Speaker 1: best chance. Of course, we can't do that, right, we don't.
Speaker 1: We don't have a time travel machine, we don't have
Speaker 1: any way of existing in parallel with our own universe.
Speaker 1: So the next best thing I would assume would be
Speaker 1: to somehow create a micro By micro, I mean super micro,
Speaker 1: I'm talking like atomic level re enactment of the conditions
Speaker 1: that were present moments after the Big Bang happened. By
Speaker 1: smashing stuff together, so we see the fundamental uh uh, elements,
Speaker 1: energies that were there before everything kind of coalesced into
Speaker 1: what it actually is now. So you're saying, sort of,
Speaker 1: by simulating or trying to as best as we can
Speaker 1: recreate the initial conditions of the universe, we can get
Speaker 1: a better sense for why the universe looks the way
Speaker 1: it does now exactly. So by that, if we were
Speaker 1: able to do that and then measure it, observe it,
Speaker 1: draw conclusions, we could perhaps start to fill in some
Speaker 1: gaps in our knowledge. But recreating the initial conditions of
Speaker 1: the universe, that sounds crazy. How could you do that? Well,
Speaker 1: if you take it turns out, if you take those small,
Speaker 1: small particles, you know, the small stuff we were talking about,
Speaker 1: the very top of the show, not transformers, but the
Speaker 1: small stuff and then smash them together at at sufficient
Speaker 1: energy we can make them kind of um, well it's
Speaker 1: decomposed of the wrong word, but to to convert into
Speaker 1: their high energy states that they were, uh, that they
Speaker 1: would have been right at moments after the Big Bang,
Speaker 1: before they formed into the particles that we know today.
Speaker 1: And we call these particle colliders. Right, These are the
Speaker 1: machines we use to create these collisions. Uh. And they
Speaker 1: are incredible things. Right, So our topic today is particle colliders.
Speaker 1: We didn't need to bury the lead there that we
Speaker 1: did find transformers in the beginning of the universe, very
Speaker 1: closely related things. Okay, so what is a particle collider
Speaker 1: and how is it different or is it different from
Speaker 1: a particle accelerator. Well, a particle accelerator is something that
Speaker 1: you use in order to get a particle up to
Speaker 1: a certain energy level, certain speed. And it's uh, I
Speaker 1: mean those are components in colliders, but they are also
Speaker 1: used for other things. Yeah, since in one sense there
Speaker 1: sort of is no difference, people often use these terms interchangeably,
Speaker 1: and it's sort of correct to do that because one
Speaker 1: term is basically a more specific term than the other.
Speaker 1: A collider is a specific way of using a particle accelerator,
Speaker 1: or it's sort of a type of particle accelerator, and
Speaker 1: they generally refer to colliding two separate beams of subatomic
Speaker 1: particles or ions. It doesn't have to be subatomic, it
Speaker 1: can be atomic particles. But uh, you know, an accelerator
Speaker 1: doesn't necessarily have to collide it with another beam of
Speaker 1: pro of of particles. It could actually be a fixed target,
Speaker 1: so you could just accelerate stuff out of fixed target
Speaker 1: to find out what happens, or at something where that
Speaker 1: beam of particles might be useful in a piece of technology,
Speaker 1: say the back of a TV screen, or at a
Speaker 1: tumor so. In a technical sense, a particle accelerator is
Speaker 1: a device that uses electromagnetic fields to grab particles, increase
Speaker 1: their speed, and focus them into directed beams. Okay, so
Speaker 1: for one thing, one thing that we have to say
Speaker 1: right away is that if we're using electromagnetic forces, then
Speaker 1: clearly whatever particles we are manipulating need to have some
Speaker 1: form of net charge to them, whether that's positive or negative. Right,
Speaker 1: so you'll see them grabbing like electrons have a negative
Speaker 1: charge or grabbing protons, grabbing ions which are charged those
Speaker 1: atoms that either have more electrons than their natural state
Speaker 1: or fewer electrons, so that they have a net charge
Speaker 1: one way or the other. Yeah. So, one commonly given
Speaker 1: example of a sort of small scale application of the
Speaker 1: same principle behind a particle accelerator is a cathode ray tube.
Speaker 1: That's what the CRT stands or when you talk about
Speaker 1: a CRT monitor or CRT TV, that's the old way
Speaker 1: of creating TV screen, those those larger, bulkier televisions that
Speaker 1: some of our listeners may never have seen. Um So,
Speaker 1: actually Craig Freud and Rich uses this example in his
Speaker 1: house Stuff Works article about atom smashers, which is a
Speaker 1: term will come back to in a minute. So, in
Speaker 1: a cathode ray tube, like on an old TV, you
Speaker 1: use the electrical difference between a cathode which is negatively
Speaker 1: charged and an anode which is positively charged, to pull
Speaker 1: a beam of electrons through an evacuated containers. That's like
Speaker 1: a glass tube where you've sucked all the air out
Speaker 1: of it and it's just a vacuum in side. And remember,
Speaker 1: because like charges repel one another, and opposite charges a track.
Speaker 1: That's why we're getting this ability to move these particles
Speaker 1: where we want them to write, So the positive anode
Speaker 1: wants to pull the electrons from the cathode, and they
Speaker 1: get pulled off in a beam and then shoot through
Speaker 1: that anode toward the TV screen. Of course, you can't
Speaker 1: just you electrons at a TV screen. You've got to
Speaker 1: aim them somehow, right, So that's where electromagnetic coils come in.
Speaker 1: They can focus the beams of electrons and make them
Speaker 1: go where they need to go. And these days particle
Speaker 1: accelerators can be used for all kinds of stuff. We
Speaker 1: don't have so much t c RT technology anymore these days,
Speaker 1: but they can be used for things like treating cancer
Speaker 1: by aiming particle beams at tumors. That's particle therapy. Interesting.
Speaker 1: But most of the time, of course, when people are
Speaker 1: talking about particle accelerators, they're talking about experimental mechanisms like
Speaker 1: the colliders. So a collider is a particular kind of
Speaker 1: particle accelerator that steers beams of accelerated particles into something,
Speaker 1: either into a barrier or into an object, or into
Speaker 1: each other to smash them and study what happens when
Speaker 1: this tiny moment of catastrophe takes place when the when
Speaker 1: the tiny particles go blue. Yeah, that's the technical term. Uh.
Speaker 1: And this is why we wanted to also bring up
Speaker 1: the whole atom smasher thing, because that is another kind
Speaker 1: of nickname for these sort of devices, right, Yeah, not
Speaker 1: to get pedantic, I mean, that's basically it's fine to
Speaker 1: say atom smasher, but that's not technically so much what
Speaker 1: these are anymore, because they're usually not going to be
Speaker 1: grabbing whole atoms. Maybe ions. There's some heavy ion accelerators
Speaker 1: out there, so that would be atomic. But but in
Speaker 1: large part, we're talking about subatomic particles. We're talking. Uh.
Speaker 1: For example, one of the ones will be covering a
Speaker 1: lot in this episode the Large Hadron Collider, which, among
Speaker 1: other things, does proton collisions. So you have two different
Speaker 1: beams of protons, which are subatomic particles, right, that's part
Speaker 1: of what makes up an atom. But you can possibly
Speaker 1: charged part yes, and you can also have things like
Speaker 1: electron positron colliders. Now electrons are the negatively charged particles.
Speaker 1: Positrons are their antimatter counterpart essentially. Yeah, So in other words,
Speaker 1: you're using, uh, you're using these things to to move
Speaker 1: very very very tiny particles around. And when I'm saying tiny,
Speaker 1: you might not really get a grip on exactly how
Speaker 1: small we're talking about. Remember the nanoscale. A nanometer is
Speaker 1: one billionth of a meter. The nanoscale is smaller, Like,
Speaker 1: if you're looking at something that's one or two nanometers long,
Speaker 1: you're not looking at it optically because you can't there's
Speaker 1: no way for you to be able to look at
Speaker 1: that optically. Light itself is not going to allow you
Speaker 1: to do that because the wavelengths are too long. But uh,
Speaker 1: the atomic scale is an order of magnitude smaller than that,
Speaker 1: So that's even smaller than a nanometer, right that you
Speaker 1: you essentially can have This is rough because it depends
Speaker 1: upon the atom, but you could have ten atoms side
Speaker 1: by side to make up one nanometer, so they're one
Speaker 1: tenth that size, so they're even smaller. And then we're
Speaker 1: talking sub atomic particles that are even smaller than a
Speaker 1: full atom. So at this point you're talking about things
Speaker 1: that are unimaginably small, and you're talking about directing them
Speaker 1: as precisely as you possibly can so that they collide
Speaker 1: with something like another beam of particles if you if
Speaker 1: you can imagine it, that means that you have to
Speaker 1: focus these beams into insanely tiny, tight packages, or else
Speaker 1: you would never get a collision. It would be like
Speaker 1: if Joe and I were both in uh an enormous
Speaker 1: stadium and blindfolded and set on either end running towards
Speaker 1: each other, and the possibility of us actually colliding that
Speaker 1: would still be far more likely. You know. Yeah, I'd
Speaker 1: say that's actually really generous. It's probably more like if
Speaker 1: I stood on the Moon and you stood on the Earth,
Speaker 1: and we each threw a pencil at each other and
Speaker 1: we somehow were able to escape the various gravitational polls
Speaker 1: saying gravity is negligible in this case, Yes, And the
Speaker 1: idea that those two pencils would meet point to point
Speaker 1: that would be still a level of precision greater than
Speaker 1: what is required, are lesser than what is required, rather
Speaker 1: than these beams of of sub atomic particles meeting is
Speaker 1: an incredible achievement. Yeah, So how do these generally work? Well,
Speaker 1: there's two main setups. You'd see. One is sort of
Speaker 1: the ring shape, the cyclotron, the cyclic Yeah, so that's
Speaker 1: where they would get these particles, like we said, they
Speaker 1: control them with electromagnetic forces within some kind of tube
Speaker 1: and accelerate them around a ring, going faster and faster
Speaker 1: with each turn and increasing well faster and faster to
Speaker 1: a certain point. And then once they get up to
Speaker 1: point something per cent of the speed of light, you're
Speaker 1: just sort of like increasing their relativistic mass, and until
Speaker 1: they finally get to that point where these two uh,
Speaker 1: well one one set would be going clockwise, one would
Speaker 1: be going counterclockwise in the notes, until they finally collide, Yes,
Speaker 1: at specific points around the cyclotron. This would be the
Speaker 1: points where you have some form of scientific instruments that
Speaker 1: are going to be measuring those collisions in various ways. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you've got an instrument sitting where the streams cross and waiting. Yes. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then the other way of doing it instead of
Speaker 1: a ring would be a linear accelerator, Right. That's where
Speaker 1: you just kind of have one big long tube and
Speaker 1: a gun on each side and you aim the bullets
Speaker 1: at each other. Yep, yep, that's that's pretty much it.
Speaker 1: And so the linear one is actually the the uh,
Speaker 1: the earliest type of particle accelerator. The cyclotrons came a
Speaker 1: little later. Yeah, but the linear type may actually figure
Speaker 1: into the future of particle accelerators though the cyclotron is
Speaker 1: what's big today. Yes, literally big today. So yeah, let's
Speaker 1: talk about the history where these things come from. Okay, well,
Speaker 1: if you if you're going to be really technical, you
Speaker 1: have to go all the way back to because that's
Speaker 1: when scientists were at first starting to notice that when
Speaker 1: they were beaming particles at like a sheet of gold,
Speaker 1: some of them were bouncing back, which then began to
Speaker 1: give people a thought of these things have the kind
Speaker 1: of mass and they're behaving in this way. Maybe there's
Speaker 1: a way of smashing these together and kind of seeing
Speaker 1: what makes them tick. Now, it wouldn't be until the
Speaker 1: nineteen thirties that they started to the scientists started to
Speaker 1: build particle accelerators that would actually uh end up colliding
Speaker 1: these particles with something else and um. At that time,
Speaker 1: they were pretty limited. They were usually that they were
Speaker 1: the linear type originally, and they could get it up
Speaker 1: to a few hundred thousand electron volts. So that might
Speaker 1: not mean anything to you. An electron vault is a
Speaker 1: unit of energy. It's equivalent to about one point six
Speaker 1: times ten to the negative nineteen jewels or it's also
Speaker 1: known as the energy gained or lost by the charge
Speaker 1: of a single electron moved across an electric potential difference
Speaker 1: of one vault. Well, that don't mean a lot to me,
Speaker 1: Well at any rate, it's it's it's a very specific,
Speaker 1: very tiny amount of energy. So the the original experiments
Speaker 1: were a few hundred thousand electron volts. Then they kind
Speaker 1: of hit an energy barrier. They were specifically using direct
Speaker 1: voltage to accelerate ions. So those charged atoms uh to
Speaker 1: go and and get into these collisions. But at that
Speaker 1: low energy, you're not getting the collision. The collisions are
Speaker 1: not necessarily as spectacular as what you would need to
Speaker 1: really get an idea of what was going on in
Speaker 1: the earliest moments of the universe. So eventually this this
Speaker 1: approach got up to about a million electron volts. But
Speaker 1: after that, the the problem is that you get voltage breakdown,
Speaker 1: so you could not continue to just try and throw
Speaker 1: more energy at the problem. They couldn't scale it up. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So in the nineteen forties, scientists turned to oscillating radio
Speaker 1: frequency electric fields to resonate with particles through accelerating gaps
Speaker 1: and that's a fancy way of saying they tried something
Speaker 1: else that worked better. It really is. I mean, we
Speaker 1: to go into a lot of detail would require one
Speaker 1: It would require more time and too, frankly, it would
Speaker 1: require a lot more expertise than what I have in
Speaker 1: this field. I've written about particle accelerators in the past,
Speaker 1: and I understand from a very kind of basic approach
Speaker 1: how they work. When you get into fine details, my
Speaker 1: knowledge breaks down pretty rapidly faster than the subotomic particle
Speaker 1: as it turns out. So uh, these accelerators were still linear,
Speaker 1: but then eventually scientists began to experiment a cyclotron designs,
Speaker 1: these big circular designs, and that the purpose was to
Speaker 1: try and continuously accelerate particles. Because you know, you're limited
Speaker 1: by the lengths of whatever linear accelerator you have, and
Speaker 1: that's it, right. You can't you can't loop it back
Speaker 1: and start over. You've got it's essentially a straight path
Speaker 1: to whatever, whether that's two guns facing each other or
Speaker 1: a gun facing a target. But with a circle, you could,
Speaker 1: in theory, just keep moving it around the circle and
Speaker 1: getting it faster and faster and faster until you're ready
Speaker 1: to direct it towards that collision, right, So that's why
Speaker 1: they went with the circular approach. At this point they
Speaker 1: got up to about twenty five million electron volts, and
Speaker 1: by the nineteen fifties they could design elect cyclotrons that
Speaker 1: could push back that energy barrier to two billion electron volts.
Speaker 1: And before the end of the nineteen fifties they got
Speaker 1: up to four hundred billion electron volts. So that energy
Speaker 1: barrier just kept going up and up and up. Um
Speaker 1: and so now these days we're talking about electron volts
Speaker 1: and the trillions, So we should probably just take a
Speaker 1: second to mention why is it so important to get
Speaker 1: the energy so high to increase their speed and increase
Speaker 1: their effective mass. It's really so that those collisions actually
Speaker 1: result in the the primal kind of state that the
Speaker 1: universe was in in those earliest moments. Without it, you
Speaker 1: don't have enough energy to revert back to that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: to get the kind of results you want, you want
Speaker 1: the highest possible energy collision. Although we should say at
Speaker 1: this point the LHC, the large hadron collider again, one
Speaker 1: of the most famous collider is right now um Is
Speaker 1: has been operating, hasn't been operating for the last several months,
Speaker 1: but in its first round it was operating at like
Speaker 1: a third of its capability. Those earliest experiments weren't really
Speaker 1: performed at anywhere near its highest capacity. Although we don't
Speaker 1: expect it ever will run it that now, but it's
Speaker 1: definitely the second round is going to be much higher energy,
Speaker 1: so they're expecting to find some really cool stuff the
Speaker 1: second round through. Well, let's get into the large hat
Speaker 1: round collider. Except first I think we should mention a
Speaker 1: couple of the other notable colliders from recent years. Sure, so, yeah,
Speaker 1: you're talking about like brook Haven's relativistic heavy ion collider
Speaker 1: are Hick that was commissioned back in two thousand. It's
Speaker 1: designed to collide heavy ions, but it's capable of going
Speaker 1: all the way down to protons and size. There is
Speaker 1: Fermi Labs Tiva tron Teva tron Tevatron is what I've
Speaker 1: always said, but it could be Tivatron. Well, yeah, so
Speaker 1: that's one of those proton anti proton colliders that's matter
Speaker 1: and anti matter. Yeah, and uh, it can work as
Speaker 1: both a proton anti proton beam collider or as a
Speaker 1: fixed target collider as well. Um, so it can do
Speaker 1: a couple of different things, and is it I'm to understand.
Speaker 1: I believe it's number two. Yeah. Up until the Large
Speaker 1: Hadron Collider it had become it was the the highest
Speaker 1: energy collider in the world with one point eight trillion
Speaker 1: electron volts, which is pretty significance. But then you've got
Speaker 1: the Large Hadron Collider that's at cern which, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: we we recently got a chance to see the movie
Speaker 1: Particle Fever, which was all about the development of the
Speaker 1: Large Hadron Collider. It's early days of being switched on
Speaker 1: the relationship between theoretical physicists, who are the ones who
Speaker 1: are coming up with the ideas of how the universe
Speaker 1: must work based upon our understanding, and the experimental physicists
Speaker 1: who put those ideas to the test and see if
Speaker 1: they actually hold water. So, yeah, the Large Hadron Collider
Speaker 1: might be the greatest instance of experimental physics in the
Speaker 1: history of humanity. Yeah, depends on how you define greatest,
Speaker 1: I guess, but it's definitely the largest machine ever built
Speaker 1: by humans as far as we know, as long as
Speaker 1: we we don't have that, Like, you know, the Nazis
Speaker 1: built a death star inside of the Earth, kind of
Speaker 1: theory or on the other side of the moon. As
Speaker 1: Iron Sky has taught us, it's a terrible movie. Don't
Speaker 1: watch it. Well, we've already you've already had to endure
Speaker 1: transformers for don't put yourself to more more pain. Uh No,
Speaker 1: there's no serious reason to question. It is the largest
Speaker 1: machine ever built by human beings. So the large hat
Speaker 1: around collider, it's basically just picture this. It is a
Speaker 1: giant underground ring shaped tunnel that's twenty seven kilometers in circumference,
Speaker 1: and that is sixteen point seven miles. They usually just
Speaker 1: call it seventeen miles. Um. If you got in a
Speaker 1: golf cart with an average top speed about twenty miles
Speaker 1: per hour and you drove around this thing, not saying
Speaker 1: there's necessarily room for you to do that, it would
Speaker 1: take you over fifty minutes to make a complete circuit
Speaker 1: inside this tunnel. And this tunnel, by the way, is
Speaker 1: about three thirty feet below the surface of the ground. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: the depth I think is variable hundreds of feet hundreds
Speaker 1: of feet down under the earth at the border between
Speaker 1: Switzerland and France, pretty close to Geneva. So why was
Speaker 1: this built? Well, it was built for the very reasons
Speaker 1: we've been talking about to create these high energy particle collisions,
Speaker 1: to see what happens, and and to kind of get
Speaker 1: an idea of what was going on at the very
Speaker 1: very earliest moments of them. We're talking like fractions of
Speaker 1: a second when the universe came into existence. Right, So
Speaker 1: we've mentioned it's sort of in general what a particle
Speaker 1: accelerator does. But what does the large had round collider do? Okay, first,
Speaker 1: you've got some feeders that speed up particles first before
Speaker 1: they start with with hydrogen ions the protons just protons,
Speaker 1: So and with those, you've got these uh, think of
Speaker 1: them as kind of like like these are the little
Speaker 1: feeder tubes that get out get those streams of protons
Speaker 1: up to a certain speed before introducing them into the
Speaker 1: collider itself. Well, oh yeah, that's true. Before they enter
Speaker 1: the main ring, they go through several stages of pre acceleration.
Speaker 1: So there are smaller rings they go into first, yes,
Speaker 1: and then it goes into the larger ring where it
Speaker 1: continues to accelerate using super cooled magnets. We're talking like
Speaker 1: we're talking about this whole system. The magnet system is
Speaker 1: cooled down to temperatures that are just above absolute zero.
Speaker 1: But why do they cool them down like that, Jonathan, Well,
Speaker 1: it's mainly to completely cut out all electrical resistance, so
Speaker 1: you make it as efficient as possible. So these are
Speaker 1: super conducting magnets that we're talking about. Not you know,
Speaker 1: when you when you have eliminated resistance, which is generally
Speaker 1: a problem with any kind of electrical system, Right, you
Speaker 1: have some resistance to electron flow, and therefore you lose
Speaker 1: some of that energy as heat. By super cooling it,
Speaker 1: you get rid of that and you make the super
Speaker 1: conduct conducting material where that's no longer a problem, and
Speaker 1: you can make these magne It's incredibly efficient that way
Speaker 1: efficient only after you have used liquid helium to cool
Speaker 1: them down to the just a little bit over absolute zero.
Speaker 1: It's actually technically colder than empty space, because even empty
Speaker 1: space still has a bit of a temperature. It's because
Speaker 1: remember absolutely zeros when you get to a point where
Speaker 1: there's no molecular movement. Sorry, I'm just trying to think
Speaker 1: what is the temperature of empty space? I would seem
Speaker 1: to depend on whether you're in the shade or in
Speaker 1: the lining fire from the sun. Right, Well, you know,
Speaker 1: it's sure, it's it's five kelvin, but it feels like
Speaker 1: nine kelvin. Um, No, it's it's but no, it really
Speaker 1: is true. It's really cooling things down. It's reducing molecular
Speaker 1: movement to a level below that which you would find
Speaker 1: in your you know, any given empty space sector. So
Speaker 1: so these magnets become extremely powerful and they're acting upon
Speaker 1: these tiny, tiny particles. So it's they're they're pretty compelling, yes, uh.
Speaker 1: And they have the ability to get these things going
Speaker 1: extremely fast practically just just a well, it's hard to
Speaker 1: say practical, right, but at the speed of light, it's
Speaker 1: an incredible speed. And you've got uh and by the way,
Speaker 1: that nine seven that was just me kind of extremely fast.
Speaker 1: You have one beam, like we said, going clockwise, one
Speaker 1: being going counterclockwise, and you do this until they've reached
Speaker 1: the proper speeds and relativistic mass, and then those beams
Speaker 1: get focused by specific magnets to collide at very particular
Speaker 1: points along the circumference of the LHC. Now, at each
Speaker 1: of these points, as we mentioned before, where the collision
Speaker 1: is is ready to happen, there are instruments waiting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're saying instruments. That sounds like there's like a little
Speaker 1: sensor or something. No, we're talking like multi story scientific facilities.
Speaker 1: We're talking like like some of them were five stories
Speaker 1: or seven stories tall, seventy feet tall. This is an
Speaker 1: enormous facility that has tons of microelectronics in it, literally
Speaker 1: tons of micro electronics in it, all in an effort
Speaker 1: to capture snapshots of what is going on in the
Speaker 1: those fractions of a second when these collisions happen. Because
Speaker 1: this stuff is you know, blink and it's over, blink
Speaker 1: and and fourteen billion of them are over. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's incredibly fast. You know, we're talking about uh so
Speaker 1: fast that again, to try and imagine an interval of
Speaker 1: time that short is impossible, at least for me. Maybe
Speaker 1: other people are capable of doing it, but it's it's
Speaker 1: how fast I wanted to run out of the theater.
Speaker 1: And yeah, instantaneous is pretty much it, right, right, Okay,
Speaker 1: So I do want to get into what they discover
Speaker 1: with these experiments. But one more thing I think we
Speaker 1: should uh talk about first and is how they built
Speaker 1: this thing. I mean, what a seventeen mile tunnel for
Speaker 1: one thing? For one thing? They didn't have to to
Speaker 1: dig the tunnel for the LHC, right, that's true. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the tunnel already existed, so that was smarter them to
Speaker 1: use this. It was already from a previous experiment called
Speaker 1: the l EP, the Large Electron Positron Collider, which was
Speaker 1: decommissioned in the late eighties to make way for the LHC.
Speaker 1: So the LHC has been in development for for years
Speaker 1: and years and years. In fact, it was one of
Speaker 1: those things where it became huge news as it got
Speaker 1: closer and closer to coming online. But the funny thing
Speaker 1: is it had been around in some form or another
Speaker 1: at least in the building process for a decade, for
Speaker 1: more actually more than a decade, almost two decades. So
Speaker 1: it was pretty incredible that to me when I was
Speaker 1: learning more about it, like, why haven't we heard about
Speaker 1: a lot about this before? And part of that is
Speaker 1: just um that at the time when the LHC was
Speaker 1: being built, there were other possible colliders that were in
Speaker 1: consideration to be built in other parts of the world,
Speaker 1: including in the United States, that ended up not panning out.
Speaker 1: We don't need no science now. We could do a
Speaker 1: full episode about that story, but we are going to
Speaker 1: focus on the optimistic, not the sad. So at any rate,
Speaker 1: the Large Electron Positron Collider was the largest electron posit
Speaker 1: positron collider ever built. It had five thousand, one hundred
Speaker 1: seventy six magnets and one hundred twenty eight accelerating cavities,
Speaker 1: and it did what you would think it would do.
Speaker 1: It collides electrons or did collide electrons with positrons, and uh,
Speaker 1: they would again try to. When they meet, they annihilate
Speaker 1: one another and produce high energies, which almost instantly rematerializes
Speaker 1: streams of particles. But again, that was one of those
Speaker 1: things of let's see what happens in these high energy
Speaker 1: particle collisions and learn more about the nature of the
Speaker 1: universe itself. Yeah, so this is a great place to
Speaker 1: build the LHC, especially because being so deep underground, this
Speaker 1: tunnel provides good protection. And it's two way protection, right.
Speaker 1: It helps protect the surface from radiation from the experiments,
Speaker 1: but also, maybe even more than that, helps protect the
Speaker 1: experiments from radiation from the outside exactly. Yeah, you want
Speaker 1: to have that shielding material there to try and keep
Speaker 1: the experiment as pure as possible, so that you don't
Speaker 1: have to worry about some sort of outside factor interfering
Speaker 1: with it. Now, that doesn't mean that an outside factor
Speaker 1: couldn't interfere with it. A bird with a baguette might um,
Speaker 1: But that's you know. You may have heard back when
Speaker 1: the LHC was was getting toward doing its first actual
Speaker 1: experiment with with UH, an actual collision, things were delayed
Speaker 1: when a what was it actually had there was some
Speaker 1: kind of coolant failure. Well, first there was a coolant failure. First,
Speaker 1: there was the liquid helium leak which was happening on
Speaker 1: the shortly after they first tested the beams, which that
Speaker 1: in that case they weren't even trying to collide anything.
Speaker 1: They were just making sure that they could move a
Speaker 1: beam through clockwise and counterclockwise before ever planning out a collision.
Speaker 1: And then the UH Not too long after that there
Speaker 1: was a helium leak, which set everything back by several months.
Speaker 1: Once they got that fixed, the next problem was that
Speaker 1: there was a there was some sort of of malfunction
Speaker 1: sometimes attributed to particles that got into a ventilation duct
Speaker 1: that may have been caused by a bird carrying something
Speaker 1: and dropping it in there. So it ends up always
Speaker 1: being described as a bird carrying a baguette and dropping
Speaker 1: the food where it landed on this in an incredible coincidence,
Speaker 1: landed down this ventilation shaft and mucked up some important electronics,
Speaker 1: which thus caused some some short circuiting and some other issues.
Speaker 1: I've read a rather cryptic statement from them saying that
Speaker 1: they like wanted to clarify, we don't know a bird
Speaker 1: dropped of a get on one of our one of
Speaker 1: our facilities components. We just what did they say? It
Speaker 1: was something like there were bread crumbs and feathers found
Speaker 1: at the sea. It could have been that someone was
Speaker 1: plucking a bird and eating a bag at and then
Speaker 1: sabotaged it. Who knows. But that also led a lot
Speaker 1: of I don't know, a lot of it was tongue
Speaker 1: in cheek, but a lot of people saying that perhaps
Speaker 1: the the Large Hadron Collider was sabotaging itself, or that
Speaker 1: someone from the future had come back to sabotage the
Speaker 1: LHC to prevent it from destroying the world. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: we should talk about it destroying the world, which it
Speaker 1: totally is going to do. It's it totally has not happened.
Speaker 1: Have you noticed, like that. Do you over all those
Speaker 1: people who thought that was gonna happen, do you remember what?
Speaker 1: Have you seen the website? I think it's has the
Speaker 1: LHC destroyed the world dot Com? Something like that. No,
Speaker 1: just it just says no, which is great. But okay,
Speaker 1: So anyway, the LHC took the place of the l
Speaker 1: e P it was, of course, has its own magnet.
Speaker 1: It's one thousand, two thirty two dipole magnets that are
Speaker 1: fifteen meters in length. Those guide the beams of protons.
Speaker 1: And then you have the three quadruple magnets, which are
Speaker 1: between five and seven ms long, that focus those beams
Speaker 1: that get them into those very precise parameters for the
Speaker 1: collisions to happen. Okay, so we've got it all set up.
Speaker 1: We've got protons going one way, we got protons going
Speaker 1: another way. They're ready to collide. The instruments are waiting.
Speaker 1: What do we discover? So? Uh well, I mean, how
Speaker 1: about the particle that helps tied together the standard model
Speaker 1: of physics. That sounds pretty good. That's pretty good. It's
Speaker 1: you might have heard of it, Higgs boson, the Higgs boson.
Speaker 1: That's right. So at the LHC. They did not come
Speaker 1: up with the idea of the Higgs boson. This is
Speaker 1: a this has been a hypothetical particle that we've known
Speaker 1: about for a long time. We've just never seen it again.
Speaker 1: This is where we get the theoretical physicists, right. The
Speaker 1: theoretical physicists are the ones who look at the universe
Speaker 1: as we understand it, and then they start looking at
Speaker 1: gaps and our understanding and they start trying to theorize
Speaker 1: what could possibly fill those gaps. The Higgs boson was
Speaker 1: this hypothetical particle that that kind of filled in this
Speaker 1: gap of of information we had. So the standard model
Speaker 1: is really complicated. We're not going to go into everything
Speaker 1: about it, but and we could not if we tried. No,
Speaker 1: if we tried, we would just completely muck it up.
Speaker 1: Uh So, just complete honesty there. But the Higgs boson
Speaker 1: sort of like the rug in the big Lebowski, tied
Speaker 1: the whole room together. It's true, it's um. It's often
Speaker 1: explained as the particle that gives other particles their mass,
Speaker 1: that it doesn't exactly give them their mass, but it
Speaker 1: helps us understand the mechanism of mass. Yeah, it was
Speaker 1: one of those things where in order to understand why
Speaker 1: matter has mass, we had to have this hypothetical particle
Speaker 1: to uh to help with our understanding, right, And if
Speaker 1: it didn't exist, if it turned out that we did
Speaker 1: experiments and found no evidence of this particle, would mean
Speaker 1: that something about our fundamental understanding of the universe is wrong. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it would mean the thing we called the standard model
Speaker 1: needs a major revamp. There's something completely wrong with it.
Speaker 1: And in fact, I know that there were there were
Speaker 1: theoretical physicists who were really kind of hoping for that,
Speaker 1: because it would mean that there'd be a whole new
Speaker 1: world to have to understand in the world of theoretical physics. Right.
Speaker 1: It would mean that the assumptions we had made were faulty,
Speaker 1: and therefore we had to really we would have to
Speaker 1: look at them again, reassess them, and figure out new
Speaker 1: assumptions to make. However, they start, Yeah, they started smashing
Speaker 1: protons together looking for a Higgs boson. Did they find one? Yeah?
Speaker 1: In fact, at first it was one of those very
Speaker 1: very appropriate scientific announcements. First of all, they may have
Speaker 1: been found. Yeah, And not only that, but the experiments
Speaker 1: had happened well before the announcement. Right that we're talking
Speaker 1: months and months and months and months and months had
Speaker 1: passed before there was ever an announcement of what had
Speaker 1: been found. Like you'll you'll hear, oh my gosh, in
Speaker 1: two thousand twelve, the Higgs boson was discovered and then
Speaker 1: you read Wait a minute, this experiment was done in
Speaker 1: a full year earlier. It took them that long to
Speaker 1: understand the data, to make sure that they knew what
Speaker 1: they were looking at, to confirm it with other people
Speaker 1: who knew what they were talking about, right, to establish
Speaker 1: at what level of certainty could they say that this
Speaker 1: was the Higgs boson and uh, And they were very
Speaker 1: cautious about it appropriately, so I would say, but at
Speaker 1: this point, we feel like certain it was the Higgs boson.
Speaker 1: That's what they found, and in fact it showed that
Speaker 1: this standard model was UH as we understood it correct
Speaker 1: like it it filled in that gap. So how exactly
Speaker 1: does it fill in the gap? Again, that's not something
Speaker 1: we're really qualified to discuss, but it's sort of the
Speaker 1: top level. The question is how can a single particle
Speaker 1: will affect everything? From how we understand how these tiny thing,
Speaker 1: how these tiny particles relate to each other too. Cosmology
Speaker 1: like our entire idea of how the universe is structure. Well,
Speaker 1: it also has to do with something called the Higgs field,
Speaker 1: which occupies the whole universe. So we're good there, thank goodness, um,
Speaker 1: and that the Higgs boson is the thing about mass
Speaker 1: which when a particle is passed through the Higgs field,
Speaker 1: the Higgs boson is what determines whether or not that
Speaker 1: particle has mass or does not have mass. So it's
Speaker 1: it's again, it's it gets to a point where it's
Speaker 1: beyond my understanding and beyond beyond that high level description.
Speaker 1: I can't explain it. Well, one thing we do know
Speaker 1: that the physicists who are working on this reported and
Speaker 1: this is the thing that was highlighted really well in
Speaker 1: that documentary we watched called Particle Fever again and yeah,
Speaker 1: you should check it out if you get a chance.
Speaker 1: It's available on iTunes, I believe. Yeah. One of the
Speaker 1: things they talked about, how was how the mass of
Speaker 1: the Higgs boson would, depending on what that value was,
Speaker 1: would lend support to totally different views of cosmology of
Speaker 1: what the universe fundamentally looks like. So if you measure
Speaker 1: the mass of the Higgs boson, and it's one number
Speaker 1: that looks like really good evidence that fits with a
Speaker 1: theory called supersymmetry, which is a theory, a theory, or
Speaker 1: a hypothesis you might want to call it. It's um
Speaker 1: a very interesting idea about how uh space and matter
Speaker 1: are fundamentally formed. Another idea would be the multiverse, the
Speaker 1: idea that our local universe, all the things we can
Speaker 1: see going back to the Big Bang, are not all
Speaker 1: there is, but they're just one of many universes in
Speaker 1: a greater multiverse. How could we ever have evidence for that? Well,
Speaker 1: if the value of the Higgs boson were a certain number,
Speaker 1: that would also seem to indicate the theoretical physicists that
Speaker 1: the idea of the multiverses maybe more well evidenced, and
Speaker 1: this would be incredible. It would also kind of be
Speaker 1: sad because as far as we know, there's no way
Speaker 1: we could ever observe any other universe other than our own.
Speaker 1: And keep in mind that those other universes would have
Speaker 1: very different laws of physics than ours do. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: part of the theory, right, Yeah, yeah, that that if
Speaker 1: it's not like it's not necessarily the parallel universe theory
Speaker 1: where we could do a Slider's like leap into another
Speaker 1: another universe and be perfectly fine. Yeah, or you might
Speaker 1: just you know, end up becoming pure thought, you know,
Speaker 1: or pure energy, just like the the guys in MST
Speaker 1: three K and that last episode did and on Comedy
Speaker 1: Central before they coalesced back into People and Robots and
Speaker 1: Sci Fi Channel. Anyway, Well, we should take a brief
Speaker 1: diversion to talk about how the media interacted with the
Speaker 1: Higgs Boson. Well, first of all, have you heard about
Speaker 1: the god particle? Yeah, this is what they called it.
Speaker 1: I don't know where this name got started. I could
Speaker 1: probably find out if I wanted to look it up,
Speaker 1: but I don't. I don't want to look it up.
Speaker 1: The name. It's a frustrating nickname because it made for
Speaker 1: some awesomely stupid media coverage and reaction among the general public.
Speaker 1: People called it the god particle. But this particle has
Speaker 1: nothing to do with theology or with religion. I saw
Speaker 1: people were reacting. I actually saw a thing just a
Speaker 1: few minutes ago. Is a collection of Twitter reactions people
Speaker 1: had because the Higgs Boson was announced, simply because of
Speaker 1: that nomenclature. But the fact that someone called it a
Speaker 1: God particle, and then people began to assume that that
Speaker 1: meant it either was a particle that would prove or
Speaker 1: somehow disprove the existence of God. Yeah. Of course, this
Speaker 1: particle doesn't do anything close to either of those, has
Speaker 1: nothing to do with it. Yeah. Yeah, but people, I
Speaker 1: don't know, I guess that's what they were interested in
Speaker 1: talking about. So let's also be fair. Okay, people will
Speaker 1: read the headline and no further. Sometimes I am also
Speaker 1: guilty of this. By the way, I'm not saying that.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying people as in those people of their
Speaker 1: never bothered to read the full article. But this is
Speaker 1: one case when you didn't do it. Yeah, okay, right,
Speaker 1: in this case, I did read the full article and
Speaker 1: I wrote one as well, But yeah I didn't. You know,
Speaker 1: there are times where I'm just as guilty of that.
Speaker 1: So I don't mean to say that, you know, somehow
Speaker 1: I'm better than those people. I am those people, just
Speaker 1: not in this one case. Okay. So the discovery the
Speaker 1: Higgs boson, we discovered it, we looked at it's it's mass,
Speaker 1: and we were like, here it is. Did it settle
Speaker 1: all these questions? About the multiverse, about the about the supersymmetry,
Speaker 1: all these other questions. No, not really, but it did
Speaker 1: still give us a really interesting piece of the puzzle
Speaker 1: that will give us something new to work with going
Speaker 1: forward in new theoretical physics, because now we know a
Speaker 1: few things. Number One, we have a better idea that
Speaker 1: the standard model of physics is on track like it's
Speaker 1: It hasn't been disproved, so we So it's not like
Speaker 1: we suddenly have to completely refocus our efforts in some
Speaker 1: new direction. What we need to do is kind of
Speaker 1: refine what we're looking for and how we're looking for it.
Speaker 1: So we've sort of seen like a mile marker along
Speaker 1: the race. It's like, Okay, we're sort of sort of
Speaker 1: going in the right direction. Good to know that we've
Speaker 1: also got a value that we can work with plugging
Speaker 1: into new theoretical physics and moving forward. But I have
Speaker 1: the question, what's next? Is there anything left for the
Speaker 1: large head round collider to discover? Or now that we've
Speaker 1: got the Higgs boson, is that it so much? There's
Speaker 1: so much? Yeah, So the Higgs boson is easily the
Speaker 1: thing that most media outlets have focused on when it
Speaker 1: comes to what the LHC is doing. But that is
Speaker 1: just one part of all the different experiments going on.
Speaker 1: That's just one thing. It's very important part, but it's
Speaker 1: not the only part. So we have questions about matter
Speaker 1: and antimatter. Like I said at the top of the show,
Speaker 1: why was it that at the Big Bang there was
Speaker 1: more matter than antimatter? Or why wasn't Why didn't equal
Speaker 1: parts annihilate each other? What was it about that event
Speaker 1: that created the universe as we know it? Why did
Speaker 1: it happen that way? We need to answer those questions
Speaker 1: if we want to have a true understanding of how
Speaker 1: our universe works. Uh. Also, you've heard about dark energy,
Speaker 1: dark matter, that stuff. Yeah, dark matter is a thing
Speaker 1: that helps us explain why the universe looks like it does.
Speaker 1: So the universe displays certain gravitational properties that don't seem
Speaker 1: to make sense given how much matter we think is
Speaker 1: in the universe. Yeah, we look around, we see all
Speaker 1: this matter. We see it behaving in a way that's
Speaker 1: not completely consistent with how we understand the universe to
Speaker 1: work based upon the amount of matter we're able to see.
Speaker 1: So what that has caused people to theorize or hypothesize
Speaker 1: is that there's some stuff out there that we are
Speaker 1: incapable of observing, that are that is in some way
Speaker 1: acting upon the rest of the stuff in the universe,
Speaker 1: and it's only because we are incapable of perceiving it
Speaker 1: that it's a mystery to us that it's totally there.
Speaker 1: And if we had a way of perceiving it, we could,
Speaker 1: it would just fit neatly into our our our vision
Speaker 1: of how the universe works. Um, I mean, if it doesn't, again,
Speaker 1: our fundamental understanding of how things work is off. So
Speaker 1: this dark energy and dark matter would make up the
Speaker 1: majority of energy and matter in the universe, that the
Speaker 1: stuff that we can actually observe would be just a
Speaker 1: tiny little fraction of the overall picture, which is pretty phenomenal.
Speaker 1: But again, we can't observe it. So one of the
Speaker 1: things that we can, we can observe the effects of it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so there there's and there's some you know, hypotheses
Speaker 1: about what it could ultimately actually be, whether it's uh
Speaker 1: whimps or MACHOs or other fun terms. But at any rate,
Speaker 1: a lot of the experiments at the l h C
Speaker 1: are dedicated to looking for evidence of dark energy and
Speaker 1: dark matter. Cosmic rays. Yeah, so cosmic rays again something
Speaker 1: that happens in the universe all the time, right, You
Speaker 1: get these these charged particles that are moving at high energy.
Speaker 1: You know. The kind of cool thing about what the
Speaker 1: LHC does is it sort of create something like a
Speaker 1: cosmic ray. Yeah. Actually, I mean really does create cosmic rays.
Speaker 1: It's just it's doing it in lab conditions, so it's
Speaker 1: under controlled conditions ray. Then again, it's a highly charged particle.
Speaker 1: It tends to be um something that would if we
Speaker 1: came into contact with it would really mess us up
Speaker 1: big time. But luckily the Earth has a couple of layers. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there a couple of layers of protection that we have
Speaker 1: here on Earth. The atmosphere and the magnetosphere in particular
Speaker 1: are helping us out a lot, so we don't have
Speaker 1: to worry about it so much. Uh. And there's some
Speaker 1: people who are worried about cosmic rays at the LHC,
Speaker 1: but again, this is under controlled conditions. This is the
Speaker 1: way you want to see it happen. Um. There are
Speaker 1: some people who are worried that that might lead to
Speaker 1: a catastrophic event. But if you just point out the
Speaker 1: fact that cosmic rays are colliding with stuff all the
Speaker 1: time throughout the universe, and our universe is still here.
Speaker 1: That's pretty good evidence that we're in safe territory, right
Speaker 1: that that we're not going to rip a hole through
Speaker 1: the spacetime continuum and get uh hold into Doctor Who's universe. Okay,
Speaker 1: So I have a question. Yeah, we've talked about black holes.
Speaker 1: Number one, could it? Could the LHC teach us anything
Speaker 1: new about black holes? And number two? Could it? As
Speaker 1: I hope we've already suggested, it could not create a
Speaker 1: black hole that will kill everyone. I'm so glad you
Speaker 1: said we'll kill everyone, because that's the part that I
Speaker 1: can say. No, it might create a black hole, but
Speaker 1: we're talking like a micro black hole that would last
Speaker 1: for a fraction of a second before collapsing in on itself.
Speaker 1: So when I say micro black hole, i'm talking about
Speaker 1: you know the black holes we think of in cosmology.
Speaker 1: Those are the former stars. Yeah, it's a result of
Speaker 1: a of a collapse star. Right, stars having to be
Speaker 1: pretty big. I don't know if you've noticed. In fact,
Speaker 1: some stars aren't big enough to become black holes. Like
Speaker 1: our star doesn't have enough mass to become a black hole.
Speaker 1: So you have to be an enormous star to become
Speaker 1: one of these incredibly powerful black holes that start gulping
Speaker 1: everything up and nothing can escape it, and then you
Speaker 1: have the spighettification and all that kind of fun stuff. Right.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you know this, but a sub
Speaker 1: atomic particle is slightly smaller than your average star, let
Speaker 1: alone a star large enough to make a black hole.
Speaker 1: And by slightly smaller, I mean is the other end
Speaker 1: of the scale. I mean it's you know, you talk
Speaker 1: about something that's so large you can't imagine exactly how
Speaker 1: big it is, to something so small you can't imagine
Speaker 1: how small it is. So first of all, you're talking
Speaker 1: about a black hole that has has less energy than
Speaker 1: a mosquito flapping its wings, so no energy really at all. Second,
Speaker 1: it collapses within a split second. It does not have
Speaker 1: the energy needed to become any kind of macroscopic effect
Speaker 1: on the world around us, so that is not going
Speaker 1: to happen. However, being able to create these teeny tiny
Speaker 1: black holes means that on a very tiny scale, we
Speaker 1: might learn more about how they how they work, So
Speaker 1: we could learn more about black holes through these experiments.
Speaker 1: But there's no chance that this is going to create
Speaker 1: a black hole that's going to destroy the Earth. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's the same sort of things before when I talked
Speaker 1: about cosmic rays hitting the Earth all the time. The
Speaker 1: collisions that happened within the LHC are recreations of things
Speaker 1: that happen in nature. Okay, these things happen out in
Speaker 1: the universe a lot. Because the universe is is so huge,
Speaker 1: it's not like these are are super common events in
Speaker 1: our particular solar system. But if you take the entire universe,
Speaker 1: these things happen all the time, and the universe is
Speaker 1: still there. So what's what we're seeing now is this
Speaker 1: controlled experiment within a laboratory where again the safety has
Speaker 1: already been established because we're here. If it weren't safe,
Speaker 1: we never would have made it because things would have
Speaker 1: destroyed themselves already before the Earth could have even formed.
Speaker 1: So that's the way to look at it, saying like, look,
Speaker 1: did you eat a sandwich today. Guess what, here's the
Speaker 1: really super cool thing that we might discover. You're going
Speaker 1: to tell me about another discovery. Yeah, here's the coolest one.
Speaker 1: We don't know. We could we could discover something that
Speaker 1: we have yet to hypothesize about, or something that completely
Speaker 1: and fundamentally changes some aspect of how we understand the
Speaker 1: universe to work. Yeah, and in fact, these are the
Speaker 1: coolest types of discoveries. These are the disruptive discoveries, the
Speaker 1: things that force us to go way back and say, Okay,
Speaker 1: we were getting a lot of stuff wrong, or we
Speaker 1: had no idea that there was this whole other world
Speaker 1: of of rules and and facts and interacting objects to discover. Right.
Speaker 1: And when you get into stuff like that, it brings
Speaker 1: up the obvious response to all these people, uh that
Speaker 1: are opposed to projects like this, because they're like, what
Speaker 1: does it actually do? You know? Yeah, how is this
Speaker 1: going to help us build a better mousetrap? Right? The
Speaker 1: ones who wants some form of practical application, Well, first
Speaker 1: of all, uh, on the face of it, if you
Speaker 1: were to and this is in that movie that we
Speaker 1: were talking about, they're American politicians railing against creating this
Speaker 1: the super collider in the United States. And the response
Speaker 1: of the theoretical physicist David Kaplan is that, you know,
Speaker 1: I can't I can't tell you what this is for.
Speaker 1: It may not ever have any practical purpose The reason
Speaker 1: for it is for us to understand the nature of
Speaker 1: the universe. It's to increase our understanding, which has its
Speaker 1: own value outside of just a practical application of making
Speaker 1: some technology that makes our lives better. Of course, if
Speaker 1: you do want to appease this, this call for practical application,
Speaker 1: you can make a pretty good case because all of
Speaker 1: the technology we have today came out of non technological
Speaker 1: scientific discovery, stuff that people were figuring out about how
Speaker 1: the world worked. I've heard this example used a lot.
Speaker 1: I can't remember, uh if he used it specifically in
Speaker 1: the film, but there have been a lot of scientists
Speaker 1: who bring this up. Radio waves. Yeah, okay, electromagnetic radiation.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's totally true. That's a scientific discovery about
Speaker 1: the nature of physics and reality. But guess what now
Speaker 1: we've got GPS and satellites and microwave, overn's, cell phones,
Speaker 1: radio stations, set, I mean everything. Yeah. The point he makes,
Speaker 1: he said, think of radio waves. When radio waves were discovered,
Speaker 1: they weren't called radio waves because we didn't have radios
Speaker 1: yet we built radios in order to this, right. So
Speaker 1: that's the thing is that you cannot predict what sort
Speaker 1: of practical application may come out of this exploratory science.
Speaker 1: Just know that if stuff does happen, it's going to
Speaker 1: be pretty amazing. So it's it's it's one of those
Speaker 1: that's really it's a hard sell for people who are
Speaker 1: paying the bills, right, It's a hard sell to say, Look,
Speaker 1: we may never have any sort of practical application for
Speaker 1: this technology, but we will understand more about how the
Speaker 1: universe works. And understanding more is a good thing, and
Speaker 1: it may lead to incredible practical applications. Who knows, the
Speaker 1: information sation that we get from these kind of experiments
Speaker 1: could lead to developments and things like interstellar space travel
Speaker 1: down the road in ways we cannot anticipate, maybe even
Speaker 1: time travel. You can go eat a bighette in two thousand,
Speaker 1: whatever year it was nine, I don't know. I'm telling you.
Speaker 1: There were theories that it was actually a time travel
Speaker 1: paradox thing. But anyway, Okay, so I have a question
Speaker 1: here we are, what's the next big step in particle physics.
Speaker 1: What's the next thing we're going to do. Obviously, I
Speaker 1: know there have been some upgrades planned for the LHC
Speaker 1: itself and it's next round of experiments will be done
Speaker 1: at higher energy levels than the first round, right, that
Speaker 1: will begin sometime in that alone is really cool. But
Speaker 1: what what's the next thing we could build after the LHC. Well,
Speaker 1: remember linear particle accelerators, Yeah, way back in the day. Yeah,
Speaker 1: back in the nineteen thirties I mentioned they might be
Speaker 1: in the future of particle accelerators. Yeah. Yeah. So here
Speaker 1: here's why you might say, well, why would we go
Speaker 1: back to a technology after we had moved on to
Speaker 1: a different format. And the reason is that part of
Speaker 1: the problem with the cyclotron approach is that you have
Speaker 1: to expend a lot of energy to move those particles
Speaker 1: in an arc. You know, to move them in an arc,
Speaker 1: you have to uh to exert energy on them, and
Speaker 1: you can cause sub atomic particles to to change and
Speaker 1: not have reached their ideal relativistic masses. That because you
Speaker 1: have to continuously exert this extra pressure in order to
Speaker 1: make them arc. If you can move them in a
Speaker 1: straight line, you wouldn't have to do that, right you wouldn't.
Speaker 1: You just have a straight pathway and you're just really
Speaker 1: accelerating them and making sure that they stay in the
Speaker 1: within the parameters of that pathway. You don't. But you
Speaker 1: don't have to bend them, you don't have to move
Speaker 1: them in an arc, and you can you can increase
Speaker 1: the whole energy level in that sense, or at least
Speaker 1: the relativistic mass in that sense. And so, uh, that's
Speaker 1: why we're looking at the possibility of some innier particle
Speaker 1: accelerators and colliders in the future. So just one big
Speaker 1: long tunnel, well really long. I mean, if we're talking
Speaker 1: about the International Linear Collider, you're talking about thirty one
Speaker 1: kilometer long particle accelerator. Yeah, that's so that's a proposed
Speaker 1: collider that uh, it's not being built yet, it's just
Speaker 1: in the proposal stage, but a lot of the particle
Speaker 1: physics community are talking about it now. It's not even
Speaker 1: clear where it would be built, but I've read that
Speaker 1: Japan has expressed interest in hosting it. Yeah, finding finding
Speaker 1: thirty one kilometers that you can use to build not
Speaker 1: just the accelerator, but then all the scientific installations that
Speaker 1: you need in order to actually study the collisions. That's
Speaker 1: I mean, that's a lot of that's a lot of space. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So what would the International Linear Collider do well? In
Speaker 1: this case, we're talking about another electron positron collider. Okay,
Speaker 1: so annihilating electrons and positrons and incredibly high energies to
Speaker 1: really see what happens once again at these high energy
Speaker 1: particle collisions, and it's it's more to say more of
Speaker 1: the same as a as a disservice, but it's really
Speaker 1: to get a slightly different like think of it as
Speaker 1: a different angle view on what is happening at the
Speaker 1: earliest moments of the universe. I hate that science and
Speaker 1: politics have to mix, because it would be wonderful if
Speaker 1: we lived in a world where we could pursue scientific
Speaker 1: endeavors without having to worry about where the funding comes from.
Speaker 1: But that's not the world we live in, right and
Speaker 1: and because we need to make those considerations, they are important.
Speaker 1: I don't want to suggest that a country that decides
Speaker 1: not to fund some sort of scientific endeavor is doing
Speaker 1: so for the wrong reasons. There may be very compelling
Speaker 1: reasons why that money needs to go somewhere else. I
Speaker 1: don't wish to make this that kind of black and white,
Speaker 1: simplistic view of how the world works. The world is
Speaker 1: insanely complicated. So I just wish that we lived in
Speaker 1: this world where we didn't have to worry about that. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, in in either case, I am also very
Speaker 1: sympathetic to the idea that, yeah, we we've got a
Speaker 1: lot of things that need funding. Yeah, there's a lot
Speaker 1: of competition for that. But at the same time, scientific
Speaker 1: research like this is funding the future. That sounds kind
Speaker 1: of like a cliche. I'm sorry, but it is. It's
Speaker 1: just it's how you invest in what's happening to your
Speaker 1: children and in their world. Sure, it's just a really
Speaker 1: hard sell in the short term, right you can you
Speaker 1: can demonstrate how long term gains are are one of
Speaker 1: the things that go hand in hand with funding science.
Speaker 1: But for people who are are you know, kind of
Speaker 1: concerned about a short election cycle that comes around every
Speaker 1: four to six years or so, or two to six
Speaker 1: years or so, however long, depending upon where you are
Speaker 1: and what position you hold, then saying oh, I want
Speaker 1: to vote for this incredibly expensive endeavor that's going to
Speaker 1: pay off possibly twenty five years down the road is
Speaker 1: a really tough sell. It's a cell that needs to happen,
Speaker 1: but it's a tough one. So anyway, this was fun
Speaker 1: to talk about particle excel raiders and the fact that
Speaker 1: that you know, there's this is stuff that's happening right
Speaker 1: now that's already incredibly exciting, and who knows what could
Speaker 1: be right around the corner or around the bend. I
Speaker 1: guess we should say with in the case of cyclotrons,
Speaker 1: so because you can't have a corner with circles. Uh.
Speaker 1: But if you guys out there have any suggestions for
Speaker 1: a future topics, something that you are really exciting about
Speaker 1: that you want to know more about, let us know.
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