Smashing Particles for Science

How do particle accelerators work and what are they good for? We take a look at particle physics.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking, Either and welcome to Forward Thinking, the podcast
that looks at the future and says he's going for speed.
I'm Jonathan Strickland. That was a good one. I'm Joe McCormick,

(00:22):
and Lauren Vogelbaum. Our other host is not with us today,
but she will be back with us soon. Yeah. So
we thought we would take this opportunity to talk about, uh,
you know, some stuff that helps us really get a
grip on what's really going on out there. Yeah. Um,
so I saw the movie Transformers for so sorry. Yeah,

(00:45):
I'm sorry to I'm sorry. I gave those people my money,
and I'm I'm I'm sorry for the world. Yeah, we're
we're all victims here. But one thing it got me
thinking about, since a lot of the movie was taken
up by things crashing into each other, really big things,
really big robotic things with laser swords and stuff like that.

(01:05):
As as you as you do crashing into each other,
what happens when small things crash into each other, Well,
then we can get a glimpse of how the universe works. Joe, Yeah, okay,
So here's a question, And I really do mean this.
It sounds like I'm being flippant, but here's a real
question that we are looking for, like answers for this question,

(01:27):
why do we have stuff? Like? Why is there stuff?
Why is there matter? And energy? Sure? Why why is
there stuff? That's a good question. I mean, I don't
know if it's possible for their not to be stuff,
but at least there is stuff. See. The reason why
I ask is that if you look at our theories

(01:48):
on the the the earliest moments of the universe, keeping
in mind that if we're we're following the Big Bang
theory here, the further you get, the closer you get
to the beginning, the less time matters. Like time, it
eventually is no longer a thing, and so you can't
ask what happened before that because there's no time, right,

(02:09):
So there's no before time. Actually it goes back about
thirteen point eight billion years, and then you reach the
boundary of time. Yes, so you can't ask what happened
before that because that's a meaningless question in the context
of of the universe, because without time, there's no before. However,
one of the things we we have hypothesized have theorized

(02:32):
even is that those early moments there there was matter
and anti matter, and these two just do not get along. No,
they tend to completely annihilate one another, don't. Absolutely. If
matter comes into contact with antimatter, you get total annihilation.
Assuming you have equal parts. Then you've got nothing left

(02:52):
of that of that interaction because they will completely annihilate
one another. But we have matter. So that means something
happened for some reason, there was more matter than antimatter,
or something else happened to antimatter, so that for some
reason we didn't have everything annihilate. And that's why we're

(03:14):
able to have this podcast. I mean, it's not a
direct line. It's not a direct line, but we're one
of the things, you know. So this is one of
those weird questions about the about the universe. Another one
would be like, why does the universe exhibit the gravitational
properties it does? Why does it expand at the rate

(03:37):
it does? Right, Because here's the thing about expansion. See,
based upon our understanding of the universe, the universe should
do one of a couple of things. It should either
continuously expand if there's not enough matter for the gravitational forces,
to pull it all back in again, or it should
expand slow, stop, and then contract because the gravity is

(03:59):
strong enough pull everything back into the center. Uh. But
one of the things we noticed is that it is expanding,
and through the data we've gotten from the Hubble space telescope,
it's actually expanding at a rate faster than what it
was billions of years ago. So now that brings in
a question, why does it do that thing? So now

(04:20):
we've had all these questions, how are we going to
solve questions like this? Well, here's the problem, right, I mean,
these are questions that would most easily be answered if
we could somehow travel back thirteen point eight billion years.
I'm gonna stop you right there and say, even if
we could do that, I'm not sure it would be
all that easy to answer these questions because how could

(04:41):
you measure it? No, but it would be it would
at least we would be there to witness what was
happening at the very least, if not the moment we
were dying. Well, let's say that somehow we've managed to exist, uh,
coexist in parallel to the budding universe. Uh, and we
were somehow able to measure it. That would be our
best chance. Of course, we can't do that, right, we don't.

(05:04):
We don't have a time travel machine, we don't have
any way of existing in parallel with our own universe.
So the next best thing I would assume would be
to somehow create a micro By micro, I mean super micro,
I'm talking like atomic level re enactment of the conditions
that were present moments after the Big Bang happened. By

(05:27):
smashing stuff together, so we see the fundamental uh uh, elements,
energies that were there before everything kind of coalesced into
what it actually is now. So you're saying, sort of,
by simulating or trying to as best as we can
recreate the initial conditions of the universe, we can get
a better sense for why the universe looks the way

(05:49):
it does now exactly. So by that, if we were
able to do that and then measure it, observe it,
draw conclusions, we could perhaps start to fill in some
gaps in our knowledge. But recreating the initial conditions of
the universe, that sounds crazy. How could you do that? Well,
if you take it turns out, if you take those small,
small particles, you know, the small stuff we were talking about,

(06:11):
the very top of the show, not transformers, but the
small stuff and then smash them together at at sufficient
energy we can make them kind of um, well it's
decomposed of the wrong word, but to to convert into
their high energy states that they were, uh, that they
would have been right at moments after the Big Bang,
before they formed into the particles that we know today.

(06:33):
And we call these particle colliders. Right, These are the
machines we use to create these collisions. Uh. And they
are incredible things. Right, So our topic today is particle colliders.
We didn't need to bury the lead there that we
did find transformers in the beginning of the universe, very
closely related things. Okay, so what is a particle collider

(06:57):
and how is it different or is it different from
a particle accelerator. Well, a particle accelerator is something that
you use in order to get a particle up to
a certain energy level, certain speed. And it's uh, I
mean those are components in colliders, but they are also
used for other things. Yeah, since in one sense there
sort of is no difference, people often use these terms interchangeably,

(07:19):
and it's sort of correct to do that because one
term is basically a more specific term than the other.
A collider is a specific way of using a particle accelerator,
or it's sort of a type of particle accelerator, and
they generally refer to colliding two separate beams of subatomic
particles or ions. It doesn't have to be subatomic, it

(07:39):
can be atomic particles. But uh, you know, an accelerator
doesn't necessarily have to collide it with another beam of
pro of of particles. It could actually be a fixed target,
so you could just accelerate stuff out of fixed target
to find out what happens, or at something where that
beam of particles might be useful in a piece of technology,

(08:00):
say the back of a TV screen, or at a
tumor so. In a technical sense, a particle accelerator is
a device that uses electromagnetic fields to grab particles, increase
their speed, and focus them into directed beams. Okay, so
for one thing, one thing that we have to say

(08:20):
right away is that if we're using electromagnetic forces, then
clearly whatever particles we are manipulating need to have some
form of net charge to them, whether that's positive or negative. Right,
so you'll see them grabbing like electrons have a negative
charge or grabbing protons, grabbing ions which are charged those
atoms that either have more electrons than their natural state

(08:45):
or fewer electrons, so that they have a net charge
one way or the other. Yeah. So, one commonly given
example of a sort of small scale application of the
same principle behind a particle accelerator is a cathode ray tube.
That's what the CRT stands or when you talk about
a CRT monitor or CRT TV, that's the old way
of creating TV screen, those those larger, bulkier televisions that

(09:09):
some of our listeners may never have seen. Um So,
actually Craig Freud and Rich uses this example in his
house Stuff Works article about atom smashers, which is a
term will come back to in a minute. So, in
a cathode ray tube, like on an old TV, you
use the electrical difference between a cathode which is negatively
charged and an anode which is positively charged, to pull

(09:31):
a beam of electrons through an evacuated containers. That's like
a glass tube where you've sucked all the air out
of it and it's just a vacuum in side. And remember,
because like charges repel one another, and opposite charges a track.
That's why we're getting this ability to move these particles
where we want them to write, So the positive anode
wants to pull the electrons from the cathode, and they

(09:53):
get pulled off in a beam and then shoot through
that anode toward the TV screen. Of course, you can't
just you electrons at a TV screen. You've got to
aim them somehow, right, So that's where electromagnetic coils come in.
They can focus the beams of electrons and make them
go where they need to go. And these days particle
accelerators can be used for all kinds of stuff. We

(10:14):
don't have so much t c RT technology anymore these days,
but they can be used for things like treating cancer
by aiming particle beams at tumors. That's particle therapy. Interesting.
But most of the time, of course, when people are
talking about particle accelerators, they're talking about experimental mechanisms like
the colliders. So a collider is a particular kind of

(10:35):
particle accelerator that steers beams of accelerated particles into something,
either into a barrier or into an object, or into
each other to smash them and study what happens when
this tiny moment of catastrophe takes place when the when
the tiny particles go blue. Yeah, that's the technical term. Uh.

(10:57):
And this is why we wanted to also bring up
the whole atom smasher thing, because that is another kind
of nickname for these sort of devices, right, Yeah, not
to get pedantic, I mean, that's basically it's fine to
say atom smasher, but that's not technically so much what
these are anymore, because they're usually not going to be
grabbing whole atoms. Maybe ions. There's some heavy ion accelerators

(11:20):
out there, so that would be atomic. But but in
large part, we're talking about subatomic particles. We're talking. Uh.
For example, one of the ones will be covering a
lot in this episode the Large Hadron Collider, which, among
other things, does proton collisions. So you have two different
beams of protons, which are subatomic particles, right, that's part

(11:40):
of what makes up an atom. But you can possibly
charged part yes, and you can also have things like
electron positron colliders. Now electrons are the negatively charged particles.
Positrons are their antimatter counterpart essentially. Yeah, So in other words,
you're using, uh, you're using these things to to move
very very very tiny particles around. And when I'm saying tiny,

(12:05):
you might not really get a grip on exactly how
small we're talking about. Remember the nanoscale. A nanometer is
one billionth of a meter. The nanoscale is smaller, Like,
if you're looking at something that's one or two nanometers long,
you're not looking at it optically because you can't there's
no way for you to be able to look at
that optically. Light itself is not going to allow you

(12:27):
to do that because the wavelengths are too long. But uh,
the atomic scale is an order of magnitude smaller than that,
So that's even smaller than a nanometer, right that you
you essentially can have This is rough because it depends
upon the atom, but you could have ten atoms side
by side to make up one nanometer, so they're one
tenth that size, so they're even smaller. And then we're

(12:50):
talking sub atomic particles that are even smaller than a
full atom. So at this point you're talking about things
that are unimaginably small, and you're talking about directing them
as precisely as you possibly can so that they collide
with something like another beam of particles if you if
you can imagine it, that means that you have to

(13:11):
focus these beams into insanely tiny, tight packages, or else
you would never get a collision. It would be like
if Joe and I were both in uh an enormous
stadium and blindfolded and set on either end running towards
each other, and the possibility of us actually colliding that
would still be far more likely. You know. Yeah, I'd

(13:32):
say that's actually really generous. It's probably more like if
I stood on the Moon and you stood on the Earth,
and we each threw a pencil at each other and
we somehow were able to escape the various gravitational polls
saying gravity is negligible in this case, Yes, And the
idea that those two pencils would meet point to point

(13:53):
that would be still a level of precision greater than
what is required, are lesser than what is required, rather
than these beams of of sub atomic particles meeting is
an incredible achievement. Yeah, So how do these generally work? Well,
there's two main setups. You'd see. One is sort of
the ring shape, the cyclotron, the cyclic Yeah, so that's

(14:14):
where they would get these particles, like we said, they
control them with electromagnetic forces within some kind of tube
and accelerate them around a ring, going faster and faster
with each turn and increasing well faster and faster to
a certain point. And then once they get up to
point something per cent of the speed of light, you're

(14:35):
just sort of like increasing their relativistic mass, and until
they finally get to that point where these two uh,
well one one set would be going clockwise, one would
be going counterclockwise in the notes, until they finally collide, Yes,
at specific points around the cyclotron. This would be the

(14:55):
points where you have some form of scientific instruments that
are going to be measuring those collisions in various ways. Yeah,
you've got an instrument sitting where the streams cross and waiting. Yes. Uh.
And then the other way of doing it instead of
a ring would be a linear accelerator, Right. That's where
you just kind of have one big long tube and
a gun on each side and you aim the bullets

(15:17):
at each other. Yep, yep, that's that's pretty much it.
And so the linear one is actually the the uh,
the earliest type of particle accelerator. The cyclotrons came a
little later. Yeah, but the linear type may actually figure
into the future of particle accelerators though the cyclotron is
what's big today. Yes, literally big today. So yeah, let's

(15:38):
talk about the history where these things come from. Okay, well,
if you if you're going to be really technical, you
have to go all the way back to because that's
when scientists were at first starting to notice that when
they were beaming particles at like a sheet of gold,
some of them were bouncing back, which then began to
give people a thought of these things have the kind

(16:00):
of mass and they're behaving in this way. Maybe there's
a way of smashing these together and kind of seeing
what makes them tick. Now, it wouldn't be until the
nineteen thirties that they started to the scientists started to
build particle accelerators that would actually uh end up colliding
these particles with something else and um. At that time,

(16:21):
they were pretty limited. They were usually that they were
the linear type originally, and they could get it up
to a few hundred thousand electron volts. So that might
not mean anything to you. An electron vault is a
unit of energy. It's equivalent to about one point six
times ten to the negative nineteen jewels or it's also

(16:43):
known as the energy gained or lost by the charge
of a single electron moved across an electric potential difference
of one vault. Well, that don't mean a lot to me,
Well at any rate, it's it's it's a very specific,
very tiny amount of energy. So the the original experiments
were a few hundred thousand electron volts. Then they kind
of hit an energy barrier. They were specifically using direct

(17:05):
voltage to accelerate ions. So those charged atoms uh to
go and and get into these collisions. But at that
low energy, you're not getting the collision. The collisions are
not necessarily as spectacular as what you would need to
really get an idea of what was going on in
the earliest moments of the universe. So eventually this this

(17:27):
approach got up to about a million electron volts. But
after that, the the problem is that you get voltage breakdown,
so you could not continue to just try and throw
more energy at the problem. They couldn't scale it up. Yeah,
So in the nineteen forties, scientists turned to oscillating radio
frequency electric fields to resonate with particles through accelerating gaps

(17:51):
and that's a fancy way of saying they tried something
else that worked better. It really is. I mean, we
to go into a lot of detail would require one
It would require more time and too, frankly, it would
require a lot more expertise than what I have in
this field. I've written about particle accelerators in the past,
and I understand from a very kind of basic approach

(18:11):
how they work. When you get into fine details, my
knowledge breaks down pretty rapidly faster than the subotomic particle
as it turns out. So uh, these accelerators were still linear,
but then eventually scientists began to experiment a cyclotron designs,
these big circular designs, and that the purpose was to
try and continuously accelerate particles. Because you know, you're limited

(18:34):
by the lengths of whatever linear accelerator you have, and
that's it, right. You can't you can't loop it back
and start over. You've got it's essentially a straight path
to whatever, whether that's two guns facing each other or
a gun facing a target. But with a circle, you could,
in theory, just keep moving it around the circle and
getting it faster and faster and faster until you're ready

(18:55):
to direct it towards that collision, right, So that's why
they went with the circular approach. At this point they
got up to about twenty five million electron volts, and
by the nineteen fifties they could design elect cyclotrons that
could push back that energy barrier to two billion electron volts.
And before the end of the nineteen fifties they got
up to four hundred billion electron volts. So that energy

(19:17):
barrier just kept going up and up and up. Um
and so now these days we're talking about electron volts
and the trillions, So we should probably just take a
second to mention why is it so important to get
the energy so high to increase their speed and increase
their effective mass. It's really so that those collisions actually
result in the the primal kind of state that the

(19:41):
universe was in in those earliest moments. Without it, you
don't have enough energy to revert back to that. Yeah,
to get the kind of results you want, you want
the highest possible energy collision. Although we should say at
this point the LHC, the large hadron collider again, one
of the most famous collider is right now um Is

(20:02):
has been operating, hasn't been operating for the last several months,
but in its first round it was operating at like
a third of its capability. Those earliest experiments weren't really
performed at anywhere near its highest capacity. Although we don't
expect it ever will run it that now, but it's

(20:23):
definitely the second round is going to be much higher energy,
so they're expecting to find some really cool stuff the
second round through. Well, let's get into the large hat
round collider. Except first I think we should mention a
couple of the other notable colliders from recent years. Sure, so, yeah,
you're talking about like brook Haven's relativistic heavy ion collider
are Hick that was commissioned back in two thousand. It's

(20:43):
designed to collide heavy ions, but it's capable of going
all the way down to protons and size. There is
Fermi Labs Tiva tron Teva tron Tevatron is what I've
always said, but it could be Tivatron. Well, yeah, so
that's one of those proton anti proton colliders that's matter
and anti matter. Yeah, and uh, it can work as
both a proton anti proton beam collider or as a

(21:06):
fixed target collider as well. Um, so it can do
a couple of different things, and is it I'm to understand.
I believe it's number two. Yeah. Up until the Large
Hadron Collider it had become it was the the highest
energy collider in the world with one point eight trillion
electron volts, which is pretty significance. But then you've got
the Large Hadron Collider that's at cern which, uh, you know,

(21:30):
we we recently got a chance to see the movie
Particle Fever, which was all about the development of the
Large Hadron Collider. It's early days of being switched on
the relationship between theoretical physicists, who are the ones who
are coming up with the ideas of how the universe
must work based upon our understanding, and the experimental physicists
who put those ideas to the test and see if

(21:51):
they actually hold water. So, yeah, the Large Hadron Collider
might be the greatest instance of experimental physics in the
history of humanity. Yeah, depends on how you define greatest,
I guess, but it's definitely the largest machine ever built
by humans as far as we know, as long as
we we don't have that, Like, you know, the Nazis
built a death star inside of the Earth, kind of

(22:13):
theory or on the other side of the moon. As
Iron Sky has taught us, it's a terrible movie. Don't
watch it. Well, we've already you've already had to endure
transformers for don't put yourself to more more pain. Uh No,
there's no serious reason to question. It is the largest
machine ever built by human beings. So the large hat
around collider, it's basically just picture this. It is a

(22:35):
giant underground ring shaped tunnel that's twenty seven kilometers in circumference,
and that is sixteen point seven miles. They usually just
call it seventeen miles. Um. If you got in a
golf cart with an average top speed about twenty miles
per hour and you drove around this thing, not saying
there's necessarily room for you to do that, it would

(22:56):
take you over fifty minutes to make a complete circuit
inside this tunnel. And this tunnel, by the way, is
about three thirty feet below the surface of the ground. Yeah, well,
the depth I think is variable hundreds of feet hundreds
of feet down under the earth at the border between
Switzerland and France, pretty close to Geneva. So why was

(23:18):
this built? Well, it was built for the very reasons
we've been talking about to create these high energy particle collisions,
to see what happens, and and to kind of get
an idea of what was going on at the very
very earliest moments of them. We're talking like fractions of
a second when the universe came into existence. Right, So
we've mentioned it's sort of in general what a particle
accelerator does. But what does the large had round collider do? Okay, first,

(23:41):
you've got some feeders that speed up particles first before
they start with with hydrogen ions the protons just protons,
So and with those, you've got these uh, think of
them as kind of like like these are the little
feeder tubes that get out get those streams of protons
up to a certain speed before introducing them into the

(24:03):
collider itself. Well, oh yeah, that's true. Before they enter
the main ring, they go through several stages of pre acceleration.
So there are smaller rings they go into first, yes,
and then it goes into the larger ring where it
continues to accelerate using super cooled magnets. We're talking like
we're talking about this whole system. The magnet system is

(24:24):
cooled down to temperatures that are just above absolute zero.
But why do they cool them down like that, Jonathan, Well,
it's mainly to completely cut out all electrical resistance, so
you make it as efficient as possible. So these are
super conducting magnets that we're talking about. Not you know,
when you when you have eliminated resistance, which is generally
a problem with any kind of electrical system, Right, you

(24:46):
have some resistance to electron flow, and therefore you lose
some of that energy as heat. By super cooling it,
you get rid of that and you make the super
conduct conducting material where that's no longer a problem, and
you can make these magne It's incredibly efficient that way
efficient only after you have used liquid helium to cool
them down to the just a little bit over absolute zero.

(25:09):
It's actually technically colder than empty space, because even empty
space still has a bit of a temperature. It's because
remember absolutely zeros when you get to a point where
there's no molecular movement. Sorry, I'm just trying to think
what is the temperature of empty space? I would seem
to depend on whether you're in the shade or in
the lining fire from the sun. Right, Well, you know,
it's sure, it's it's five kelvin, but it feels like

(25:33):
nine kelvin. Um, No, it's it's but no, it really
is true. It's really cooling things down. It's reducing molecular
movement to a level below that which you would find
in your you know, any given empty space sector. So
so these magnets become extremely powerful and they're acting upon
these tiny, tiny particles. So it's they're they're pretty compelling, yes, uh.

(25:59):
And they have the ability to get these things going
extremely fast practically just just a well, it's hard to
say practical, right, but at the speed of light, it's
an incredible speed. And you've got uh and by the way,
that nine seven that was just me kind of extremely fast.

(26:24):
You have one beam, like we said, going clockwise, one
being going counterclockwise, and you do this until they've reached
the proper speeds and relativistic mass, and then those beams
get focused by specific magnets to collide at very particular
points along the circumference of the LHC. Now, at each
of these points, as we mentioned before, where the collision

(26:46):
is is ready to happen, there are instruments waiting. Yeah,
we're saying instruments. That sounds like there's like a little
sensor or something. No, we're talking like multi story scientific facilities.
We're talking like like some of them were five stories
or seven stories tall, seventy feet tall. This is an
enormous facility that has tons of microelectronics in it, literally

(27:12):
tons of micro electronics in it, all in an effort
to capture snapshots of what is going on in the
those fractions of a second when these collisions happen. Because
this stuff is you know, blink and it's over, blink
and and fourteen billion of them are over. I mean,
it's incredibly fast. You know, we're talking about uh so

(27:33):
fast that again, to try and imagine an interval of
time that short is impossible, at least for me. Maybe
other people are capable of doing it, but it's it's
how fast I wanted to run out of the theater.
And yeah, instantaneous is pretty much it, right, right, Okay,
So I do want to get into what they discover

(27:56):
with these experiments. But one more thing I think we
should uh talk about first and is how they built
this thing. I mean, what a seventeen mile tunnel for
one thing? For one thing? They didn't have to to
dig the tunnel for the LHC, right, that's true. Yeah,
the tunnel already existed, so that was smarter them to
use this. It was already from a previous experiment called

(28:18):
the l EP, the Large Electron Positron Collider, which was
decommissioned in the late eighties to make way for the LHC.
So the LHC has been in development for for years
and years and years. In fact, it was one of
those things where it became huge news as it got
closer and closer to coming online. But the funny thing

(28:38):
is it had been around in some form or another
at least in the building process for a decade, for
more actually more than a decade, almost two decades. So
it was pretty incredible that to me when I was
learning more about it, like, why haven't we heard about
a lot about this before? And part of that is
just um that at the time when the LHC was

(28:59):
being built, there were other possible colliders that were in
consideration to be built in other parts of the world,
including in the United States, that ended up not panning out.
We don't need no science now. We could do a
full episode about that story, but we are going to
focus on the optimistic, not the sad. So at any rate,

(29:19):
the Large Electron Positron Collider was the largest electron posit
positron collider ever built. It had five thousand, one hundred
seventy six magnets and one hundred twenty eight accelerating cavities,
and it did what you would think it would do.
It collides electrons or did collide electrons with positrons, and uh,
they would again try to. When they meet, they annihilate

(29:43):
one another and produce high energies, which almost instantly rematerializes
streams of particles. But again, that was one of those
things of let's see what happens in these high energy
particle collisions and learn more about the nature of the
universe itself. Yeah, so this is a great place to
build the LHC, especially because being so deep underground, this
tunnel provides good protection. And it's two way protection, right.

(30:06):
It helps protect the surface from radiation from the experiments,
but also, maybe even more than that, helps protect the
experiments from radiation from the outside exactly. Yeah, you want
to have that shielding material there to try and keep
the experiment as pure as possible, so that you don't
have to worry about some sort of outside factor interfering
with it. Now, that doesn't mean that an outside factor

(30:28):
couldn't interfere with it. A bird with a baguette might um,
But that's you know. You may have heard back when
the LHC was was getting toward doing its first actual
experiment with with UH, an actual collision, things were delayed
when a what was it actually had there was some
kind of coolant failure. Well, first there was a coolant failure. First,

(30:50):
there was the liquid helium leak which was happening on
the shortly after they first tested the beams, which that
in that case they weren't even trying to collide anything.
They were just making sure that they could move a
beam through clockwise and counterclockwise before ever planning out a collision.
And then the UH Not too long after that there

(31:12):
was a helium leak, which set everything back by several months.
Once they got that fixed, the next problem was that
there was a there was some sort of of malfunction
sometimes attributed to particles that got into a ventilation duct
that may have been caused by a bird carrying something

(31:34):
and dropping it in there. So it ends up always
being described as a bird carrying a baguette and dropping
the food where it landed on this in an incredible coincidence,
landed down this ventilation shaft and mucked up some important electronics,
which thus caused some some short circuiting and some other issues.
I've read a rather cryptic statement from them saying that

(31:56):
they like wanted to clarify, we don't know a bird
dropped of a get on one of our one of
our facilities components. We just what did they say? It
was something like there were bread crumbs and feathers found
at the sea. It could have been that someone was
plucking a bird and eating a bag at and then
sabotaged it. Who knows. But that also led a lot

(32:18):
of I don't know, a lot of it was tongue
in cheek, but a lot of people saying that perhaps
the the Large Hadron Collider was sabotaging itself, or that
someone from the future had come back to sabotage the
LHC to prevent it from destroying the world. Oh yeah,
we should talk about it destroying the world, which it
totally is going to do. It's it totally has not happened.

(32:39):
Have you noticed, like that. Do you over all those
people who thought that was gonna happen, do you remember what?
Have you seen the website? I think it's has the
LHC destroyed the world dot Com? Something like that. No,
just it just says no, which is great. But okay,
So anyway, the LHC took the place of the l
e P it was, of course, has its own magnet.

(33:00):
It's one thousand, two thirty two dipole magnets that are
fifteen meters in length. Those guide the beams of protons.
And then you have the three quadruple magnets, which are
between five and seven ms long, that focus those beams
that get them into those very precise parameters for the
collisions to happen. Okay, so we've got it all set up.

(33:21):
We've got protons going one way, we got protons going
another way. They're ready to collide. The instruments are waiting.
What do we discover? So? Uh well, I mean, how
about the particle that helps tied together the standard model
of physics. That sounds pretty good. That's pretty good. It's
you might have heard of it, Higgs boson, the Higgs boson.

(33:42):
That's right. So at the LHC. They did not come
up with the idea of the Higgs boson. This is
a this has been a hypothetical particle that we've known
about for a long time. We've just never seen it again.
This is where we get the theoretical physicists, right. The
theoretical physicists are the ones who look at the universe
as we understand it, and then they start looking at

(34:02):
gaps and our understanding and they start trying to theorize
what could possibly fill those gaps. The Higgs boson was
this hypothetical particle that that kind of filled in this
gap of of information we had. So the standard model
is really complicated. We're not going to go into everything
about it, but and we could not if we tried. No,

(34:23):
if we tried, we would just completely muck it up.
Uh So, just complete honesty there. But the Higgs boson
sort of like the rug in the big Lebowski, tied
the whole room together. It's true, it's um. It's often
explained as the particle that gives other particles their mass,
that it doesn't exactly give them their mass, but it

(34:45):
helps us understand the mechanism of mass. Yeah, it was
one of those things where in order to understand why
matter has mass, we had to have this hypothetical particle
to uh to help with our understanding, right, And if
it didn't exist, if it turned out that we did
experiments and found no evidence of this particle, would mean
that something about our fundamental understanding of the universe is wrong. Yeah,

(35:09):
it would mean the thing we called the standard model
needs a major revamp. There's something completely wrong with it.
And in fact, I know that there were there were
theoretical physicists who were really kind of hoping for that,
because it would mean that there'd be a whole new
world to have to understand in the world of theoretical physics. Right.
It would mean that the assumptions we had made were faulty,

(35:31):
and therefore we had to really we would have to
look at them again, reassess them, and figure out new
assumptions to make. However, they start, Yeah, they started smashing
protons together looking for a Higgs boson. Did they find one? Yeah?
In fact, at first it was one of those very
very appropriate scientific announcements. First of all, they may have

(35:54):
been found. Yeah, And not only that, but the experiments
had happened well before the announcement. Right that we're talking
months and months and months and months and months had
passed before there was ever an announcement of what had
been found. Like you'll you'll hear, oh my gosh, in
two thousand twelve, the Higgs boson was discovered and then
you read Wait a minute, this experiment was done in
a full year earlier. It took them that long to

(36:17):
understand the data, to make sure that they knew what
they were looking at, to confirm it with other people
who knew what they were talking about, right, to establish
at what level of certainty could they say that this
was the Higgs boson and uh, And they were very
cautious about it appropriately, so I would say, but at
this point, we feel like certain it was the Higgs boson.

(36:41):
That's what they found, and in fact it showed that
this standard model was UH as we understood it correct
like it it filled in that gap. So how exactly
does it fill in the gap? Again, that's not something
we're really qualified to discuss, but it's sort of the
top level. The question is how can a single particle
will affect everything? From how we understand how these tiny thing,

(37:04):
how these tiny particles relate to each other too. Cosmology
like our entire idea of how the universe is structure. Well,
it also has to do with something called the Higgs field,
which occupies the whole universe. So we're good there, thank goodness, um,
and that the Higgs boson is the thing about mass
which when a particle is passed through the Higgs field,

(37:26):
the Higgs boson is what determines whether or not that
particle has mass or does not have mass. So it's
it's again, it's it gets to a point where it's
beyond my understanding and beyond beyond that high level description.
I can't explain it. Well, one thing we do know
that the physicists who are working on this reported and
this is the thing that was highlighted really well in
that documentary we watched called Particle Fever again and yeah,

(37:49):
you should check it out if you get a chance.
It's available on iTunes, I believe. Yeah. One of the
things they talked about, how was how the mass of
the Higgs boson would, depending on what that value was,
would lend support to totally different views of cosmology of
what the universe fundamentally looks like. So if you measure

(38:10):
the mass of the Higgs boson, and it's one number
that looks like really good evidence that fits with a
theory called supersymmetry, which is a theory, a theory, or
a hypothesis you might want to call it. It's um
a very interesting idea about how uh space and matter
are fundamentally formed. Another idea would be the multiverse, the

(38:31):
idea that our local universe, all the things we can
see going back to the Big Bang, are not all
there is, but they're just one of many universes in
a greater multiverse. How could we ever have evidence for that? Well,
if the value of the Higgs boson were a certain number,
that would also seem to indicate the theoretical physicists that

(38:51):
the idea of the multiverses maybe more well evidenced, and
this would be incredible. It would also kind of be
sad because as far as we know, there's no way
we could ever observe any other universe other than our own.
And keep in mind that those other universes would have
very different laws of physics than ours do. Yeah, that's
part of the theory, right, Yeah, yeah, that that if

(39:13):
it's not like it's not necessarily the parallel universe theory
where we could do a Slider's like leap into another
another universe and be perfectly fine. Yeah, or you might
just you know, end up becoming pure thought, you know,
or pure energy, just like the the guys in MST
three K and that last episode did and on Comedy

(39:34):
Central before they coalesced back into People and Robots and
Sci Fi Channel. Anyway, Well, we should take a brief
diversion to talk about how the media interacted with the
Higgs Boson. Well, first of all, have you heard about
the god particle? Yeah, this is what they called it.
I don't know where this name got started. I could
probably find out if I wanted to look it up,
but I don't. I don't want to look it up.

(39:55):
The name. It's a frustrating nickname because it made for
some awesomely stupid media coverage and reaction among the general public.
People called it the god particle. But this particle has
nothing to do with theology or with religion. I saw
people were reacting. I actually saw a thing just a

(40:16):
few minutes ago. Is a collection of Twitter reactions people
had because the Higgs Boson was announced, simply because of
that nomenclature. But the fact that someone called it a
God particle, and then people began to assume that that
meant it either was a particle that would prove or
somehow disprove the existence of God. Yeah. Of course, this
particle doesn't do anything close to either of those, has

(40:38):
nothing to do with it. Yeah. Yeah, but people, I
don't know, I guess that's what they were interested in
talking about. So let's also be fair. Okay, people will
read the headline and no further. Sometimes I am also
guilty of this. By the way, I'm not saying that.
I'm not saying people as in those people of their
never bothered to read the full article. But this is
one case when you didn't do it. Yeah, okay, right,

(41:01):
in this case, I did read the full article and
I wrote one as well, But yeah I didn't. You know,
there are times where I'm just as guilty of that.
So I don't mean to say that, you know, somehow
I'm better than those people. I am those people, just
not in this one case. Okay. So the discovery the
Higgs boson, we discovered it, we looked at it's it's mass,
and we were like, here it is. Did it settle

(41:22):
all these questions? About the multiverse, about the about the supersymmetry,
all these other questions. No, not really, but it did
still give us a really interesting piece of the puzzle
that will give us something new to work with going
forward in new theoretical physics, because now we know a
few things. Number One, we have a better idea that
the standard model of physics is on track like it's

(41:45):
It hasn't been disproved, so we So it's not like
we suddenly have to completely refocus our efforts in some
new direction. What we need to do is kind of
refine what we're looking for and how we're looking for it.
So we've sort of seen like a mile marker along
the race. It's like, Okay, we're sort of sort of
going in the right direction. Good to know that we've
also got a value that we can work with plugging

(42:07):
into new theoretical physics and moving forward. But I have
the question, what's next? Is there anything left for the
large head round collider to discover? Or now that we've
got the Higgs boson, is that it so much? There's
so much? Yeah, So the Higgs boson is easily the
thing that most media outlets have focused on when it

(42:28):
comes to what the LHC is doing. But that is
just one part of all the different experiments going on.
That's just one thing. It's very important part, but it's
not the only part. So we have questions about matter
and antimatter. Like I said at the top of the show,
why was it that at the Big Bang there was
more matter than antimatter? Or why wasn't Why didn't equal

(42:51):
parts annihilate each other? What was it about that event
that created the universe as we know it? Why did
it happen that way? We need to answer those questions
if we want to have a true understanding of how
our universe works. Uh. Also, you've heard about dark energy,
dark matter, that stuff. Yeah, dark matter is a thing
that helps us explain why the universe looks like it does.

(43:14):
So the universe displays certain gravitational properties that don't seem
to make sense given how much matter we think is
in the universe. Yeah, we look around, we see all
this matter. We see it behaving in a way that's
not completely consistent with how we understand the universe to
work based upon the amount of matter we're able to see.
So what that has caused people to theorize or hypothesize

(43:36):
is that there's some stuff out there that we are
incapable of observing, that are that is in some way
acting upon the rest of the stuff in the universe,
and it's only because we are incapable of perceiving it
that it's a mystery to us that it's totally there.
And if we had a way of perceiving it, we could,
it would just fit neatly into our our our vision

(43:59):
of how the universe works. Um, I mean, if it doesn't, again,
our fundamental understanding of how things work is off. So
this dark energy and dark matter would make up the
majority of energy and matter in the universe, that the
stuff that we can actually observe would be just a
tiny little fraction of the overall picture, which is pretty phenomenal.

(44:21):
But again, we can't observe it. So one of the
things that we can, we can observe the effects of it. Yeah,
and so there there's and there's some you know, hypotheses
about what it could ultimately actually be, whether it's uh
whimps or MACHOs or other fun terms. But at any rate,
a lot of the experiments at the l h C

(44:41):
are dedicated to looking for evidence of dark energy and
dark matter. Cosmic rays. Yeah, so cosmic rays again something
that happens in the universe all the time, right, You
get these these charged particles that are moving at high energy.
You know. The kind of cool thing about what the
LHC does is it sort of create something like a

(45:02):
cosmic ray. Yeah. Actually, I mean really does create cosmic rays.
It's just it's doing it in lab conditions, so it's
under controlled conditions ray. Then again, it's a highly charged particle.
It tends to be um something that would if we
came into contact with it would really mess us up
big time. But luckily the Earth has a couple of layers. Yeah,

(45:23):
there a couple of layers of protection that we have
here on Earth. The atmosphere and the magnetosphere in particular
are helping us out a lot, so we don't have
to worry about it so much. Uh. And there's some
people who are worried about cosmic rays at the LHC,
but again, this is under controlled conditions. This is the
way you want to see it happen. Um. There are
some people who are worried that that might lead to

(45:43):
a catastrophic event. But if you just point out the
fact that cosmic rays are colliding with stuff all the
time throughout the universe, and our universe is still here.
That's pretty good evidence that we're in safe territory, right
that that we're not going to rip a hole through
the spacetime continuum and get uh hold into Doctor Who's universe. Okay,
So I have a question. Yeah, we've talked about black holes.

(46:07):
Number one, could it? Could the LHC teach us anything
new about black holes? And number two? Could it? As
I hope we've already suggested, it could not create a
black hole that will kill everyone. I'm so glad you
said we'll kill everyone, because that's the part that I
can say. No, it might create a black hole, but
we're talking like a micro black hole that would last

(46:28):
for a fraction of a second before collapsing in on itself.
So when I say micro black hole, i'm talking about
you know the black holes we think of in cosmology.
Those are the former stars. Yeah, it's a result of
a of a collapse star. Right, stars having to be
pretty big. I don't know if you've noticed. In fact,
some stars aren't big enough to become black holes. Like
our star doesn't have enough mass to become a black hole.

(46:50):
So you have to be an enormous star to become
one of these incredibly powerful black holes that start gulping
everything up and nothing can escape it, and then you
have the spighettification and all that kind of fun stuff. Right.
I don't know if you know this, but a sub
atomic particle is slightly smaller than your average star, let
alone a star large enough to make a black hole.
And by slightly smaller, I mean is the other end

(47:13):
of the scale. I mean it's you know, you talk
about something that's so large you can't imagine exactly how
big it is, to something so small you can't imagine
how small it is. So first of all, you're talking
about a black hole that has has less energy than
a mosquito flapping its wings, so no energy really at all. Second,
it collapses within a split second. It does not have

(47:35):
the energy needed to become any kind of macroscopic effect
on the world around us, so that is not going
to happen. However, being able to create these teeny tiny
black holes means that on a very tiny scale, we
might learn more about how they how they work, So
we could learn more about black holes through these experiments.
But there's no chance that this is going to create

(47:58):
a black hole that's going to destroy the Earth. I mean,
it's the same sort of things before when I talked
about cosmic rays hitting the Earth all the time. The
collisions that happened within the LHC are recreations of things
that happen in nature. Okay, these things happen out in
the universe a lot. Because the universe is is so huge,

(48:19):
it's not like these are are super common events in
our particular solar system. But if you take the entire universe,
these things happen all the time, and the universe is
still there. So what's what we're seeing now is this
controlled experiment within a laboratory where again the safety has
already been established because we're here. If it weren't safe,

(48:40):
we never would have made it because things would have
destroyed themselves already before the Earth could have even formed.
So that's the way to look at it, saying like, look,
did you eat a sandwich today. Guess what, here's the
really super cool thing that we might discover. You're going
to tell me about another discovery. Yeah, here's the coolest one.
We don't know. We could we could discover something that

(49:03):
we have yet to hypothesize about, or something that completely
and fundamentally changes some aspect of how we understand the
universe to work. Yeah, and in fact, these are the
coolest types of discoveries. These are the disruptive discoveries, the
things that force us to go way back and say, Okay,

(49:23):
we were getting a lot of stuff wrong, or we
had no idea that there was this whole other world
of of rules and and facts and interacting objects to discover. Right.
And when you get into stuff like that, it brings
up the obvious response to all these people, uh that
are opposed to projects like this, because they're like, what

(49:45):
does it actually do? You know? Yeah, how is this
going to help us build a better mousetrap? Right? The
ones who wants some form of practical application, Well, first
of all, uh, on the face of it, if you
were to and this is in that movie that we
were talking about, they're American politicians railing against creating this
the super collider in the United States. And the response

(50:06):
of the theoretical physicist David Kaplan is that, you know,
I can't I can't tell you what this is for.
It may not ever have any practical purpose The reason
for it is for us to understand the nature of
the universe. It's to increase our understanding, which has its
own value outside of just a practical application of making

(50:27):
some technology that makes our lives better. Of course, if
you do want to appease this, this call for practical application,
you can make a pretty good case because all of
the technology we have today came out of non technological
scientific discovery, stuff that people were figuring out about how
the world worked. I've heard this example used a lot.

(50:48):
I can't remember, uh if he used it specifically in
the film, but there have been a lot of scientists
who bring this up. Radio waves. Yeah, okay, electromagnetic radiation.
I mean, that's totally true. That's a scientific discovery about
the nature of physics and reality. But guess what now
we've got GPS and satellites and microwave, overn's, cell phones,

(51:10):
radio stations, set, I mean everything. Yeah. The point he makes,
he said, think of radio waves. When radio waves were discovered,
they weren't called radio waves because we didn't have radios
yet we built radios in order to this, right. So
that's the thing is that you cannot predict what sort
of practical application may come out of this exploratory science.

(51:31):
Just know that if stuff does happen, it's going to
be pretty amazing. So it's it's it's one of those
that's really it's a hard sell for people who are
paying the bills, right, It's a hard sell to say, Look,
we may never have any sort of practical application for
this technology, but we will understand more about how the

(51:51):
universe works. And understanding more is a good thing, and
it may lead to incredible practical applications. Who knows, the
information sation that we get from these kind of experiments
could lead to developments and things like interstellar space travel
down the road in ways we cannot anticipate, maybe even
time travel. You can go eat a bighette in two thousand,

(52:16):
whatever year it was nine, I don't know. I'm telling you.
There were theories that it was actually a time travel
paradox thing. But anyway, Okay, so I have a question
here we are, what's the next big step in particle physics.
What's the next thing we're going to do. Obviously, I
know there have been some upgrades planned for the LHC
itself and it's next round of experiments will be done

(52:36):
at higher energy levels than the first round, right, that
will begin sometime in that alone is really cool. But
what what's the next thing we could build after the LHC. Well,
remember linear particle accelerators, Yeah, way back in the day. Yeah,
back in the nineteen thirties I mentioned they might be
in the future of particle accelerators. Yeah. Yeah. So here
here's why you might say, well, why would we go

(52:58):
back to a technology after we had moved on to
a different format. And the reason is that part of
the problem with the cyclotron approach is that you have
to expend a lot of energy to move those particles
in an arc. You know, to move them in an arc,
you have to uh to exert energy on them, and
you can cause sub atomic particles to to change and

(53:23):
not have reached their ideal relativistic masses. That because you
have to continuously exert this extra pressure in order to
make them arc. If you can move them in a
straight line, you wouldn't have to do that, right you wouldn't.
You just have a straight pathway and you're just really
accelerating them and making sure that they stay in the
within the parameters of that pathway. You don't. But you

(53:45):
don't have to bend them, you don't have to move
them in an arc, and you can you can increase
the whole energy level in that sense, or at least
the relativistic mass in that sense. And so, uh, that's
why we're looking at the possibility of some innier particle
accelerators and colliders in the future. So just one big
long tunnel, well really long. I mean, if we're talking

(54:08):
about the International Linear Collider, you're talking about thirty one
kilometer long particle accelerator. Yeah, that's so that's a proposed
collider that uh, it's not being built yet, it's just
in the proposal stage, but a lot of the particle
physics community are talking about it now. It's not even
clear where it would be built, but I've read that
Japan has expressed interest in hosting it. Yeah, finding finding

(54:29):
thirty one kilometers that you can use to build not
just the accelerator, but then all the scientific installations that
you need in order to actually study the collisions. That's
I mean, that's a lot of that's a lot of space. Yeah,
So what would the International Linear Collider do well? In
this case, we're talking about another electron positron collider. Okay,
so annihilating electrons and positrons and incredibly high energies to

(54:53):
really see what happens once again at these high energy
particle collisions, and it's it's more to say more of
the same as a as a disservice, but it's really
to get a slightly different like think of it as
a different angle view on what is happening at the
earliest moments of the universe. I hate that science and

(55:15):
politics have to mix, because it would be wonderful if
we lived in a world where we could pursue scientific
endeavors without having to worry about where the funding comes from.
But that's not the world we live in, right and
and because we need to make those considerations, they are important.
I don't want to suggest that a country that decides
not to fund some sort of scientific endeavor is doing

(55:38):
so for the wrong reasons. There may be very compelling
reasons why that money needs to go somewhere else. I
don't wish to make this that kind of black and white,
simplistic view of how the world works. The world is
insanely complicated. So I just wish that we lived in
this world where we didn't have to worry about that. Well,
I mean, in in either case, I am also very

(56:00):
sympathetic to the idea that, yeah, we we've got a
lot of things that need funding. Yeah, there's a lot
of competition for that. But at the same time, scientific
research like this is funding the future. That sounds kind
of like a cliche. I'm sorry, but it is. It's
just it's how you invest in what's happening to your
children and in their world. Sure, it's just a really
hard sell in the short term, right you can you

(56:23):
can demonstrate how long term gains are are one of
the things that go hand in hand with funding science.
But for people who are are you know, kind of
concerned about a short election cycle that comes around every
four to six years or so, or two to six
years or so, however long, depending upon where you are
and what position you hold, then saying oh, I want

(56:45):
to vote for this incredibly expensive endeavor that's going to
pay off possibly twenty five years down the road is
a really tough sell. It's a cell that needs to happen,
but it's a tough one. So anyway, this was fun
to talk about particle excel raiders and the fact that
that you know, there's this is stuff that's happening right
now that's already incredibly exciting, and who knows what could

(57:07):
be right around the corner or around the bend. I
guess we should say with in the case of cyclotrons,
so because you can't have a corner with circles. Uh.
But if you guys out there have any suggestions for
a future topics, something that you are really exciting about
that you want to know more about, let us know.
Drops the line on Facebook, on Twitter, on Google Plus.

(57:27):
We have to handle f W thinking. We look forward
to hearing from you. You hear from us really soon.
For more on this topic in the future of technology,
visit forward thinking dot Com, brought to you by Toyota.

(57:52):
Let's Go Places,