Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseHear the story of the multi-decade trans-Atlantic rivalry that led to the Higgs boson discovery.
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Hey, Daniel, did you celebrate July fourth?
Of course, it's a really important day in history? July fourth, twenty.
Twelve, twenty twelve. You mean seventeen seventy six, right, American Independence Day? Oh?
I mean yeah, that's important too, But twenty twelve was a much more important day.
More important than the founding of our country.
Yeah, this is like cosmically important, right.
What happened on July fourth, twenty and twelve?
July fourth, twenty twelve is the Higgs Dependence Day. It's the day we announced the discovery of the Higgs boson.
Do we beat the British to it or.
It was our reunion with Britain? We did it together.
Hi am Jorge. I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD Comics.
Hi.
I'm Daniel Whitson. I'm a particle physicist, and the only particle I've ever helped discover was the Higgs Boson.
Oh nice, I've discovered lots of particles. There's plenty of dust particles in my house, none of which are particularly interesting. Some of them are big, but not Higgs. But welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.
In which we talk about all the crazy and amazing things that we find in our universe. We take you to the forefront of knowledge. We're scientists, are trying to figure out how everything works, and we show you how you can understand it too, how your curiosity is the same as theirs.
Yeah, we like to talk about not just the things that scientists discover and what we understand about them, but we also like to talk about how they were discovered because we think this it's a very important part of understanding science and how science works, and what science knows and what it can know.
That's right. Sometimes particle physics is presented as like a grand edifice that we've put together all at once, but really it's sort of like a sloppy house of cars that we've been building bit by bit over the last one hundred years, and each piece was added painfully and with great effort due to lots of theorists and experimentalists working hard. And usually there are fun, juicy political dramas along the way.
I guess it's made out of particles. The House of particles.
Everything's made out of particles, man or feel you.
Do a TV series called House of Particles.
There's definitely enough drama in particle physics to fuel the whole soap opera.
Hopefully it gets pushed into a train or anything like that.
But more than that, we want you to understand that this idea of particle physics, these things that we understand, are not just some theoretical concept, but they're slowly built up from actual discoveries, experiments, We've done, things that we forced the universe to reveal. And it's those experiments, those actual discoveries, those confrontations with nature that form the foundation of that understanding.
Yeah, because I think it's easy once you know something to just forget that you at some point didn't know something. You know, like, think back when you were a kid and you didn't know about the universe or galaxies or planets. What were you thinking, like, what was your view of the world.
That's right, Like, before I knew that bananas were gross, I thought like, hey, maybe they were okay, But now I can never go back to a universe in which bananas could be digestive.
Hey more bananas for me, man. I'm happy that you don't like them.
It all works out. But you know, sometimes I like to imagine like alternative universes in which discoveries were made in different orders and different things were weird or puzzling, because you know, the reason that things it seem weird, it's only because we haven't seen the whole picture. It's like when you're doing a jigsaw puzzle and you don't know like where these pieces go or what that's going to reveal. The nature of the questions comes from the parts you haven't found yet. But in some sense that's just due to luck. You know, we found this before, we found that, We stumbled over this before we stumbled over that. So the history of these discoveries is really important for you to understand why we're asking the questions we're asking now.
Yes, So to the on the program, we are covering some pretty recent history, if physics wise, and we're covering probably the most famous particle I think in culture these days and maybe in physics.
That's right, And that's not something I'm grumpy about. I mean, I think the Higgs Boson deserves its role as the most famous particle. It plays a really essential role in our theory, and it's a really epic struggle to find it. The search for it goes over many billions of dollars and many different particle colliders and many decades.
Yeah, So to the on the program, we'll be asking the question, I was the Higgs Boson discovered on a Tuesday, right, wasn't it? Or a Wednesday?
You know?
It was no single moment. I think that's the short answer to the question. It's not like we came into work one day and boom, there was a Higgs boson in our email inbox, you know, or like we found one in the center of the lab, or there was just one moment when the results were like boom, there we have it. It's sort of a slow build, a gradually accumulation of data, a very gentle, gradual reveal, not like an exciting plot twist at the end.
I guess it wasn't discovered with a bang. It was more like with twenty three bazillion bangs a second.
It's like somebody very slowly drawing back the curtain so you can see more and more and more of it. The drama builds slowly, but then you know you need to have a date, You need to have a moment where you say, okay, this is it. We've decided we've discovered it. So that's officially the moment of discovery.
You guys picked July fourth, twenty twelve.
Yeah, that's just sort of random, just so a fun coincidence. And that's why we get to call it Higgs Dependence Day.
Because and on the Higgs. I guess we all depend on the Higgs. Really, the whole universe depends on the Higgs.
The whole universe does totally depend on the Higgs. If it wasn't for the Higgs boson, our universe would be totally different. And also, the Higgs boson is sort of precariously balanced. It's in this weird high energy state and it's the reason that particles have certain masses, and if that changed, then the universe would totally change. It would collapse into something unrecognizable to us. So thank Gosh for the Higgs Boson doing what it does.
He sainted rules by fear, we must worship, but otherwise it's gonna destroy the universe.
I think the Higgs Boson would rather be feared than loved. Yeah, it should be called the Machiavelli particle, not the God particle.
All right. Well, it's a very important particle, and it was discovered recently, and there's a bit of drama about it and a lot of interesting twists of the story. So we'll get into that today. But first, as usual, we were wondering how many people out there had heard of the story or know about the details of how the Higgs boson was discovered.
That's right, So if I asked people to volunteer to answer random zience questions on the Internet, not knowing anything about what I would ask them and no googling allowed. So thank you to everybody who participated. And if you'd like to volunteer your voice for future random science questions, please write to us to questions at Danielanjorge dot com.
All right, so before you listen to these answers, think about it for a second. What do you remember about July fourth, twenty twelve. Here's what people had to say.
The Higgs boson was discovered using the LHC. Some sequence of particle decays was detected that backed up the theory existing on the Higgs.
I know where that's cern a large Chandern collider, but how most likely shooting and colliding particles.
So the Higgs boson was discovered in the Large Hadron Colorida.
The Higgs boson was predicted by Peter Higgs and others, and then it was discovered in two thousand twelve in the Large Hadron Collider.
It was discovered in the Large Hydron Collider, and it was by zooming around hydrogen or helium electrons very close to the speed of light.
I think it was discovered with the Large Hydron Collider, but as to how, I don't know. I note that Higgs boson first discovered. In theory, we knew that every force has an acting particle, and for gravity we call that particular Higgs.
Physicists, even someone like Einstein, figured out that there was something missing and they kept looking for looking for and it was my understanding that Higgs was the one that came up with the idea of how it might might.
Exist if the Higgs boson gives mass to particles.
I'm going to suggest that they started with a particle with non mass. I think I heard in one of your Guys podcasts that they were discovered by the Large had Drunk Collider, So I'd assume that how it was discovered.
I'm not sure, though.
I feel like I should know that one. I think maybe we were smashing some particles together and found some extra energy that we couldn't account for.
All Right, some pretty knowledgeable answers here. You guys did a pretty good job of educating the public.
Yeah.
I think it's also a good pr by the LHC team because it's sort of the particle collider that's in people's minds. I mean, I don't know if you remember, but we also asked people how the top quark was discovered, and the answers were basically the same by the Large Hay Drunk Collider, even though that one was actually discovered by the previous commander. So I think that this is a win for the LAHC as being the particle collider that's in the forefront of people's minds and the tips of their tongues.
You're like the Kleenex of physics experiments. You know, pretty soon they're going to call all colliders to la.
That's right, I blow my nose on the LHC.
All right, So step us through the history here, Daniel. We're going to get into how it was discovered and how can we know that it's actually there. So take us back to before twenty twelve. What do we know and why do we think the Higgs boson existed?
So the Higgs boson is one of these particles that has a long history because we thought it existed before we discovered it. There are a lot of people who suspected it was there. And this is a grand tradition of this in particle physics, of like looking at the patterns of the particles that we see and seeing something missing or not having a question answered, and finding a missing piece that answers that question. It's just like with the jigsaw puzzle or with a periodic table. If there's a hole in the periodic table, you wonder, like, why is that hole there? Wouldn't this make more sense if there was something else there. So people spend a lot of time thinking about the patterns of the particles that we had seen and wondering about some things about them they didn't understand, and using that to predict the existence of this Higgs boson and also this Higgs field.
But in this case, was it really a pattern because I know, for the like some of the other quarts, it was sort of based on a pattern. But here wasn't more like about the math and looking at the equations and like, oh, it's missing some field tier to make it all balance out.
Yeah, Actually it was a lack of a pattern. You see, in the second half of this last century, people had understood that there was a deep connection between electromagnetism in the thing responsible for electricity and magnets, and the thing that gives us the photon, and this other force, the weak nuclear force, the one responsible for radioactive decay, and that force has three particles, a Z particle and two W particles, And people had understood that actually these two different forces were just parts of the same force. The electroweak force and the photon belonged with sort of a gang. It was actually not just like one photon over here and three weak particles over there. They're part of this gang of four particles and mathematically, it fit together beautifully. It's just like a missing part of a jigsaw puzzle finally clicked into place and you could understand why things look way they looked. It was just really gorgeous. Like from the group theory point of view, it satisfied lots of symmetries, but there was one problem. The problem is that the photon is really different from these other bosons in an important way that you mentioned, and that it has no mass, whereas the other ones are really heavy.
And so what made us think that they were all together in a gang? You know, like, is it because they all transmit the same force kind of or do they behave in a similar way.
They do kind of behave in a similar way. I mean electrons very familiar particles. They like to interact with photons, but also with the weak bosons, the w's and the disease and that's it. Electrons don't interact with anything else. That's all they interact with. And so it feels sort of natural to connect all the particles that electrons and also muons and taos talk to and look for a pattern among them to see if they fit into like a larger grouping. It's like when you put electricity and magnetism together, Electricity is a bunch of different phenomena that you observe, and magnetism are a bunch of different phenomena that you observe. But you notice that sometimes electric charges cause magnetism and sometimes magnetism can induce electricity, and so it makes more sense to think of them as one thing. I mean, they are different phenomena, right, it's not like magnets are electrical, but there really makes more sense. It's simpler just to think of it as part of a larger combination. They're connected, somebody, Yeah, It's like they're two sides of the same coin. And so you get this beautiful connection if you plug the photon in with these other three particles in the same way as if you merge electricity and magnetism, you get these beautiful symmetries. And particle physics is all about symmetries, about finding these patterns. And we don't know why the universe has symmetries. We don't know why it has patterns, but we have found that when you look for patterns, typically those things are clues, they're hints. They show you how the universe works.
Like everything needs to do somehow balance together or it'd be weird if it wasn't symmetric.
Yeah, nice, and here we have a really beautiful symmetry electroweak symmetry. These particles all fit together in this really nice way. And specifically you can like rotate your way through this four dimensional space. You have four particles there. If the symmetry works, you can rotate between them. And so like the photon and the z should play the same role. You should be able to rotate between them. But the problem is the symmetry was broken. It didn't quite work because the photon is very very light, it has no mass, and the z was very very heavy. So it's like an almost symmetry. It's like a m it's like a hint, like, oh, this almost works, but what about this one piece and that piece sort of stuck in physicist's eye for a long time.
It's like looking in the mirror and is seeing kind of a different image of yourself. You're like, something's going on here.
Yeah, and it's like almost right, but not quite. And so they wanted to understand, like is this symmetry just flawged and we throw it out the window, or is there a reason why it's broken is that a clue. Does that explain something else? Because the symmetry was too good to abandon, you know. On the other hand, there's lots of times in the history of physics when we thought we've had a beautiful idea and had to throw it away because it just didn't work. Like mathematically it works, but nature says no. So sometimes that happens. But sometimes, you know, it's just a clue that like you need to refine it or tweak it or twist it. And so that's what the Higgs boson was. It was a refinement of this theory to help it work right.
Well, although I feel like it's weird because I feel like you physicists started wanting things to be symmetric, but nowadays they accept that some things are not symmetric.
Yeah, well, you know, the universe doesn't always obay these symmetries. You know, we'd like to see symmetry because it's like beautiful and pretty, but then the universe says, yeah, that's nice, but I don't follow those rules. And so then we got to figure out why, like what are the real symmetris, you know, or how do we break these symmetries in the smallest possible ways, so our theories are still pretty I guess.
I mean, like, if we had known back then that some symmetries can be broken, would you still have look for the Higgs boson or come up with the Higgs boson or would you have just said, oh, well it's not cemmetal.
Oh, that's a great question, I think.
So.
I mean, there's just so much evidence that suggests that the weak force and electricity and magnetism are connected. You have to find some way to connect them, so I think it's too tempting to avoid.
So okay, So then that's how they came up with the Higgs field. It's like, hey, let's put a number here to make it all balanced out, and let's call that the Higgs field.
Yeah, because you can't just say I'm going to make these particles massive. I'm just going to put in by hand some numbers and make the W and the Z massive, because that breaks the kind of symmetry that you're trying to protect. It's called the local gauge symmetry of electroriwek symmetry less. You rotate these particles between themselves. So if you put the masses in, it just breaks that symmetry. So they found another way to give these particles mass. It's like, don't put the mass on the particle itself. Instead give it mass from its environment. So the mass is no longer like something that belongs to the particle itself. It's an after effect. It's an emergent phenomenon from interacting with its environment.
Like maybe it doesn't come from the photon, but maybe there's just something about space or the universe that somehow we're not seeing but magically balances out the equations.
Yeah, we talked about this on another podcast about renormalization. How, for example, the actual charge of the electron all by itself is like negative infinity, and it's only an interaction with a complex vacuum of space that it gets brought up to minus one. And the same way, the masses of these particles by themselves, like the Z and W all by themselves in an empty universe would have mass zero. But when you put them in our universe with a complex vacuum with particles and fields, whenever, they look like they have this heavier mass, and that's because they interact with the Higgs boson. So it's a clever way to effectively give mass to these particles without actually putting it on them, so you don't break this symmetry. It's like a clever little mathematical trick.
I guess the idea is that it's not a property of the particles, but it's more like a yeah, property of interacting with something, and that's different.
That's different, although all we can do is measure our interactions, and so it's a bit of a philosophical difference. It's like we talked about in the case of the renormalization episode, like what does it really mean for the particle to have no mass in an empty universe. It's never going to be in an empty universe. It's always going to be in our universe. And so it's a bit of a mathematical philosophical distinction, but it lets us keep this symmetry because we think the symmetry deals with like the bear the pure particle by itself.
All right, pretty cool. Let's now get into how we actually found this magic or not magic particle that gives everything mass and what the search for it was like. But first let's take a quick break.
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All right, Daniel, we're celebrating Higgs Dependence Day, the day that we learn of our deep dependence on the Higgs boson, which was July fourth, twenty twelve, a little over eight years ago. So how do we actually find this Higgs boson.
It's important to understand that the first idea was not for Higgs boson, but for a Higgs field. This is some new quantum field that fills the universe and has this effect that gives the Z and the W mass and not the photon. But one prediction of the field is that, like all other fields, if you give them a little blob of energy, if you excite them, if you get a little packet of excited field, then that looks like a particle, so there's a prediction also for a new particle, the Higgs boson. So the field and the particle have the same relationship as other particles and fields. But what we found was not directly the Higgs field. We looked for the Higgs boson, which is the particle from them.
Could you have a field without a particle? Could you, you know, predicted the Higgs field but not the Higgs boson, or when you predict the Higgs field, you automatically predict the Higgs boson.
Well, that's a great question. I think that every quantum field has to have a particle. I can't think of an example of a quantum feel it doesn't have a particle, And I think that your interaction with it in terms of perturbation theory is always described in terms of particles. But you know, I'm not sure. That's a really fun question. We'll smoke some banana peels and think about that deep question someday.
But I guess it was all sort of together, like when Peter Higgs came up with this idea of like playing this in to make the equations, where he must have known right away that meant that there was a particle involved.
Too, Yes, absolutely, And you know, Peter Higgs sort of wins the race to get his name put on this, but there were lots of other people coming up with very similar ideas at the same time, and they submitted papers like within weeks of each other, and so there's still a lot of bitterness. And in some parts of the world it's not called the Higgs Boson, it's called the b. E. H Boson because there's two other guys, Brout and Englert, who have their names on it. Also, so depending on like where your conference is, it's called the b. E. H Boson or the Higgs Boson or.
Really you have to like code switch when you go between conferences.
Yeah, precisely. And there's a whole group of Americans who are totally left out of the Nobel Prize and the naming and they're grumpy and all their friends call it after them, and so yeah, you.
Totally have to code switch. Oh man, But you know, I like the Higgs name. I feel like it's better than that.
You feel that best sounds like you burped or something, right, Yeah, but Higgs sounds pretty cool.
If I'm insulting like all of Europe.
Right now, mostly just Belgium.
Actually, well they don't get insulted, so they're just drinking Belgian beer.
Well they have good fries and waffles anyway. So what we do is we look for the boson, not the field, And like with other particles, the way you make it is you use a collider and you smash particles together to try to make enough energy in a tiny little spot that the universe can make heavy particles. Most of the universe is like dilute and cool, and so there isn't enough energy to make anything except for very light, stable particles like electrons and quarks that we're made out. But if you want to find new stuff, you got to collide particles that really high energy and create those little packets of energy that nature can then turn, sometimes very rarely into an excitation of the Higgs field and give you a Higgs boson.
I guess one question I have is, you know, it seems like the Higgs field is so pervasive and so integral to all particles, and it's like it's always there, Like why is it so hard to make it BLib? You know, like if it's right there, why does it have such a big threshold for us to find it. Why couldn't we have found it earlier with lower energy collider.
Yeah, that's a great question, And the key is the mass. The prediction from Peter Higgs was there is this, and therefore there is this particle, but he couldn't predict what the mass of that particle was. It could have been very very very light, in which case it would have been discovered just a few years after he predicted it, or it could have been super heavy so that we hadn't even discovered it yet, And so he didn't know how heavy it was. And like with all things in collider world, the heavier it is, the more energy you need to make it, and so the bigger your collider has to be, and so the more expensive it is, and so it just took time to build a big enough collider to find it.
I guess you need energy to make it, but I guess. You know, it's sort of a weird thing to think about the Higgs boson having mass, because isn't isn't that what it does is to give mass to things.
Yeah, it's weird. It also has self interactions. It interacts with itself, and that's the thing that gives it mass, and Higgs field didn't predict how strong that self interaction would be, and so we didn't know, and so people started looking for it pretty much right away and not finding it all right.
So then, yeah, you build a collider. You've smacked protons together, and you hope that a Higgs comes out every once in a while.
That's right, And protons have inside them quarks and gluons. The gluons hold the quarks together, and what you hope for is two of those gluons actually collide together with enough energy to give you a Higgs boson. And the Higgs boson doesn't last for very long, so you can't just like take a picture of it. You can't see it and say, here's our Higgs boson, in which case you only would have need to have made one of them. You could put it on your wall and that's your discovery. The problem is that it lasts for ten to the minus twenty three seconds and then it turns into other stuff. That's what you got to do is look at that other stuff and figure out if it looks like it came from a Higgs boson or something else.
I guess what makes you think that it could it even had mass, It couldn't have been like a photon or would that not help you with the symmetry of the equations.
Yeah, in order to have the effect that it has, it has to have a non zero mass, otherwise it wouldn't have this weird symmetry breaking effect. But we didn't know it could have been ten times heavier than it turned out to be, or ten times lighter.
You know.
That's one of the frustrating things about the theories that we didn't quite know where to look. And that means you don't know how big to build your accelerator or how it will decay, because all those things change based on how heavy it is.
Really, it can have any kind of mass, Like but you know what, do we have a very different universe if the Higgs boson was really big and massive.
No, you could have the much heavier Higgs boson and basically have the same universe.
Really like the Higgs was really massive. Wouldn't that I don't know affect how things have mass or anything like that.
No, because it doesn't matter. Most things get massed through their interaction with the field. It doesn't matter how heavy the particle itself is.
All right, So they're really fast collisions and the Higgs doesn't last for very long, So how do you actually detect it, Like, how do you know it existed if it only exists for ten to the minus twenty three seconds.
And so we can never say for sure. What we do is we look at a collision and we look at the patterns of the stuff that came out, and we say, okay, this looked like this collision had, for example, two photons in it. We can add up the energies of those photons and say, okay, the total energy that came out of this collision, how much was it? And if a Higgs boson was there, then the total energy that came out of the collision should add up to the mass of the Higgs boson. So we look for a lot of events like that, a lot of collisions that turn into two photons. We add up all their masses and we make a plot of it like a histogram, and we look for a bump. We look for a bunch of collisions that led to two photons that all have the same mass, because if the Higgs boson is real, it'll make more of those events happen, and.
You have to know for sure that those two photons couldn't have come from any other thing.
We can never know that for sure. There are other ways to make two photons photons, those two same photons, but they don't tend to make two same photons that add up to the Higgs mass. They tend to make random masses. And so the background, the things that mimic your signature that also give you two photons, just give you random numbers. Whereas photons that came from the Higgs always end up at about the same place. So if you do it often enough, you notice like a pile of them accumulating at the same place with the true mass of the Higgs. You look for this basically, this bump over this background spectrum.
Right, and I imagine you see other bumps, but they're probably due to other like interactions, right.
Yeah, Well, bumps are pretty exciting because they almost always mean some particles there, some heavy particles there, and it decayed. And so basically every bump is a Nobel prize.
You know.
It's sort of like you're draining a swamp and you're seeing features in the lake, and every one is something fascinating and interesting, and the bigger your collider, and the longer you run it, the more you're able to like pump water out of that lake and see all the hidden features. And so we're constantly doing this, right, This is why we run the collider over and over and over again, because we're looking for smaller and smaller and more subtle bumps. The more collisions you make, the more you can see these little bumps emerge from the fog.
So I guess it's all statistical, right, because you run us a bunch of times, and if you see it is kind of like an unexpected high incidence of you know, collisions in this mass range, that must mean that the Higgs was there.
Yeah, it's all statistical, and we can't point to one event and say this one was definitely a Higgs. We just say, well, these fifty events all have about the same value, and there's more close to this value than any other value, and so we think it's very likely that it's there. But it's a little bit frustrating because you can't like take a picture of it or say conclusively this collision was a Higgs boson it. It's in the end a purely statistical.
Say you only see the leftovers or the footprints in the snow. You never actually like take a picture of it.
Yeah, it's like you're looking for Bigfoot and you have tracks, and you have spore and you have you know, lots of other evidence that convince you that it's not just random nonsense, But you don't actually have the Bigfoot itself.
Right, you see it. You see a lot of poop in one place that more than usual. You're like, hmm, something was here and something likes to keep coming back here.
Yeah, precisely.
All right, Well let's get into now how we actually found it and what that discovery meant. But first, let's take another quick break.
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Hi.
I'm David Eagleman from the podcast Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science podcast in America. I'm a neuroscientists at Stanford, and I've spent my career exploring the three pound universe in our heads.
We're looking at a whole new.
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Join me weekly to explore the relationship between your brain and your life by digging into unexpected questions. Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
All right, we are talking about the discovery of the Higgs boson, which was an important date in history, at least physics history. And step us through Daniel. What was it actually like to like look for this thing and to find this thing. Were people confident they would find it or was it kind of a big shot in the dark.
It was a very long and sometimes painful process, full of excitement and disappointment. And it was another one of these transatlantic rivalries where the Americans took the lead, and then the Europeans took over and they didn't find it, and then the Americans took over again and had a chance, and then finally the Europeans family like a race, Yeah, it really was. It's like an arms race article rate in science, and it's constantly this race for who's got the highest energy colliders. It's a bit of like nationalism and prestige. It's a lot like the space race, you know, except without the threat of icbm's raining down on you.
Who had the biggest rocket kind.
Of yeah, and it started with the Americans. So there's a long history of looking for the Higgs boson and very low masses in other colliders which didn't see it. But once we understood like this thing was gonna be pretty heavy, we knew it needed a big collider. And so the Americans had a big idea. They were gonna build the super Conducting super Collider, awesomely named and it was gonna be the most powerful.
Collib for real. That was I thought you were just using hyperbole.
No, they used hyper belie.
Actually call this what is it, super.
Superconducting super Collider. It's a pretty super name.
Yeah, it's like we made Superman. We're gonna we're to use Superman as much as.
Possible, exactly. And this thing was gonna have so much energy. It was gonna have thirty three tarra electron bolts now terra electron bolts. That's thirty three trillion electron bolts. That's a whole lot of energy. And it was gonna be the biggest collider ever. And they started building it. It was going to be in Waxahatchie, Texas, And they started building it. They started boring a hole. They cut like twenty kilometers of tunnel underground in Texas. They spent billions of dollars and then they canceled the project.
What happened? And well, and this one is interesting because it wasn't a ring right, like I think it's like a straight collider.
Now, this one was going to be a ring where they never finished the ring, so it's still like a partial tunnel underground in Texas. And it just sort of lost political support and became a scapecode for like, you know, excessive government spending, Like, what are you spending five billion dollars on this thing? Is ridiculous?
Really?
Do we scoffed at five billion dollars for the search for the ultimate particle?
I know?
And it was especially ridiculous because they spent like two billion dollars digging a hole and then like another three billion dollars like closing up shop and filling it in.
Yeah.
So yeah, it was so much waste of money. And there's a funny story there because the guy who was the director of CERN at the time, and CERN was preparing to build their own collider to look for the Higgs boson, he came to the US and testified in front of Congress that it was a big waste of money to build the super conducting super collider because by the time it's finished, SERN would have already discovered the Higgs bosone.
No way sabotage.
So Carlo Rubia, the same guy who in the top quark history made that false claim to discover the top quark, he sabotaged. He totally knife in the back to the super conducting stuper.
With his confidence. He's just like, don't even bother. He like totally psyched us out.
He totally shacked us out. And of course his prediction was boloney because the Europeans didn't discover the Higgs boson with their next collider, and it's such a tragedy because that collider would have taught us so much about the universe. Thirty three terra electron volts is three times as powerful as our best current collider, the Large Hadron Collider. Really, so this is like better, even better, three times better than the one we have now thirty years ago. So particle physics was set back like several decades by that funding decision.
Because of this one move by this person who had ambitioned to be the first one to discover it.
Yeah, and you know, also the vaguaries of American electoral politics and shifting priorities in the house and all this stuff. But you know, it was sort of like particle physics aimed too high and flew too close to the Sun and then came crashing down.
I see, like, maybe they had only spent two billion dollars for a twenty two terra electronic old collider, maybe they would have made it through.
Maybe. And you know a lot of people left their positions at Academia to go work for the super Conducting super Collider lab, and their careers greatered after that, and so it was really a big tragedy for American particle physics.
All right, So then the Europeans took over or what happened.
Yeah, so then the Europeans took over, and the superconducting super collider was going to collide protons, and protons are very powerful, but the Europeans took a different strategy. They decided to collide electrons and positrons. And these things are much cleaner because they don't have the strong interaction, and so the collisions are just simpler and more powerful and easier to under stand. The trick is it's not as easy to get them up to high speed because protons are easier to accelerate to high speed because they have more mass.
Counterintuitively, right, but this is still not the LAC.
This is not the LHC. It's the LEEP, the large electron positron collider, call it LEP. And this thing was like much much less than even one terra electron volt. It was zero point two is a fifth of a terra electron bolt.
M doesn't sound so big compared to thirty three.
Yeah, exactly. It was much smaller. But you know, the good thing about having electron colliders, you got to use all the energy in the electron. When you collide protons, you only get part of it because you're really just using like one quark or glue on inside the proton. But when you collide electrons and positrons, you get all the energy, so you don't need as much energy in an electron positron collider.
All right, Well, I've never heard of the LP, so I'm guessing it didn't discover the Higgs boton.
It didn't, but it almost did. And they turned this thing on and they ran it for a while, and they didn't see the Higgs, and they didn't see the Higgs, and they didn't see the Higgs and then the last summer that they were going to have this thing turned on the summer of two thousand, they're supposed to shut down so they could tear it apart and build a large hadron collider. There's gonna be the big upgrade that last summer. Oh, it is in the same place, in the same place, in the same tunnel, right, So this same tunnel where the large Electron proton collider was is the same tunnel we use now for the LHC. So you couldn't run both of them at once.
Oh what, there's the same size tunnel.
Same size tunnel, just stronger magnets. And so that's how they saved a bunch of money to build the LHC, is that they put it in the same place as the original collider. But that meant that they couldn't operate both at the same time. So to build the LAC to have to turn off the LED.
So what happened right before they closed?
Yeah, so right before they closed. It's the summer of two thousand and you know in Europe, in like July and August, everybody goes on vacation like it's ridiculous. It doesn't matter what's going on. Everybody takes like a month of vacation.
A month. I've heard six weeks is the normal in Europe.
A month of the minimum. Everyone just sort of like slides down the content to the beaches on the Mediterranean. And so some people stayed behind, didn't take vacation. And a good friend of mine, Marumi, who was a post doc a the time, he was there in the control room and it was like the last few weeks this collider would even run. And he's sitting there looking at the data, and all of a sudden, boom, there's a collision that comes in that looks exactly like a Higgs boson. It's like beautiful, it has exactly everything you would expect. It's gorgeous. You know. It has a certain mass at about one hundred and fifteen GeV, which is like right on the edge of what the LP could discover. And he thought, wow, that's pretty, but you know whatever, It's one event, and then later that same afternoon, boomed is another one exactly the same mass, and he's like, wow, Amy, this is like the moment like I'm here by myself. Everybody else is on vacation. Maybe like nature is talking to me with an incredible moment for him.
Why would it start now and not before?
Well, they were turning up the energy, so they were cranking up the energy bit by bit. They were like squeezing out as much energy as they could, and so it might be that they had just crossed the threshold.
Be able to create it all right, and was it real?
It turned out it wasn't real, but it was tantalized. It was not it was not. And in the end he had six events. So everybody came back from vacation. He was like, guys, while you were on the beach, here's what I found, and he should have these events, and it set the whole community on fire. People were like, oh my gosh. The problem was they didn't have enough events to prove it. They didn't have like conclusive evidence. They had a hint, right, So they wanted to run longer. But then everybody's also waiting to build the LAHC. So they petitioned to the management of CERN. They said, please delay the LAC and let's run this collider for another six months or another year to get like conclusive evidence.
Right, yeah, just to get more hits.
Yeah, because across the pond, the Americans were building their collider, the Tevatron outside Chicago, and if they turned off the LP would take them, you know, eight or ten years to build the LAHC. In the meantime, if it really was there at one hundred and fifteen, the Americans would find it right. And so it seemed like a really dangerous bet to turn off the LP where you had this like exciting hint that maybe he was right there, and to build the LHC.
So they actually turned it off. Yeah, they said no.
The certain director said no, I don't think that the evidence is conclusive, and the LHC should be our priority, and so he shut it down. He gave them like an extra couple of weeks and he shut it down ago.
What did they find in those extra weeks?
Not much. You know, they had four experiments around the ring at the LP, and the one that my friend was on saw six events that looked like a Higgs boson, and a couple of the other experiments saw one or two. But some of them saw nothing. And so it was like it was tempting, it was tantalizing, but it wasn't really that strong. It was sort of like a last ditch effort to maybe see it there, but it wasn't really conclusive, and so the certain director made a really tough choice.
Well, what do we think now, do we think that it was or that it wasn't for sure?
We think it was just a fluctuation, because if it was there, if it really was the Higgs boson at one hundred and fifteen GeV, the tevatron, the next accelerator would have found it. And now, of course we know with the benefit of history that it's not at one hundred and fifteen. It was found later at one twenty five. So that was just a fluctuation. You know, you flip a coin one hundred times, sometimes you'll get weird distributions, and that's what happened here. And the folks were like desperate to find that. They were so excited to see it that they got really excited about what, in the end was just a few random events.
All right. So then I guess while they were building the LAC then the Americans had kind of like this window for them to do it, to find it with the tevatron.
Yes, so we built a collider outside Chicago at Fermulab, and it was colliding protons and antiprotons at two TeV, so this is ten times the energy the collider at left, although you don't get to harness all that energy because remember the proton is like a bag of particles that has quarks and gluons in it, which you're colliding are those quarks and gluons. They don't have the full energy of the proton, but still it's really powerful, and you're right, they had like ten years to look for it. But you know, protons are messy because you're collide a whole bag of particles and it makes a big, messy splash, just not as clean and pure as colliding electrons and positrons, so it's harder. So they had more energy, but it was always going to be tough for the tepatron to find it. The only chance they had is if it was very very light. If it was at one fifteen, they could.
Have found it, but not higher because they can go up to two TeV.
They can go up to two TV, they could have found it like below one fifteen. And also there's a window between around like one fifty and one eighty where it does a very special thing. It turns into w bosons that the tepatron would have been very good at finding, so they were just you know, rolling the dice. If it was low mass or if it was in this one window, they totally would have found it. The tepatron would have found the Higgs boson.
So then what happened Then they gave up.
Well, they ran as long as they could, and then once the LEDC turned on, then they gave up. They said, all right, well there's no point anymore. Really, yeah, what uh?
Because I guess they weren't finding it, and so they were like, all right, somebody has a better machine.
Yeah, and the LEDC is you know, ten times as powerful as the tevatron. It has higher energy and more collisions per second.
Oh it's twenty TV.
Yeah, so the LEDC is about five times is powerful. It's collisions they varied from seven TV at the start up to now thirteen TeV, so about an order of magnitude more powerful. But also they have more collisions per second. And so the tempatron knew that, you know, as soon as it turned on it was going to find it pretty quickly. There was no point to continue because for the tevatron to find it would need like two and a half times more data need to run for like another five or ten years. But you know there were people in the fields who are like, no, we should keep running, We should keep going because they might stumble.
Right, yeah, they might crash right, Like the machine is hard to get it to work.
Yeah, And you know when they turned the machine on the LHC after ten years they'd been quiet building this thing. They turned it on in two thousand and eight. It only ran for like nine days before there was a big disaster.
So they did stumble.
They did stumble exactly. And there was an electrical fault. One of the things hadn't been and wired correctly, and it shorted out and released like tons of liquid helium. There's this big alarm. And I was actually at the LEDC that day. I was on shift in the control room, which is normally a very boring thing. You sit there, you look at a bunch of panels, they're all green lights. You try not to fall asleep, but sometimes something crazy happens. And that happened while.
I was there, really did, like the lights turned red with the big horns, like yeah, exactly. It wasn't just like a computer like window popping up. You just click, okay, like, wait, wait, wait, what blood did I say?
No, it was a big disaster.
You know.
There were fires and like really heavy equipment got like shoved around inside the tunnel, and so it was a big disaster. We got to hit the big red button finally to you know, shut everything down. It was exciting, but of course it was also disappointing because it took like fifteen months to fix it. This stuff is super cold, and so to fix it you have to warm it up very gradually, fix it, and then cool it down very gradually, which takes months and months.
So maybe the tevatron should have been going, you know.
So the tepatron kept going during that window. They were like, oh, we got one more little chance at this Uh. They were watching the lac stumble, yes exactly, and so they were like, keep going, everybody, maybe we'll see it. And so they pushed a little harder one last gasp because again nobody knew where it was. It could have been like just around the corner in the window that tabatron could have found it. But in the end, the eliotc turned on, and then people turned off the tebatron because they figured they were not going to find it. It was time to let the eliotc do its thing, and.
Pretty soon after it turned on, you guys found it like it like, it didn't take a long time.
It didn't take a long time.
You know.
We turned on again in like two thousand and ten and started analyzing data. And you know, it takes a little bit of time because you have to get enough data and these colliders, when you turn them on, they work in fits and spurts until the engineers figure out like how to kick it and how to tweak this knob, and you know, on tuesdays you got to elbow it this way and really get it, you know, humming. But eventually the data started pouring in and then we were doing that thing we talked about, We're like pulling the water out of the swamp and seeing the features. And you know, there were wiggles in the data early on that people got excited about. And people didn't know, is it there? Is it not there? Where are we going to find it? Nobody really knew where to look.
So finally, one day, not on July fourth, they actually started getting the data and it started to point to having found the Higgs. But you know, was there a moment I imagine you told me that maybe there wasn't. But I wonder if there was a moment when like some grad student or some physicists you know, pulls out the data and they're like, huh, what is this little bump?
Well, you know there was a moment for me in the summer of twenty eleven. Both experiments saw bumps, but they saw bumps in different places. Like ATLAS saw bump, but it was at around one hundred and forty five gv. The CMS saw a bump around one hundred and twenty GV. So you knew that they were just random because they didn't agree. Now, these are two different experiments at LISTS and CMS, two different experiments at different points around the ring dependent data, and so you expect them, if the Higgs is real, to see bumps at the same place. It's a very important cross check. And also the two groups. There's a whole group of thousands of experimentalists working on atlasts and thousands of experimentalists working on CMS. They're not supposed to talk to each other, supposed to keep each other separate, supposed to keep these secrets so that the work can be independent.
Right.
The problem is, of course, all these people know each other. We're all friends. Sometimes you got like a married couple where one is on one experiment the others on the other experiment. You know, they're talking to each other, so there's no way that any secrets are really being kept. And so there was a moment in like late twenty eleven, I called up a friend of mine on the other experiment. I said, hey, you know, we have a bump. Where's your bump?
You told them I had a bump, like I found a lump.
What no, no, no, I mean sharing information like that is strictly against the rules. I would never do that. Did I say it was me? I mean, I'm meant it was a colleague of mine who talked to his friend and then told me about it. I mean, you must have misheard me. I would never do that.
You tainted the results.
We had this bump, and I was curious about whether they had a bump, And it turns out they had a bump in the same place. And that's the moment.
And you figured that out on the phone.
At the moment I started to believe when I thought, you know what, I think this is it. I think we actually did find.
It broke the rules. Daniel Well why did you do that?
I think you mean my colleague who broke.
The rule, and your friend also broke it because he told or she told you where the bump was.
Again, this is a story about a colleague of mine who broke these rules. Everybody was breaking the rules. Man, these were the worst kept secrets at CERN.
Oh man, I've less confidence now, Daniel in the Higgs Botson.
Well, I was not directly involved in producing that plot, so it couldn't influence me in neither was he.
Oh I see, so you were like literally a league like he started some secret and you phoned the other team.
Again, this unnamed colleague of mine, he was the league. We saw bumps in the same place, and so that's the moment I started to leave it. And then we just kept collecting more and more data, and the bumps got bigger and bigger, and they lined up right on top of each other. And then in late June we had enough events, enough collisions at all the same place that we could say, statistically, it was very, very unlikely for this to be random chance. Random chance can produce anything, but the odds were like one in millions that just random chance could produce all these bumps at exactly the same place. So that was the day we said, all right, we decided that now we have discovery.
And that was July fourth, twenty twelve.
And that was July fourth, twenty twelve, and there was big announcement at CERN, and everybody knew there was going to be the announcement the next day. So it starting like July third, everybody at CERNED was like standing in line to get into that auditorium and sleeping in line, like camping out. You know, this is like Comic Con, but nerd edition at CERN and.
Nerds super super conducting super.
Nerds exactly, and people really wanted to be in that room. And they invited Peter Higgs and he was there, and the director of SERN gave a talk, and you know, for the people in the audience, we already knew the results. We've been involved in producing them and preparing them. But it was just a moment we all got together and basically said, all right, let's high five and declare that we have found this thing after decades and decades of searching emails.
The rest of the world is like the Higgs what wait, you have a collider in Geneva. Nobody told us about this.
You know, the team at CERN is really good at pr They are very good at popularizing the science and making people understand it. And that's why I think the Higgs boson is one of the most famous particles, is because it's been well sold to the public as an exciting discovery.
Also, it was the Obama years. You know, we were happy about all good news.
That's right, and we believed scientists that's right.
Then that gets us to today. So now these days, we know that the Higgs field exists, and that the Higgs boson exists, and it makes all the equations balance out. And now we have a more complete picture of the universe and the particles in it.
That's right. And now we know where the Higgs is. It's at about one hundred and twenty five GIV, a number we didn't know before we measured it. And we can study all of its properties. We can see it turning into this kind of particle and that kind of particle, and we can try to measure its properties in great detail and see is this the particle that Higgs predicted or is it a weird version of it? Are there more Higgs bosons out there? And so the search doesn't stop just because we found it. Now we're studying in gory detail and trying to see if it has any more secrets to reveal.
All right, well again, also pretty exciting and good insight into how science works little by little through competition and friendly breaking of the rules.
Right, and anybody on the als experiment who heard that, please forgive me breaking the rules. But I bet you did too.
You're like, hopefully nobody's listening to this podcast, not a couple of one hundred thousand or ten thousand people. Well, I'm sure you know there's like you know, podcast host, podcast listener confidentiality.
Absolutely, yeah, yeah, I mean we assume that, so I'm trusting you with this story, folks.
All right, well, thanks for joining us, Thanks for telling us the story. Daniel, Well, we hope you enjoyed that. See you next time.
Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact. But the people in the dairy industry are That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. House US Dairy tackling greenhouse gases. Many farms use anaerobic digestors to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit us dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
Our iHeartRadio Music Festival for a sentate by Capitol One Coming Back to Las Vegas Sep. Twenty first, a weekend full of superstar performances a Sap, Rocky, Big Sean Came, looka Bail Tojikaulia, when Stefani, Hoosier, Keith Urban, New Kids on the Block, Paramore, Shaboozi, The Black Crows, The Weekend, Thomas Red, Victoria Monette, Coldplays, Chris Martin and Moore, stream Live Holy on Hulu.
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Hi, I'm David Eagleman from the podcast Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science podcast in America.
I mean neuroscientists at.
Stanford and I've spent my career exploring the three pound universe in our heads. Join me weekly to explore the relationship.
Between your brain and your life.
Because the more we know about what's running under the hood, better we can steer our lives. Let's into Inner Cosmos with David Eagelman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
