Smashing Particles for Science

Published Jul 4, 2014, 1:00 PM

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

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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, 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, 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. 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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. 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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. 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 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, 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 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, 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, 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 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 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. 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, 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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, 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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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. Let's Go Places,

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