Particle Fever

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- No, I don't know.

- A few people.

I was... it was terrible.

Tomorrow's will be better.

I don't think I can say that.

Say it in a public forum.

I need... I need evidence.

It's big, no?

Ever since I entered physics,

people have been talking about

this machine.

The Large Hadron Collider,

the biggest machine

ever built by human beings,

is finally going to turn on.

And after many, many years

of waiting and theorizing

about how matter got created

and about what

the deep fundamental theory

of nature is...

all those theories

are finally going to be tested,

and we're gonna know something.

And we don't know

what it's gonna be now,

but we will know,

and it's gonna change

everything.

And if the LHC

sees new particles,

we're on the right track.

And if it doesn't, not

only have we missed something,

but we may not ever know

how to proceed.

We are at a fork in the road,

and it's either going to be

a golden era...

Oh!

Or it's going to be quite stark.

And I've never heard of

a moment like this in history,

where an entire field

is hinging on a single event.

- Hi.

- Hi.

- I'm David.

- I'm Fabiola.

Fabiola, nice to meet you.

So, look, I have suggested

to be on this side

because this big wheel

is quite spectacular.

Yeah, yeah.

More than ever,

this will require

the collaboration

between the theory

and experimentalists,

so it would be

a very nice period

where we work together and,

uh...

Well, it's fun to finally

interact with experimentalists.

I mean, I used to be

just in my office,

coming up with, you know,

crazy ideas.

It's a big thing.

There is a general sense waiting

for this machine to start,

this massive machine that has

taken so many years to build.

We are all in great anticipation

of what it might find.

And every time

there's even a rumor

that a new particle

is discovered...

even before it turns on...

the entire field

goes into a fever pitch.

The experiment was designed

initially in the mid '80s

and has taken

this long to construct.

There are 10,000 people

of over 100 nationalities.

That includes countries

which are mortal enemies

of each other,

like India and Pakistan,

and Georgia and Russia,

and Iran and Israel.

All have physicists

working on this machine.

These big blue things

are 7-ton

superconducting magnets,

which have to be cooled

with liquid helium

to the coldest temperatures

on Earth,

colder than empty space.

There are 100,000 computers

connected all over the world

to deal with the data.

In fact, the worldwide web

was invented at CERN

so that physicists

all over the planet

could share the data.

The United States was building

a machine just like this,

in fact, a bigger machine,

in Texas,

but they ran into

a small technical difficulty.

I doubt anyone believes

that the most pressing issues

facing the nation include

an insufficient understanding

of the origins of the universe.

Unfortunately, the

Superconducting Super Collider

was canceled by Congress

in 1993.

And finally, he's saying,

"Well, if we don't do it,

the Europeans will do it."

Let them do it!

We'll steal their technology

like they steal our technology.

It got very political.

It was very expensive,

very complicated.

It's hard for physicists

to explain

why we do

these kinds of experiments.

The purpose of the machine

is not military application.

It's not commercial application.

It's to understand something

about the basic laws of physics.

There are two kinds

of particle physicists:

There are the experimentalists.

They built the big machines,

run the experiments,

analyze the data,

and try to discover things,

like new particles;

And then there are

the theorists, like me.

We construct the theories

that try to explain everything

we see in nature.

Without us, the experimentalists

are in the dark,

but without them,

we'll never know the truth.

I mean, if you go,

it won't be so terrible.

When I was at Stanford,

I had a mentor:

Savas Dimopoulos.

Savas only likes to work

on the biggest puzzles.

Now, just for fun,

I wanted to tell you that the

enabling technologies that...

He has

some of the most famous theories

that will be tested at the LHC,

but he doesn't know

if any of them are true,

so there's an intensity with

which he approaches physics.

If he works on a paper that

could result in a Nobel Prize,

he doesn't allow more

than three people on the paper,

because you can only share

the Nobel Prize

with three people.

That's the level

at which he's operating

and the impact

he's trying to have.

Takes us beyond the

confines of atomic physics.

In particle physics,

you have to have a threshold

amount of intelligence,

whatever that means.

But the thing

that differentiates scientists

is purely an artistic ability

to discern what is a good idea,

what is a beautiful idea,

what is worth spending time on,

and, most importantly,

what is a problem that

is sufficiently interesting,

yet sufficiently difficult

that it hasn't yet been solved,

but the time

for solving it has come now?

So people have been waiting

for this experiment,

the LHC, for a very long time.

Nothing like it

has ever happened.

All the superlatives

are justified.

This is the case

where the hype is...

the hype

is approximately accurate.

To get, you know, 3,000 people

to work

on an experiment together,

whose goal is to understand

what's going on at distances

a thousand times smaller

than the proton...

this is... this is a really

extraordinary testament

to what...

to some of the highest ideals

we can have as human beings.

It's...

Nima and I got our PhDs

around the same time.

He's a couple years ahead of me.

And Nima

is the star of our generation,

and he's the guy we all followed

and looked up to

and tried to keep up with

and tried to outpace

if we could.

Since the mid '70s,

we've had an amazingly

successful theory of nature

that we call the Standard Model

of particle physics.

But sitting in the heart

of the theory is a sickness,

very, very glaring

conceptual problems

that infected

this fantastic understanding.

Why is the universe big?

Why is gravity so much weaker

than all the other forces?

The kinds of answers that this

theory gives to these questions

seems so patently absurd

that we think that we're missing

something very, very big.

And on top of all of that,

there is one prediction

of this theory...

absolutely crucial

for it to even make

internal theoretical sense...

and this is

the famous Higgs particle.

The Higgs, or something like it,

must show up.

If it doesn't show up,

there's something

truly, deeply wrong,

very, very, deeply wrong

with the way

we think about physics.

There are strong reasons

to think that some

of these questions

will find answers at the LHC.

There's been no shortage

of ideas

for what they might be,

but this is really

this generation of people's...

my generation of people's...

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