Particle Fever Page #6

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a factor of a million, billion,

billion, billion, billion,

billion, billion,

there's something very wrong

with your understanding

of basic physics.

Even worse,

this one number,

the cosmological constant,

needs to have

this extremely precise value.

And if the value

is different even by a tiny bit,

we would radically change what

the world looks like around us.

If you saw a situation where,

if the parameter

has a very dangerous value

and you change it a little bit,

the world

would change radically,

and we'd be dead.

We couldn't possibly live.

You would wonder

where that came from.

You know, how is that possible?

So just on the face of it,

you would look at the situation

and say,

"Wow, someone really cared

to put this parameter

"at just the right value

so that we get to be here

"and that

it's a pleasant universe

and really cares a lot."

This is the sort of thing that

really keeps you up at night.

It really makes you wonder,

"Maybe we've got something

"about the whole picture,

the big picture,

totally, totally,

totally wrong."

Before I went

to elementary school,

my mother started telling me

biblical stories.

She told me that if we are good,

we'll go to paradise,

and we will stay there forever.

And when she said "forever,"

I started panicking.

I kept asking, "Forever?"

"Forever?"

You mean, it never ends?

Like, you wake up,

and you know that then,

you go back to sleep,

and this never ends, never ends,

never ends.

I started crying.

She told me,

"What's wrong with you?

"This is paradise.

"It will be a lot of fun.

You'll be very happy there."

But this idea of eternity,

something infinite,

scared me.

There is

a scientific alternative

to believing there's

someone out there who loves us,

twiddling the dials very finely

for things to work out.

And this alternative,

said briefly,

is that everything we see

in our observed universe

is actually a very small part

of a much,

much vaster multiverse.

You might

literally imagine that,

from some bird's eye

point of view,

if you went

to enormous distances,

you would see that our universe

is actually a little pocket

inside a vastly bigger space.

In this picture,

these mysterious numbers,

like the cosmological constant,

are actually basically random.

And out there in the multiverse,

next to us somewhere,

is another region

where these numbers take on

some other random value,

and then another region

where they take on

some other random value still.

Only in a tiny sliver,

a minuscule part

of this gigantic multiverse,

for completely

accidental reasons,

do these numbers take on

the very, very special values

which allows structures to grow,

stars to form, galaxies to form.

Ultimately,

things like us to form.

This is the really

opposite extreme interpretation

of the presence of fine-tuning

as intelligent designers

would want to give.

If you believe

that someone out there cares

and twiddles the parameters

so that you can exist,

that puts our existence

at the very core of reality.

If you believe

that our entire universe

is a tiny, little,

minuscule spec

in a gigantic multiverse

which is mostly lethal,

that's a polar opposite

philosophy

for what the universe

looks like.

In fact, it's an idea

that many physicists loathe,

because certain questions

then become things

that we will not hope

to be able to understand.

Nima is now an advocate

for this idea

that the laws of physics

are different

in different parts

of this multiverse,

that what we measure

in experiments

are not deep mysteries

of nature,

but they're just random

accidents in our universe,

that maybe even the Higgs itself

is a random accident that

has occurred in our universe

and let's life exist,

but has no explanation.

In a sense,

it's the end of physics.

On the one hand,

we have the direction

that we've been on

for the last 400 years,

towards increasing beauty,

simplicity, symmetry,

and a path

that has time and time again

paid off with deeper

and deeper insights

about the way the world works.

On the other hand, we have

the idea of the multiverse,

which would move us

to a real picture

not of symmetry and beauty

and order,

but fundamentally of chaos

on enormous distances.

This is the really

very, very big-scale question

which the LHC

is going to push us in

one way or the other.

What happens, for example,

if...

Oh, blimey.

Yeah, there's a lot of...

Hi, Katja.

You all right?

Oh, you're not recording this,

huh?

Yes, we're all on the...

Yeah, don't worry

about all the other crap.

We've got the beams

going around again.

The magnet repairs

are holding up well,

and our next challenge

is to take these beams

up to high energy

and collide them.

Okay.

We're very, very aware

of the damage we can do.

Here we go.

That's what worries me stiff

at the moment.

The original proposal

for ATLAS was in 1989.

And you're kind of riding

this idea.

You've got this dream

of physics.

This dream of physics

is what pulled everyone along

for those 19 years.

And so here, now, today,

finally,

with high-energy collisions,

we can start to look

for that dream of new physics.

Uh, blue.

The control room, yes.

The control room.

This is the control room.

The pressure of it being

an event, of course, is there.

And, of course, anything

can go wrong, and it has.

Last weekend

was a complete disaster.

We were discussing

the possibility

that we do collisions

during the night

rather than the plan,

9:
00 in the morning.

Of course,

this has caused major,

sort of knock-ons for,

one, the experiments,

and two, for the media service.

Good morning, everybody.

I propose we start.

I will take you briefly

over the whole summary

of the weekend,

just to get you

up to date what happened.

During the night,

we tried to set up again

for high intensities,

for 450 GeV collisions,

but then we were cut short

because we encountered a vacuum.

What everybody wants,

from a physics point of view

and from being sure,

is doing it secretly before

and showing it to the media

during the day.

And I think this was also

the wish of Fabiola.

It's the wish of everybody,

because this is, of course,

then you're much more certain.

But this does not work nowadays.

Media wants to see

this little risk.

I understand.

So that means

we have to adapt to that.

Let's see.

This...

this is not it.

It doesn't seem like...

You got to hit the reload.

I'm reloading it.

Yeah, I wonder

if we should stop.

Everyone is reloading it.

Maybe we should stop.

There you go.

- Hey!

- All right.

Okay, now.

And, indeed, welcome to CERN,

the European Organization

for Nuclear Research,

in Geneva.

Welcome to

the CERN control center.

And here on the screen

we can see the four

different experiments:

ATLAS, CMS, LHCb, and ALICE.

And the program for today

is to first send one beam

in one direction, a second

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