Original subtitles

50 years ago in Scotland,

one man had a brilliant idea --

an idea that today pits science detectives in Europe and America

against each other

in a $10 billion race to solve the riddle

of what you, me, and everything around us

is really made of.

It's a journey into the heart of matter,

plunging into the core of our physical being

and of the physical world itself.

But will this journey into the subatomic Universe

revolutionize our understanding of nature,

or will it reveal just how little we really know

about who we are and what we're made of?

Space, time, life itself.

The secrets of the cosmos lie through the wormhole.

♪ Through the Wormhole 1x07 ♪ What Are We Really Made Of? Original air date on July 21, 2010

-- sync, corrected by elderman -- -- for www.Addic7ed.Com --

What are we really made of --

you, me, everything around us?

That simple question has kept people guessing

for thousands of years.

In ancient times, the answer was easy --

everything in creation was made

from one or more of the four elements --

Earth...

Air...

Fire...

and Water.

When I was a kid, in not quite so ancient times,

we were told that everything is made out of atoms.

But in the last few decades,

scientists have looked inside the atom

and found that things are a lot more complicated.

Despite all of our knowledge,

we still don't understand the true nature of matter.

But right now,

thousands of investigators are following hunches,

tracking down suspects,

and getting closer than ever

to learning how we and everything around us

fits together.

And they're doing it by breaking things apart.

When I was 6 years old,

my father gave me his old pocket watch --

a time keeper.

"How does this work?" I wondered.

I decided to find out.

Taking it apart was a lot easier than putting it back together,

but I learned a little about what makes things tick.

And that's pretty much what particle physicists do today.

They smash things up and look at the debris

through extremely powerful microscopes.

We do what kids do.

We smash things, and we look to see what comes out.

And so, to do that,

we need to smash things harder and harder and harder

to see what's smaller and smaller and smaller.

At Chicago's Argon National Laboratory,

Bob Stanek builds machines that peer into the subatomic world.

So, this is our advanced photon source --

a microscope that's about a half a mile around,

and it contains 33 stations

where 33 individual experiments can go on

measuring tiny structures

of whatever these guys feel happy measuring.

If you remember way back in High School,

when you looked through the microscope

and you said, "wow, look at all that stuff -- how neat it is,"

it's amazing that ordinary light and optics

can bring you to such a detailed level.

However, for a lot of things nowadays,

you need more than just that ordinary light.

You need to get smaller and smaller and smaller.

With the A.P.S., we can see things much smaller

than we could see with our standard microscope.

We could see things a factor of 10 smaller,

a factor of 1,000 smaller, a factor of 10,000 smaller.

In fact, we can see things that are 10 to the 10th smaller

than what we could see with ordinary light.

We can see molecules.

We can see viruses.

We can almost see the structur of life.

The ability to take pictures of molecules and atoms

is an incredible thing, because only 100 years ago,

the atom was just a theory.

At the dawn of the 20th century,

it was believed that if atoms existed at all,

they were either empty shells or solid little balls.

Then one investigation changed everything.

It was the brainchild of Ernest Rutherford,

the Sherlock Holmes of particle physics.

Steve Nahn is a Professor at M.I.T.

and a team leader on the world's biggest Particle Accelerator,

the Large Hadron Collider in Europe.

Steve is going to reproduce

one of the most important experiments

in the history of science --

Rutherford's probe into the structure of the atom.

This experiment is the same as Rutherford's experiment.

We use the same kind of gold foils

and send millions of particles through these gold foils.

Rutherford thought that all the particles

would essentially go straight through and not deflect at all,

but that's not what happened.

The Rutherford experiment

is like firing bullets at a haystack.

The particle are like bullets,

and the atoms in the gold foil are like haystacks.

If the haystack is empty, the bullets go straight through.

If the haystack is packed with cannonballs,

all the bullets bounce back.

If there are a few cannonballs in the center,

some of the bullets will bounce back.

And that's what happened.

When Rutherford fired his particles,

most went straight through,

but some sharply bounced back from the center of the target,

upending the conceived wisdom of the time.

Something small and hard was down in there,

deep inside the Shell of the atom.

This is the evidence for a very heavy, very small object

at the core of the atom --

the high-density nucleus

surrounded by a vastness of empty space.

In fact,

the nucleus of an atom is 100,000 times smaller

than its radius.

It's equivalent to the head of a pin

in the middle of a football stadium.

After Rutherford, physicists probed further into the atom.

They found that it is built out of three parts --

the protons and neutrons that form the nucleus

and the electrons that form the Shell around it.

Between them, they make up atoms.

Atoms stick together and form molecules.

Out of the molecules,

we get more complex shapes, from a strand of DNA...

...Up to the 7,000 trillion, trillion atoms

that form a human body.

For a time, the atomic theory of the Universe

seemed to explain most everything,

but then physicists started breaking atoms apart,

and they discovered a slew of mysterious new particles

that turned their theories upside down.

The most frightening was called antimatter --

matter's evil twin.

If just this much touches ordinary matter,

it will level a city.

So, why are scientists trying so hard to make it?

Turns out it may hold the secret to the mystery of matter.

When scientists first smashed atoms apart,

they uncovered their essential building blocks --

protons, neutrons, and electrons.

Next, they built machines

that let them smash these tiny pieces together,

and out came strange, new particles.

Perhaps the strangest is the stuff we call antimatter --

matter's polar opposite.

It's the most explosive substance in the Universe.

When matter and antimatter touch,

they violently cancel each other out.

Physicists say, they annihilate each other.

It triggers an enormous explosion.

How big of an explosion?

Less than half a gram of antimatter rice

would produce a 13-kiloton blast

as big as the Hiroshima bomb.

Professor Frank Close is a theoretical physicist

at Oxford University.

Antimatter is a perfect opposite to matter.

If I was made of antimatter,

I would look exactly the same as I do today.

If you looked at the atoms that I'm made of,

they would look exactly the same if I was made of antiatoms.

It's only when you get inside the atoms

that you see the difference.

That's the atoms that we're made of

have little negatively charged electrons

whirling around a big, bulky, positive nucleus.

And the antiatoms?

Ask this man --

Joel Fajans,

an antimatter investigator

at the University of California, Berkeley.

Antimatter is everywhere in the Universe.

For instance, this banana contains potassium 40,

an isotope of potassium which emits positrons.

Positrons and other forms of antimatter

are difficult to study, however, and that's my job.

That's what I do, is to study antimatter.

I was partially inspired to do this

by this experiment over here --

the Bevatron Accelerator

at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The Bevatron was the first giant Particle Accelerator.

It's being torn apart now, but back in the '50s,

it was the center of the world for physics research.

The same techniques that were used in the Bevatron

to accelerate particles

are now used in the enormous Particle Accelerators

that are throughout the world.

Particle Accelerators are like giant microscopes

that let us peer into the subatomic world.

They break matter down into its smallest components.

Drilling down far enough to detect antimatter

requires taking protons from an atom's nucleus,

trapping them in a vacuum,

then shooting them into a ring of giant electromagnets.

So, a Particle Accelerator works

by starting protons going around in a circle in a ring.

And every time they go around,

you give them a little kick with an electric field

so they get going faster and faster

and faster and faster...

And faster until they're almost at the speed of light.

Well, they're going almost the speed of light

in a real particle collider,

but here they're not going that fast...

Yet.

So, protons in this direction...

Interact with protons in this direction,

and at some point,

they come like a car crashing together.

And you can imagine what happens when a car crashes together.

Pieces fly all over,

and around that interaction point

where the cars crashed together

is where we have our detector.

So, and this happens,

millions and millions and millions of times every second.

When you break protons apart,

you release incredible amounts of energy.

Strange things come out of the explosions,

including tiny particles that flare into existence

and disappear in billionths of a second --

particles like the antineutron

and the antimatter version of the proton.

Theorists had predicted they existed in the 1920s.

Decades later, the Bevatron proved they were right.

Suddenly, the world we thought we knew

got a whole lot stranger.

Positrons from things like radioactive decays

like in the banana or cosmic rays

form one half of an antimatter Universe.

Antiprotons from machines like this

and from cosmic rays and other natural sources

form another half of an antimatter Universe.

Put them together,

and you've got a complete antimatter mirror Universe

which just looks like ours

except everything is backwards, everything is mirrored together.

And that's a little bit surprising, shocking maybe,

because matter Universes and antimatter Universes

aren't very compatible with each other,

because when you put them together,

when they touch, they annihilate or blow up.

So, how did we come to be here?

Because if there is just as much matter

as antimatter in the Universe,

it should have all combined together

and left us with absolutely nothing.

The tiny bursts of light you see here

are antimatter electrons or positrons.

When they leak out of this small radioactive disk,

they hit the oppositely charged electrons

of the normal matter in the chamber

and instantly annihilate,

creating these flashes of energy.

Positrons and electrons are the smallest particles imaginable,

so the fact that you can see them explode with the naked eye

gives you a hint of how much energy is being released.

Antimatter is the ultimate high explosive.

Some worry that, in the wrong hands,

it could be used to create an antimatter bomb --

the ultimate super weapon.

There's no way we're going to destroy the Earth

using antimatter here.

It's absolutely impossible

to get a large amount of antimatter around

simply on the basis of economics.

If you wanted to make even a couple of grams of antimatter,

you'd have to run this facility

for, in fact, thousands, if not tens of thousands of years

to make even a few grams of antimatter.

And this is a fundamental physics issue.

This isn't an efficiency issue.

It's not as if we're going to get much better at this

than we currently are at it.

So you can relax.

The world is safe.

Antimatter is what we're not made of.

But the fact that it exists at all

reveals how alien the Universe really is

and how little we understand the cosmic forces at work

in the heavens and deep inside our own bodies.

The discovery of antimatter

was followed by deeper probing into the heart of the atom

on larger, more powerful Particle Accelerators.

But physicists didn't like what they saw.

The closer they looked, the less things made sense.

The accelerators exposed

a bewildering array of mysterious particles --

dozens of strains,

pieces of matter, all seemingly different.

Some were incredibly heavy.

Some had no weight at all.

The subatomic world earned the nickname "The Particle Zoo."

When we were learning about the zoo of particles

that were not defined,

it was pretty chaotic, and it just didn't look right.

You're thinking, "this is bull crap.

There's got to be something better than this."

'Cause this is just all, you know,

like, just categorizing stuff, black magic,

and people just didn't know what they were doing.

Physics is a quest for simplicity.

This was chaos.

Why?

To help crack this mystery in the 1970s,

the United States built Fermilab,

a high-energy research facility 30 miles outside of Chicago.

Fermilab sits on top of the Tevatron,

a four-mile-long Particle Accelerator.

Nobel-prize-winning experimental physicist Leon Lederman

conducted many of his experiments here.

But for decades, he groped in the dark like everyone else,

trying to make sense of the messiness of the quantum world.

Little by little,

more and more particles got fed into the hopper

till there were a couple of hundred particles

as, you know, in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s,

and then people started organizing these particles

into family groups,

and out of this, late '70s, early '80s,

came the organization called a Standard Model.

But it was a gradual process,

and it's like a jigsaw puzzle.

You got the right piece, and everything fell together,

and there was the painting on the box cover.

After studying thousands of these jigsaw puzzles,

physicists began to understand what they were looking at.

Rob Roser runs the giant detector

th takes pictures of matter and antimatter collisions

inside the Tevatron.

Behind me is an event display of a proton-antiproton collision

occurring inside the CDF detector.

You can imagine a proton coming from one direction

in and out of the screen

and colliding at the center point.

And so by looking at the bend or curvature of the particle,

if it's curved in one direction,

that particle's positively charged.

If it's bent in an opposite direction,

that particle is negatively charged.

So, if we just break this event down,

you can see a single long pink object

pointing to a big pink cluster.

The more the color, the more energy that particle has.

So you can see, here is the single particle

that gave up a bunch of energy

right in the initial part of the calorimeter.

That's indicative of an electron.

Over here, you see a single line

that's giving up energy in the back half of the detector,

more characteristic of what a muon object would look like,

a muon being a heavy electron.

So we can start to get a lot of information

by just looking at a couple of very simplistic ideas

in terms of where the particles traveled,

how much they curve,

and where they deposited energy in the detector.

Today,

after years of reading these subatomic tea leaves,

physicists feel they are getting closer

to answering the question, "what are we really made of?"

The stuff that we are made of today

only requires maybe a handful of little particles --

the atoms on the outside are electrons

whirling around like planets, if you like.

There's a nucleus in the middle of the atom

which we used to believe was made of protons and neutrons.

Well, it is, but deeper down, they, in turn,

like going to the heart of the cosmic onion,

are made of little things called quarks.

And two types of quarks -- an up quark and a down quark.

And that's it.

An up and a down quark joined together

in different ways ultimately make the atomic nucleus.

An electron whirling around the outside make the atom.

Throw in a neutrino,

which is created in radioactive processes,

and that's the basic particles

that make up everything that you see around you.

There's also the photon of light,

which we are seeing with right now,

and that pretty well is it.

Most of the atoms in our body

are made of nuclei and electrons,

and the nuclei themselves are made of protons and neutrons,

and the protons and neutrons are made of quarks.

And, of course, you say, "what are the quarks made of?"

And that's where we're stuck.

For the last 40, 50 years, we've been studying the quarks,

trying to find something inside,

and we get the same results we had for the electron.

There's nothing inside. The quarks don't have any size.

The size, the radius of a quark is zero.

It's a little bit like "Alice in Wonderland."

Remember when Alice saw the Cheshire cat

sitting on the branch of a tree with a big smile?

And much to Alice's great astonishment,

right in front of her eyes,

the Cheshire cat started to disappear,

and finally -- poof! -- It was gone.

But it left behind one component -- its smile.

That quark smile is a tiny box stuffed full of energy.

All matter is actually made of energy

that has congealed into particulate form.

So that appears to be what we are made of --

at least as far as we can see right now.

But knowing this opens up an even greater mystery,

which is -- why does the stuff we are made of

behave the way it does?

Our explorations of matter

reveal that everything is nearly hollow --

you, me, and everything in the Universe.

It's all an empty space with a few pinpricks of matter

floating in a void like rocks adrift in the vastness of space.

But how do these pinpricks of matter

form into shapes and structures?

There must be something holding it together --

some sort of glue in the ocean of emptiness.

The question is, what?

Today, we think we know what we're made out of --

the incredibly small building blocks

that form all the matter in the Universe.

But finding these bits and pieces of matter

revealed another even more challenging mystery --

why are things solid?

Why do they have mass?

Matter is mostly eupty space.

Every now and then, you find the point of an atom,

but most of the time, it's empty space.

So, that point of atom and that point of atom and so on --

how are they held together?

How are you held together? How am I held together?

It's not glue. You know it's not glue.

It has to be some exchange of fundamental properties.

That exchange of forces has to happen --

even though you don't see it --

has to happen at the global level everywhere.

Empty space isn't empty at all.

It's filled with forces.

When these men toss this basketball back and forth,

they're transferring the momentum of the ball

from one to the other, which pushes them apart --

a complex exchange of invisible forces

talking to each other.

So, there are four fundamental forces --

the gravitation force that everybody knows about,

the electromagnetic force, which mostly everybody knows about,

the weak force, which you don't know about,

and the strong force, which you don't know about.

The weak force is what determines radioactive decay.

How uranium decays into whatever it decays into --

that's governed by the weak forces.

The strong forces are what holds the proton together,

what holds the quarks into three pieces that form a proton.

So, us guys are doing the weak forces and the strong forces,

and what we don't understand is the gravitational force,

and we think we understand the electromagnetic force.

Just as we can't see the things we're made of,

we can't see the fundamental forces around us.

But we know they're there.

Finding out how these forces work

and where they came from in the first place

is the great quest of modern physics.

Solving this mystery

could reveal the Universe's most closely held secrets --

not just what we're made of,

but why the stuff inside us holds its shape.

The key breakthrough in particle physics

was the discovery

that certain particles are actually force carriers.

For instance, photons -- particles of light --

carry the electromagnetic force.

All the forces have these carriers.

We haven't found them all yet,

but we've found enough to know they're there.

And we know enough about how they interact

to realize that at extremely high temperatures --

around a million, billion degrees --

the electromagnetic and the weak force begin to merge.

This merging is called electroweak unification.

You don't have to understand it -- I certainly don't --

but to physicists, it was like finding the missing link.

It led the way to one of the most successful theories

in the history of science --

the Standard Model of particle physics.

It's been proving correct again and again

over the last 40 years.

But there is a problem with the Standard Model --

A big problem.

And it goes back to The Particle Zoo --

strange particles that turn up when you smash together protons

to see what's inside.

Subatomic particles have a huge range of weight, or mass.

For instance,

one point-blank quark can weigh 200 times more

than the point-blank electron,

and these particles have even heavier cousins

weighing 100,000 times more.

The Standard Model cannot explain

why there is such a wild range of masses

or even why particles have any mass at all.

Fixing this problem

became the next great quest of modern physics.

Salvation came in the unlikely form of this man.

Meet Peter Higgs,

an unassuming Professor who set off one of the largest

and most expensive investigations

in the history of science.

There was a gapping hole in the Standard Model of the Universe.

Peter Higgs put a plug in it.

Higgs theorized that a vast field

stretching to infinity runs through everything.

When certain kinds of particles interact with the field,

that interaction is what gives those particles mass.

If Higgs' theory becomes fact,

we may finally understand why things are solid.

But at first, Higgs had trouble getting his theory accepted.

A paper outlining the idea was rejected by CERN.

I was indignant,

because I thought what I'd done

had possibly important consequences.

So I rewrote the paper by adding on some extra paragraphs,

and instead of sending it back to Geneva,

where I thought the people at CERN didn't understand

what I was talking about,

I sent it across the Atlantic to Physical Review Letters,

the corresponding American journal,

and it was accepted.

The paragraphs Higgs added

predicted that the mass-giving field

would have a matching particle,

a force carrier called a Higgs Boson.

And this matching particle

could theoretically be created in a Particle Accelerator.

Gradually,

experimental physicists became excited by Higgs' idea.

What happens with a theory is, of course,

a small number of theorists push this idea.

They love it.

And little by little,

more and more theorists climb on board, you know?

It's like the train. "Whoo Whoo!"

We're gone, and we're taking off from the station.

In one of the great ironies of modern science,

CERN, the organization that rejected Higgs' paper,

has just spent $10 billion

building a machine to find the Higgs particle.

But what exactly is the Higgs?

Ask a half dozen physicists,

and you'll get a half dozen different answers.

The Higgs.

It's a tricky thing

to come up with an analogy for Higgs Bosons.

It's --

there's the analogy

with something being dragged through treacle,

but for me, that's misleading,

because this is a dissipation of energy,

and it isn't like that.

That's a pretty bad analogy for the Higgs.

What I've read on the Higgs is, in my mind, very confusing.

Here's the way I understand it.

A bunch of reporters standing in a room, crowded room.

And so me and President Obama

want to make it from the entrance of this room

to the exit of this room.

So we go in, and what happens?

Of course, all the reporters glom on Mr. Obama.

And old Bob over here,

he just makes a beeline right to the exit door.

So, basically, with no inertia, I can make it to that door,

whereas Mr. Obama has a lot of inertia, a lot of mass.

So this Higgs field affects one particle

more so than another particle.

Must be able to come up with a more --

well, when we see what they look like,

we'll come up with a better analogy.

Another analogy, yeah.

Something involving cars or something.

I don't know.

However you describe it,

the Higgs solves a slew of problems,

starting with The Particle Zoo.

It's a very elegant idea, because if you accept it,

then our whole picture of particles becomes simpler.

There are not so many particles.

It's the mass that makes it look as if there are many particles.

A little bit like a kaleidoscope,

where you look in with a lot of mirrors,

and there's only one little pattern,

but it's reflected and reflected in mirrors,

and it looks very complicated.

The Higgs phenomenon is a very satisfying way

of simplifying our Standard Model.

The Higgs gives mass to the basic seeds of matter,

such as the electron and atoms and the quarks inside protons.

Because the mass of the electron

helps determine the size of the atom,

the Higgs gives structure and form to everything we know.

If you turned it off,

you, me, your dog, and the planet

would fly apart at the speed of light.

So, how do you find an invisible,

seemingly undetectable force of nature?

All the forces have related particles that we can see,

given enough energy.

With the right tool,

we can create those force particles,

although as it turns out,

it's taken nearly 50 years to develop a tool

that may spot the Higgs.

This is CERN's Large Hadron Collider.

At full power, it can channel 7 trillion electron volts,

making it by far

the highest energy particle accelerator ever made.

The higher energy levels of the LHC produced bigger collisions

that spurt out more massive particles.

This raises the odds

that out of the billions of collisions produced each second,

the LHC will find things humans have never seen before --

things like the Higgs.

But the LHC will do much more than find a tiny particle,

because what they've really built at CERN

is a Big-Bang machine.

While trying to solve the mystery of matter,

physicists realized that they're on the trail

of a much bigger mystery -- perhaps the ultimate mystery.

What happened in the first moments of creation?

Right now,

thousands of science detectives hunt the Higgs Boson --

the elusive particle that gives everything mass,

the thing that may keep matter glued together.

The mystery they are trying to solve is much, much bigger

than anyone first imagined.

To solve it,

they have to go back to the beginning

and re-create the first moments of the Universe.

In the first moments just after the big bang happened,

it was incredibly hot --

billions of billions of degrees.

And heat is energy.

And the energy congealed into forms of matter,

many of which we have already discovered,

many of which we only believe exist

because of our equations.

Most of these things only lived

for a trillionth of a second themself.

They were made, they died away

and left children, grandchildren, and so forth.

This cascading down

from these ephemeral particles

into the stable stuff took place very quickly.

The stable stuff then ends up congealing

to make the stuff that you and I and everybody's made of today.

So, what we're doing

is re-creating in the lab the first moments of the Universe,

and then by surrounding the site of the collisions

with these special cameras, detectors,

we can record what happened.

And so we are simulating just after the big bang,

making mini bangs, if you like, in the lab.

And from what we find there,

we begin to get a sense of how matter,

the stuff that we ultimately, 15 billion years later,

are made of, first came to be.

Jon Butterworth is a physicist

at the University College of London.

Adam Davison is a postdoctoral student.

They're two of the 6,000 scientists

conducting experiments back at CERN,

the European organization for nuclear research.

CERN itself is quite -- yeah, is not terribly pretty.

It looks like someone dropped a load of rusty bricks on the ground.

I get the impression that there was never much

of an architectural plan for CERN.

Until you go underground, of course,

and then it's like something out of a James Bond villain set.

This, as a piece of engineering, is a miracle.

It is the pyramids of our time.

The heart of CERN is the Large Hadron Collider,

a $10 billion, 17-mile-long Particle Accelerator.

It is quite possibly the most sophisticated

scientific instrument ever built.

The LHC creates the primordial explosions,

then four enormous detectors along the accelerator ring

take pictures of the collisions.

The two largest detectors are called Atlas and CMS.

M.I.T.'S Steve Nahn leads a team

that helped design and now runs the CMS detector.

We build our detectors to take pictures of the events

which happen once every 25 nanoseconds.

That's 40 million times a second

we have an interaction that we want to take a picture of.

And our detector is made out of several different cameras.

You could think of it as having, like,

an X-ray camera and an infrared camera

and an ultraviolet camera and a regular photo camera

all at the same time taking pictures

of different aspects of the event.

So, with this terabytes and terabytes of data on disk,

we have to write algorithms

which sift through and find that event,

that one in 10 million, one in 100 million,

one in a billion event that you're looking for.

On the other side of the LHC,

Butterworth and Davison have developed a way

to comb through the enormous amounts of data

generated by CMS's archrival, the Atlas detector.

The two men are trying to create maps

of what they think the subatomic Universe looked like

just seconds after its creation,

then matching their imaginary maps up to reality.

Somewhere in there, they hope they'll find the Higgs.

It's kind of like a border around an unknown country.

And we know that it's there.

We've had experiments that have gone to high enough energy

to tell us there is a border and there is a land beyond it,

but we've not had really much of a glimpse of the land.

So, the LHC really is gonna let us over that border

and let us have a look at this land and survey it and see.

And this is why people, when people ask,

you know, what we're gonna find,

"when are you gonna get your nobel prize?"

We just don't know.

We know that if the Higgs exists,

it will be in that country somewhere,

and our kit is good enough to find it.

It might take a few years, but we'll find it.

Meanwhile, back in America, Fermilab hasn't given up.

It's a race against the clock to find the Higgs

before CERN's LHC powers up.

Of course, we're here in Chicago,

and we'd love to have that machine in Chicago.

So we look at the success of our European colleagues

with mixed feelings.

It's a little bit like watching your mother-in-law

drive off a cliff in your BMW.

September 2008.

The physics world holds its collective breath

as the LHC powers up for the first time.

The first low-powered beams

shoot through the 17-mile ring, and all is well.

They're ready to tear the veil off the Universe

and try to catch sight of the Higgs.

Now they raise the power --

one more notch on the way up to 7 trillion volts.

And then...

...The LHC explodes.

September 2008.

Explosions rip through the 17-mile-long tunnel

housing the Large Hadron Collider,

Europe's Big-Bang machine.

An enormous blast destroys

hundreds of the superconducting magnets

that shoot protons through the accelerator.

It was pretty dramatic. Yeah, absolutely.

It took a year to fix.

It must have been quite an electrical arc

to melt through the --

imagine the face of the guy

who opened the door to the tunnel.

Yeah, I can imagine waiting to get in there right then.

He must have been really, really nervous

to see what had happened.

You know, it was desperately disappointing

for everyone involved.

As CERN rebuilds its broken magnets,

Fermilab's Tevatron steps up the pace.

But they don't see the Higgs.

This means that the Higgs particle,

the force carrier that allows matter to clump together,

has a high mass,

and the higher the mass,

the more outside energy it takes to crack it open.

At this point, Fermilab just can't generate enough energy.

December 2009. CERN's LHC restarts.

Within weeks, it powers up well past Fermilab's capacity.

Eventually, it will be 7 times more powerful.

With both machines running,

the Higgs particle could be found in the next few years,

unless everyone's secret fear comes true --

what if it's not there at all?

What if the Standard Model is wrong

and the Higgs doesn't exist?

If it turns out that the experimental evidence

is strongly that there is no such thing,

then I'm simply baffled,

because it means that a great deal of physics,

which I think I now understand, I would no longer understand.

If the Higgs theory is wrong,

of course, many theoretical physicists

will jump out of second-floor windows.

That's about as high as they go.

Nature knows how it works.

Soon we will know how it works.

We have our ideas on how it works,

which may be proved correct.

They may be proved wrong.

Whichever it is, we will learn.

If you're asking me to place my bets,

I think that something like the Higgs Boson is out there,

waiting to be discovered.

What would be more exciting is, in fact,

we find things that we don't understand.

So, we understand that the Higgs is gonna be there,

and so we find it, so, hurray, hurray.

Now what do we do?

But if you find something you don't understand,

well, now people have a job.

My job every day is to go to work

and understand things that I don' understand.

If I have more stuff to no understand,

that's job security.

So, what are we really made of?

Dig deep inside the atom,

and you will find tiny particles

held together by invisible forces in a sea of empty space.

Dig even further,

and we discover that everything is made up of tiny packets

of energy born in cosmic furnaces.

This energy that cools down

gets dragged through a mysterious force named the Higgs

and clumps together,

forming all the things we call matter.

It has an evil twin called antimatter,

but most of that has long since disappeared.

As we get closer to re-creating the heat of the big bang

in our accelerators,

we get closer to understanding

how and why all this happened.

Perhaps some day not long from now,

we'll finally solve the last remaining riddles of matter

and fully comprehend the inner workings of creation.

-- sync, corrected by elderman -- -- for www.Addic7ed.Com --