All language subtitles for through.the.wormhole.s01e07.what.are.we.really.made.of.hdtv.xvid-momentum

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 --