Original subtitles

[low tones]

[atmospheric sounds]

- [Narrator] When I was a student I read a fragment of

a Greek philosopher, Heraclitus.

It was a long time ago, but the phrase stayed with me.

Nature loves to hide, it said.

Just that.

Does it perhaps mean that the law

which governs everything we see

is invisible to our eyes?

In which case everything that is apparently there before us...

is hiding from us at the same time.

But then, how can we know it?

- [Man] We might have a whole elephant here,

and we just don'’t see it.

Because we don'’t have the eyes or the questions

to explore that particular part of nature.

The universe somehow has given us a shock.

It'’s a shock therapy.

- [Man #2] We who, hundred thousand years ago,

were apes basically, wandering around the African Savanna,

we are able to understand so much

about the way the universe works.

But it could be that something completely unexpected shows up.

We'’re just looking where human beings have never ever

looked before.

[classical music]

[echoes and violin]

- [Narrator] The first time I came to Geneva

it was almost by chance.

The European Centre for Particle Physics

was in the throes of an epoch-making experiment.

I was in the celebrated citadel of science,

but I was rather disappointed.

My first impression of CERN

was of an unattractive industrial suburb.

In those early days I got a call from a friend who worked at CERN

who had managed to obtain authorization

to enter the great particle collider, the LHC.

'We can go down into the cavern,' he said.

It was here, in this tunnel over 100 meters below ground,

that in the summer of 2012 the '‘Higgs Boson'’ was captured:

the '‘God Particle'’.

Physicists don'’t approve of that term,

but it does convey the idea.

Thanks to this discovery

a theory has been verified which explains,

with remarkable precision,

everything we can see in the universe.

- The one thing in human history which I find the closest to what

we do are the Gothic cathedrals.

We don'’t really know who is the main author.

We are all main authors.

I mean, I'm the spokesman but I don't count more than

all the others.

Each one, one has made a little statue,

one has made a glass work,

and in the end, the result has grown over a very long time--

maybe they take 100 years to make such a cathedral--

and the result is harmonious, it'’s beautiful.

[violin music]

- [Narrator] CERN is a community gathered around the invisible.

The people who make up this community are united by a common

passion for Nature made not of concrete objects,

but of pure energy.

They deal with issues that may seem very far

from everyday life.

Yet here, in November 1990, in this little ground floor office,

the World Wide Web was conceived.

If the internet is now free and accessible to all,

that is due in large part to the fact that CERN

was born out of a great European ideal,

whereby all knowledge must be shared and placed

at the world'’s disposal.

[otherworldly sounds]

- [Man] Today is also a special day.

Because we heard two presentations

from the two experiments ATLAS and CMS.

We should state it: we have a discovery.

We have observed a new particle consistent with a Higgs Boson.

[applause]

Peter.

- [Man] To the extent that I am made of fundamental particles,

does this not have any relevance to me?

- I think it has a lot of relevance to you because

if that would not exist, I think you would not exist

[digital music]

[beeps and door opens]

[beeps]

- [Narrator] The LHC ring and its detectors

are the largest machine ever made.

But it is a machine unlike any other.

It doesn'’t make anything,

it isn'’t part of any production process.

For me, it'’s a poetic machine, because it is not useful.

All it can do is look for answers.

It investigates a mystery where the words and images

with which we are familiar can no longer help us.

Everything we see is made of invisible particles,

of which we possess no concrete image.

Like hunters, physicists look for tracks,

the prints left by energy that reveal their existence.

Some of them we can discover only indirectly,

from the traces left by other particles.

Here the word 'imagine'

no longer means to look for an image.

These are the paths followed by the particles

in billionths of a second after a collision.

They are the only pictures that the LHC can take.

[string music]

[heavy rain]

[calming music]

- [Man] If we were able to see at the same time

atomic phenomena and cosmological phenomena

our brain would probably explode.

We only see something like an averaging

of all these structures and to be able to see

this extraordinary complexity we have to use machines.

[whimsical music]

[discordant music]

- [Narrator] It'’s hard to accept that Nature is in its essence

so undefinable,

and that only when we observe it does it take on a precise state.

And yet from nature so indeterminate

emerges the world that we know, so solid, reassuring.

A jetty.

An apple tree in blossom.

Artists and physicists find out that they can no longer describe

nature directly,

using recognizable images.

[harp music]

We are used to seeing elementary particles as colored balls,

atoms as miniature solar systems.

But these images are nothing like the real thing.

Images of something we cannot see.

There are artists who are inspired by the discovery

of physics to imagine the invisible.

- [Man] The way things look and the way thing are

are very very different.

We are like a man standing on the top of a cliff looking out

to a sea where he can see a horizon.

But only imagine what lies on the other side.

[string music]

We are left in this place where...

Yeah, we know about our own lack of knowing.

This for me is a huge source of inspiration.

- [Narrator] The LHC ring is being prepared

for the experiment:

Hundreds of millions of data acquisition channels

are synchronized to a billionth of a second.

But this experiment is very different

from the previous ones.

There is no theory to verify.

It'’s a hunt for tracks, in the hope of finding something.

- [Man] We are jumping to a new level,

because we'’re increasing the energy to levels that have never

ever been produced in a laboratory

so we really don'’t know what we'’re gonna see there.

I personally hope that we're gonna see something

completely unexpected.

- We understand 4% maybe 5% of our entire universe.

That'’s a big problem, we need to solve that--

what'’s the other 95-96% that'’s out there?

We need a hint.

[gentle music]

- This is a real event.

This is what actually happened in the experiment.

In the very center you have the point

where the two nuclei hit each other.

It is the densest and hottest thing

that humans have ever observed,

is the closest thing to the big bang.

We are going backwards in time until a few microseconds,

a few millionths of a second from the big bang and then we

observe how matter evolved from then.

[classical music]

[drumbeat]

[explosion]

- [Narrator] The Big Bang recreated inside a machine.

A time machine in which the history of the universe

goes backwards, in the freezing darkness,

to a tiny pinhead from which everything apparently began.

- [Woman] I would really like to see

something completely unexpected,

really blowing our minds,

and causing us to rethink the way we view the universe.

That, to me, would be the most amazing thing

in the whole world.

- We could get lucky, we could discover new particles like

supersymmetry, we could discover dark matter.

- I think this is one of those moments in history where

we really have no clue.

There are all these things we have imagined, but normally

nature is far more imaginative than physicists.

So, one thing that we would like to see is precisely

nature showing some of its remarkable imagination.

[classical music]

- [Man] What are we?

Where do we come from?

Where are we going?

I had that painting on my wall, just to remind me

every day when I came into the office,

why I was coming to work.

I mean, artists, like scientists,

are trying to understand the human condition.

What'’s going on in the universe around us.

Gauguin tried to describe this

in his famous painting

and our impulse is very much the same.

Of course we use different tools to address

perhaps similar metaphysical problems.

The veritable crossroads of art and science

is a revelatory experience.

A beautiful scientific experiment is indistinguishable

from an art work.

[percussive music]

- [Narator] The sense of excitement I can feel in the air

is contagious, liberating.

Slowly, the liquid helium cools the 27 km ring down

to a temperature of 272 degrees below zero.

[chatter]

On Easter Day an electrical current equivalent

to the consumption of the entire city of Geneva

switches on the LHC.

Just like artists, physicists need to use their imagination

to get closer to the truth.

Before every experiment there is an intuition, a question.

This time, however, we are facing the mystery.

- [Man] Atoms and molecules are actually dynamic entities,

they're in perpetual motion.

So on the atomic and molecular level the entire world is

actually a massive perpetual motion machine.

[leaves rustling, water flowing]

[atmospheric sounds]

Our entire lives,

our reality is actually embedded in this

interlaced matrix of energy fields

that's on a level that's invisible to our eyes.

My human body

is a fancy energy field

that is made from the same building blocks

as any other object in nature.

And in that sense we all come from the same material.

[psychedelic music]

So, the motion of any given atom in the system

depends on and affects the motion of millions

of other atoms in its neighborhood.

So you start to imagine a sort of dance on a stage.

So this sort of insanely interconnected,

interlaced choreography.

[expansive sounds]

[rushing water]

- [Woman] We'’d like to tune to objectless world of nature,

and although those things are invisible, we can sense them,

we can experience them,

so we just want to amplify this experience and tune to it.

[gong]

[bell sounds]

[low humming tone]

We are interested in certain wave behaviors

and visualizations of them

and having it live in front of the observer.

[string music]

- [Gormley] Matter and energy are dimensions of each other.

Space and time are dimensions of each other.

As a sculptor, how do I lose my determinism to shape

particular bits of matter

and acknowledge the fact that everything

is in flux.

[strings fade in]

- [AÁlvarez-Gaumé] I don'’t think in our common language

we have metaphors for the subatomic world.

We visualize it as Galileo who was telling us with mathematics.

Then you have to use the language of mathematics

and of course experiment to get a picture, if you like,

but the picture is not, you know,

something nice with people, with landscape and mountains.

It'’s something which you really have to learn.

[dramatic orchestra music]

- [Man] Math is just a language like any other:

French or English or what have you.

And so, when a physicist comes up with a relationship,

like we do,

it'’s not too far different from a poet writing a poem

or an artist painting a picture.

It'’s just our medium for creativity.

[digital tones]

- [Narrator] To cross the threshold of the invisible

using numbers, it seems absurd.

And yet, as in a mirror, human beings, too,

replicate the mathematical structure of Nature.

When we record images,

we use quantum mechanics and digital codes.

This Mont Blanc is really just a long series of ones and zeroes,

stored in a memory.

[harp plucking]

- Art, like science, is saying: "“try looking at it this way"”

Can we conceive of the world being constituted like this?

And if so, what does that change?

[digital atmospheric music]

- [Woman] One thing sonification can do for us

is let us ear things that would normally be in-audible.

There are patterns and cycles in the universe that

happened at such a slow rate,

like longer than a human lifetime

and at the other end of the scale are things that

take place in yoctoseconds or septillionths of a second,

and we would never be able to perceive those things.

I think time and the sequence of things,

is a really strong perceptual cue to people, to humans,

and I think we almost, without even intending to,

we think of things that are happening in a sequence

we give it a kind of a narrative, almost.

[digital squeaks play]

And then only a few.

So each line in this file corresponds to one collision

that they have gathered data from.

[low tone]

Here, you hear that kind of low, mysterious sound,

that frequency is about here, but then every once in a while,

for some of the GEV values,

you'll see a different frequency pop up like these.

There.

Every little particle that you heard there was an echo

and it creates almost a reverberation effect,

like the little echoes you hear from the walls in the room.

[atmospheric sounds]

- [Man] Sound is much more complex than vision

and sound can overcome some of the visualization issues.

Where, for example, we cannot imagine two things

to take the same physical space, we can imagine two sounds

to take the same physical sound space.

This is the energy, the energy off the particles,

and the energy is then translated into these numbers,

that are music notes, basically.

Something that comes from physics, from the LHC,

from the very chord of the inner nature of matter.

[chorus of xylophone-like notes]

[drumbeat]

- [Domnitch] When humans went to space, the sense of beauty,

interconnectedness and harmony were so apparent to astronauts

being outside of the planet,

that they all share this great feeling of revelation

and when you're floating in this dark empty space

that they characterize like "“the black velvet"”...

the immense sense of beauty dawned onto them.

- [Narrator] The tests are over, it'’s time to attempt

the great experiment.

The first collisions at an unprecedented high energy.

At a depth of 100 meters,

the LHC ring must be completely sealed off.

On the surface, the experiment is monitored

twenty-four hours a day in the control rooms.

- [on loudspeaker] Start powering 56.

Start powering 57.

Start powering 58.

[classical music] Start powering 59.

[alarm sounds] Start powering 60.

Start powering 61.

Start powering 84.

Start powering 85.

Start powering 86.

Start powering 87.

Start powering 88.

Start powering 89.

[muffled explosion]

- [Narrator] Five hundred trillion particles, compressed

by the magnets into two beams each thinner than a human hair,

move round the ring at the speed of light,

producing a billion collisions per second.

[faint music, muffled explosions]

[music crescendoes]

[digital sounds]

- [Narrator] After billions of collisions,

something turns up in the LHC detectors.

This curve reveals the possible presence

of a new mysterious particle.

In less than a month the physicists put forward

400 theories to explain it.

How to choose between them?

How will the right theory be recognized?

- Some of the basics laws of nature explaining, for example,

quantum mechanics or explain the behavior of the atom

or the way that the planets go around the sun

or how the universe expands.

The concepts are very simple.

How, with such few concepts, so simple, you can explain so much.

- In a very, very simple way we've managed to boil down

this incredible amount of complexity in the universe

into just two or three fundamental aspects.

And to be able to do that is kind of a form of magic.

[string music]

- [Narrator] 'When the solution is simple, God is answering,'

Einstein said.

Behind the complex formulae there is an intuition,

that the universe is hiding something extremely simple.

To arrive at that simplicity, physicists use experiments

and equations, but often that'’s not enough.

Often, they need something else.

- [AÁlvarez-Gaumé] There seems to be some aesthetics

in the way we work.

For example when you look at Einstein's description

of how gravitational forces work...

[breathes deep]

Gives you a sense of beauty, aesthetics,

because of the simplicity.

- A theory in physics will have to be beautiful

in order for it to have much truth in it.

Einstein'’s general theory of relativity, that'’s so beautiful,

it'’s so beautiful that I find it very difficult to understand.

[laughs]

[beeps]

[beeps]

- [Narrator] It seemed strange to me to hear scientists talking

about beauty.

Beauty has to do with taste, with personal feelings.

How can it help a scientist?

[beeps]

- Physicists, I think, tend to look at theories and equations

in a similar way.

So, if they are elegant and, in a certain way, pretty,

appealing to them,

then to us it's an indication that they are somehow right.

[moody music]

- [Woman] There was this incredible sunset,

one over the valley in the back of the mountain

and one looking directly at Mount Blanc

and I kept looking at it and I couldn't figure out

what was so...

I knew it was beautiful and I knew it was attractive

and I knew I just kept wanting to look at the mountain

and just look at the scenery and I kept thinking to myself:

'Why do I like this so much?'

- Why would a sunset be beautiful in the first place?

I mean, you could kinda break it down like scientists and say,

'Well, it'’s red because of Rayleigh scattering and

the blue photons are scattered at hard angles,

so it doesn't get through to your eyes to see it.

But, uh...

And so you can kind of break down why it looks this way

and why it does that, but there'’s no

inherent beauty in the actual thing itself.

So, the beauty would have to therefore be coming from

the conscious mind.

So, 'beauty,' I guess, would be a beautiful thought.

- If the solution is simple,

if there's nothing which you can remove anymore,

if it's kind of

reduced to the core.

That'’s beauty for me.

- What attracted me to physics was basically that

we don'’t understand how the universe is created,

where it is going to.

Yeah, I think the mystery of the universe makes it beautiful.

- I'’m very keen on finding out if there is simplicity

behind the world we see.

We see a lot of forces, we see a lot of particles,

and more and more particles get discovered,

but what we need to do as physicists and as humans

is understand the world in its most easy sense.

- I don'’t know, the beauty... [laughs]

I cannot describe it.

- The beauty that I see is the beauty of the creation

of our mind.

How a person mind can develop such skillful skills like...

How someone could think of beyond their mind.

[string music]

- [Ellis] I think it'’s difficult to describe beauty

in physics, in science in general.

Often it is not something which, just, you see with your eye,

it'’s something that you feel with your brain.

[harp plucking]

- [Narrator] Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,

runs the proverb.

I wonder

where else could it be?

In which detail?

Others say one can never know where it is,

because it is just a secret harmony...

a relation between things.

[fanciful orchestra music]

[distant bell tolls]

[classical music]

- [AÁlvarez-Gaumé] It is remarkable that the laws of

nature have a symmetry that we cannot see with their eyes

and we cannot see with simple instruments.

So this is the hidden beauty we are looking for.

- [Narrator] Is this the secret of Nature?

Is it symmetry that protects us from chaos?

Where did the intuition of the Greek temple come from?

Its parts are in mathematical relation, one with the other,

as in musical harmony.

[harp music]

Elementary particles have relations between one another

which are more like those of a temple

than those in Nature that we can see with the naked eye.

- I think a completely symmetric world

would not be very interesting.

Life we'’ll be impossible.

- You might say that the beautiful universe is one where

all the symmetry are respected, nothing is broken.

However, the beautiful world we live in is where somehow

all the symmetries are in a broken face.

[windchime sounds]

[harp music]

People often are more attracted to men or women

who are not necessarily representing perfect beauty.

So, it is the asymmetry and the imperfection

that makes the person attractive.

- I think that if you look at a composite image of the Mona Lisa

in which this part is reflected to be the same as that part,

it would not be a very interesting picture.

So, I think that this idea of broken symmetry

is something that artists also understand.

[harp music]

- [Narrator] The story goes that carpet makers would deliberately

weave a slight defect into their symmetrical designs.

They were afraid that, if the symmetry were too perfect,

their souls would be trapped in the carpet for eternity.

[atmospheric sounds]

- I think that the universe knows nothing about beauty,

it knows nothing about people,

it knows nothing about consciousness.

Scientists and people perceive beauty in the universe

but I think that this concept of beauty

is for me a human construct.

- [AÁlvarez-Gaumé] One thing that is interesting is that Weinberg,

who is certainly someone who admires and likes the beauty

that we see around us, says something that is shocking,

and many people find it shocking, which is that

the more we know about the universe,

the more it seems pointless.

That means that we begin to learn that somehow

the laws of nature have no purpose.

[discordant orchestra music]

[drumbeat]

- [Gelfand] There is an infinite spectrum of shades of beauty.

Beauty to me is the abyss,

that which cannot by any means be

defined or categorized or simplified...

It is something that is transcendent.

[dark orchestral music]

- [Gormley] I prefer truth to beauty,

because I think truth has less to do with taste

and more to do with fact.

And I think this is true in science,

in the same way that science has escaped from

traditional ideas of beauty.

And the reassurances of those notions of beauty

are over.

And we are left with, yes, doubt as our yardstick.

- [Man] Humans are predisposed to see beauty,

and maybe that's the most interesting thing,

is that we detect beauty.

And the LHC is a giant detector. It's detecting something else,

maybe that is what it's detecting,

is the foundation of beauty, not just the foundation of matter.

[violin music]

- [Narrator] The heart of matter is free, unpredictable.

Billions of collisions, and every time the result

is different from before.

Here, matter shows its character of energy and dance.

The search goes on, no one can know whether the LHC will reveal

a fresh surprise in a month, a year, or never again.

I'’ve come to understand that true scientists love,

above all else, what they do not yet know.

We are ministers of doubt, one said to me.

- [Narrator] Scientists are not afraid of chaos and uncertainty.

But when telling a story, so as not to get lost,

you need something that puts things in order.

Every story has an ending because human beings have

a weakness, they always try to see a meaning in things.

[atmospheric music]

Not far from Geneva, forty thousand years ago,

somebody ventured into this cave in the south of France.

We do not know exactly why.

There is a widespread tradition among many peoples

that if a hunt is to be successful,

it must be preceded by a vision.

Of the human beings who painted these figures we know nothing.

The only thing we can be certain of

is that they retreated from the visible world

to trace images of Nature made of order and beauty.

In the darkness and silence of a cave they held their breath

and then blew spittle and paint onto the rock.

[high notes]

[discordant orchestra music]