[MUSIC PLAYING]
SPEAKER 1: Please join me
in welcoming Rolf to Google.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
ROLF LANDUA: Thanks
for having me.
So it's about once
upon a try, which
sounds a little bit like once
upon a time, which is usually
the beginning of fairy tails.
And in some way, I'm
telling you a story
of a fairy tale, namely how
humankind has sort of always
been curious about its origins
and what's happening around it.
What are these little twinkling
lights there in the sky?
And they tried to find out.
And this tradition, in CERN,
they're still working very hard
and trying to find
out what actually
is the origin of our
universe, how it evolved,
and what are the
particles, how are they
related to space and time.
And all this we are trying
to bring together with Google
to the general public.
And so today, I will
talk about three things.
First of all, for those
who might not exactly
know what CERN is, I will
give a short overview
about what we are, how we are
financed, what we are doing,
and what are our instruments.
The second part will then be our
collaboration with Google Arts
and Culture, which is, I
think, a really very useful
collaboration of two giants in
their respective fields-- in IT
and in particle physics.
And then I will in the
end give you a little bit
the highlight of
our collaboration
and overview about the
Big Bang Augmented Reality
app, which you can download
for free from Google Store
or from the Apple Store.
And I talk also a little bit
about the challenges which
you have in such a collaboration
and, of course, the outcome.
So let me start with
CERN and the LHC.
First of all, you see
the beautiful landscape
around Geneva, which, of
course, is a big motivation
to work there.
You see the Mont Blanc, the
lake, and all these places.
And then you see this
little yellow line,
which we haven't yet
painted on the surface,
but it shows you where the
LHC tunnel is actually.
And now if I zoom in,
you will see that it's
about 100 meters underground.
It's 27 kilometers
long, so about 16 miles.
And it's in this tunnel.
And there is this
high-tech instrument,
which we call the Large
Hadron Collider, which
is an accelerator which
accelerates particles
to 99.999991% of
the speed of light,
and then brings them into
collision in four interaction
points.
I'll talk about that in a
minute a little bit more.
Now, what you have to know
about CERN in a few lines is
it's already quite
an old institution.
It's 65 years old.
It is funded and paid
by 23 member states.
In the original
1954, it was just 12.
Now we have 23, plus eight
associate member states
from practically
all over the world.
Our budget is about $1.2
billion, 1.1 billion euros.
And we have a staff
of 2,500 people,
mainly actually engineers
and technicians, some
physicists, but not so many,
because usually our physicists
come from outside.
We have a very big
international collaboration
of 13,000 scientific
users which come
from 110 different countries.
So it is probably something like
the UN of science, the CERN.
Well, in a nutshell,
the only thing
you really have to understand
about the physics of CERN
is that, in particle collisions,
you create a state of matter
which is so hot
and so energetic,
so it has such a high energy
density, that it resembles
a little bit the state
of the entire universe
after about a trillionth of a
second, so after the Big Bang.
So that is basically the
key of what we are doing.
So we are transforming
the energy
which is in the movement,
in the kinetic energy
of the particles, into
the mass of new particles,
which we create at
that very moment.
So in each collision,
which you see now,
we create something like
500 or 1,000 new particles
which were not be there before,
and which now some of which
are really new for us,
for example, the Higgs
boson, about which I
will talk in a minute.
Or it might be that it
contains other particles which
we don't even know yet.
And they might or probably have
some very important information
about the very early universe.
Now, in a nutshell, you
see that CERN is made out
of accelerators, very small
ones, which start basically
the acceleration chain,
and then bigger ones,
and even bigger ones,
until we go to the LHC.
And you see the last part of
it, where we inject particles
from the super proton
synchrotron into the LHC.
And after about 20
minutes, they have
an energy which is high enough,
and they start to collide.
For something like 12
hours, the beams collide.
And then we re-inject new beams.
And in each of these
collisions of which we
have about a billion
per second, you
produce these new particles.
So you can imagine what
kind of data rate we have.
It's about a
petabyte per second.
And this is then digested
by huge farms of computers
and the LHC computing grid.
Speaking about the results--
what we have found out is
the universe actually is
built in a pretty simple way.
If you know what a quark
is and what an electron is,
then you are already
in good shape.
Because taking these
little LEGO blocks,
and you can build from two
up quarks and one down quark,
you can build a proton.
And two down quarks and
an up quark is a neutron.
You can build the nuclei
with the electrons.
You can have the atoms.
And with atoms you
can build molecules.
And you are cat at
home, and the seats
here, and whatever-- the
whole world is made out
of these particles.
Now for us, the most important
one is, of course, the proton.
And you see in this animation
the three quarks walks
and the gluons, which
are exchanged between.
But that's not
the important part
which I want to talk about.
The important part is
that we have discovered,
in the same way as CERN is
now doing a collision that's
very, very high energy,
we have discovered
that there are more than
the particles actually
we need in this universe.
They exist.
I mean, they are
sort of replications
of this family of up and
down quark and electron,
its neutrino--
three more.
I mean, there are three
families in total.
And all these particles
have been discovered
over the last 60 years, some
of them very close to here
at Stanford, some of them at
Fermilab, and recently more
of them at CERN.
And the latest one was the
discovery of the famous Higgs
boson, which is also part
of our little exhibit, which
I'll show you in a minute.
Now, the question is,
after we have discovered
all these particles
and we've grouped them
in a nice kind of a periodic
table of particles, is that,
have we finished?
Can we now put the final
formula on a T-shirt and say,
that's it?
That is the world formula?
Actually, you need
a big T-shirt.
You need a pretty big T-shirt.
This is the formula,
which describes
the interaction of all these
particles that we know of.
It's, on the one hand,
a fantastic achievement,
because there hasn't been
one single experiment which
could not be described
actually by this formula,
or whatever, the Lagrangian, you
call it, of the standard model.
You can simplify
it a little bit.
We cheat, and put
it on a T-shirt.
But in principle, this
simplified formula
is just a cheat, because
it contains basically
all the elements of the
formula on the left.
So with other words, the
standard model cannot be
the final answer.
We know that there's more to it.
We know that there
is, for example,
dark matter, dark energy,
and all these things.
And well, the job
is not done yet.
But when talking about the
evolution of the universe
and how it came about,
we have understood,
we believe at least, the main
steps, the main evolution.
And we see that
the laws of nature,
which were sort of coming into
existence in the very, very
first moments, in the first
trillionth of a second
of the universe,
they basically mated
all these particles together.
They self-assemble.
And it's like a big
self-assembling LEGO game.
So the up and the down quarks
make protons and neutrons.
Then you have
nucleosynthesis, the helium.
And then after 308,000
years, the universe
is cold enough in order
that atoms can form.
And then a few billion
years later, even the stars
produce heavy elements
which later on then
go into a star, solar systems,
and planets, and finally
life, intelligence,
and consciousness.
So these are the big steps.
And that is basically
well understood
by the two pillars of
general relativity, which
describes the big
expansion of space
and the dynamics of space time,
and the standard model, which
are the actors, the
particles, which
then produce tangible outcomes.
OK.
Now, that is basically the end
of my particle physics lecture.
And I go back to our
collaboration between CERN
collaboration and between CERN
and Google Arts and Culture.
So once upon a try
is this journey
of invention and
discovery where,
not only CERN, but
also NASA, and now
more than 100 museums
around the world,
have created huge websites.
And these websites contain
some of the inventions
and discoveries that
we have done at CERN.
Now why did CERN agree on that
and was very positive about it?
Because the world's
cultural heritage online,
we consider ourselves as being
part of this cultural heritage.
Science is not a
different part of culture.
No, science is culture.
So that's the first thing.
Secondly, our big goal
is that everything
that we discover
at CERN has to be
made public to
everybody and in a way
that they can understand it.
So to partner with Google and
bring these discoveries online
and for free to everybody is, of
course, exactly up our street.
Then the focus on
science and technology
is, of course, something also
which we would very much like.
Because as you
know, STEM subjects
and inspiration of young people
is a very important issue
nowadays.
And finally, talking
about the Big Bang
and bringing it in augmented
reality into your pocket,
and you can look at it whenever
you have a bit of time,
I think it's a very nice idea.
So being myself very much
engaged in education at CERN,
this collaboration was perfect.
And therefore, Google and
CERN, we are strong partners,
I think.
And there are many
future opportunities
to collaborate
again in this way.
Now I'll tell you a
little bit about a story
about our collaboration.
So that's how it started.
About a little bit more
than two years ago.
Michael Firnhaber, from
Hamburg actually, head
of global strategic
engagement, was contacting me.
And he came to CERN.
We discussed a
little bit, you know?
And he was saying, we
would love to explore
how CERN and Google could create
an innovative and high-end
experience together.
And so that's what we did.
And the first mail he
sent to me showed me
that it's a good idea,
actually, to talk about CERN
and what actually CERN
is, because clearly, there
are many rumors, and there
are many conspiracy theories.
And what are these people doing?
And are they opening the
portal to another dimension.
And there are ET coming
out, and so on, and so on.
So Michael, in a
very positive way,
he probably googled
what CERN is and came up
with a few questions.
For example, who
invented the internet?
Well, my notes
were it wasn't us,
because he probably
meant the World Wide Web.
But he said the internet.
I think internet
was something else.
What is antimatter?
I said yeah,
"Angels and Demons."
We worked on "Angels and Demons"
together with Ron Howard.
So we've watched this film.
Dark matter?
Yeah, I wish I knew what it was.
What is the Mandela effect?
I googled that.
It has something to do with
something you've seen before,
or don't-- but
which is not true.
What is the CERN portal?
I told you, conspiracy theories.
You know?
And so we need to demystify it.
What is the Higgs boson?
Very interesting question.
What is the CERN super collider?
Well, it's a Large
Hadron Collider.
And where is it?
Not far from my office.
What is the Higgs boson?
I think I've seen this
question just before.
What is the god particle?
It's the Higgs boson.
And so on and so on.
So anyway, so in the
end, I said, yep,
let's now fix, with the team
from Google Arts and Culture
in Paris and in London, all
the questions which we had.
And so they are a
fantastic team, very nice
people, very professional.
So I worked with Google
Institute in Paris and London.
And finally, there was
the company which did all
the animations, Nexus company
in London, which Claire, Laura,
[? Sergei, ?] and [? Nayam. ?]
And it was really a very nice
collaboration we have.
And these are the list
of topics which we did.
10 things you didn't
know about CERN--
that was something
straightforward because there
are many things people
don't know about CERN.
A stroll through
CERN's underground--
we used the existing
Street View from which
Google Zurich had
done already 2012,
but which was not so much used.
The strange world
of antimatter--
my own past history, you know?
I could bring it in.
That's probably why this
part is the most boring part
of the whole [INAUDIBLE].
Because when you know too much
about a subject, it's not good.
Of course, the birth
of the worldwide web--
you are all
interested, probably.
I mean, the worldwide web is
probably one of the reasons
why we are here now.
And of course, that was a
tricky subject because, you see,
very often [INAUDIBLE]
is, of course,
still a very good friend
of ours, and so on.
But he has, of course,
the insider view
of exactly how the development
of the worldwide web
went ahead.
And that is not exactly how it's
always described in the public.
And with the relations with
his supervisor and the CERN
management at that time
was maybe a little bit more
strained than it
appears in this history.
So it was a tricky
and sensitive way
how to phrase all
these different things,
but I think we succeeded.
The hunt for the Higgs
boson I will show you
in a second, how we frame that
story so that you can relive
a little bit this whole
saga which started in 1964
and ended in 2012.
And then we have a
large photo collection
of hundreds of
thousands of photos.
And when Google Paris said, oh,
we need this photo collection,
I said, this will be
daunting because our captions
and so on are not very perfect.
And so anyway, I think we
managed to get something.
And of course, the hero project
is the Big Bang Augmented
Reality app.
So now we went onto work.
And the Google team
was full of ideas
and came up with lots, and
lots, and lots of suggestions.
But there was a bottleneck.
And the bottleneck
is this person,
which was sitting there
trying to get all these ideas
into some content which
could be not only shown
to the general
public, but was also
defendable towards
my colleagues.
Because if something
is wrong, yes, I mean,
there's always scientists
which say, [INAUDIBLE] you
made a mistake here.
How can you do that?
Anyway, so the outcome is you
can explore CERN from home.
We have five nice
stories, I think,
and a big photo collection on
the Google Arts and Culture
website.
The one I don't
speak about more is
the birth of the worldwide
web, because it's
pretty straightforward.
You can explore the
antimatter website,
which contains basically
an overview about all
the experiments which are
done at CERN and on antimatter
in the antimatter facility.
Then you have a stroll through
the CERN's underground spaces
and the website about
10 things you probably
didn't know about CERN.
I will show you,
just to give you
an idea, how these websites
have been constructed, how
the exhibits tell the story.
I will give you an overview
about the discovery
of the Higgs boson.
It's is a gripping story,
because it starts in 1964
when some scientists, who nobody
at that time had heard before.
Peter Higgs in Scotland
came up with an idea
about how elementary
particles, which are basically
points, how they can obtain a
property which we call mass,
where you push them
and they resist.
And how can that be, when
they are sort of a point?
How can a point
resist your force?
And the idea was that
maybe our universe,
since the very beginning
of the universe,
is filled with a field which
encompasses everything.
And this field has a
finite value and interacts
with these particles,
so basically
like in a super fluid, in a
frictionless liquid where you
can float, and nothing happens.
But once you want to
change your momentum in one
or the other way, this
medium around it says, no,
resists at least this
change of the momentum.
And that's what we call mass.
But that was pure
theory in 1964.
But little by
little, it became one
of the most important
missing parts
of the so-called standard model.
And so over 50
years, people tried
to find the excitation
of that field, which
is the Higgs boson, and tried
to prove that this theory was
correct, or not.
And so on the 4th of July,
2012, CERN, in the auditorium,
made a big announcement.
And that's where
the story starts.
And then we flashback
basically to 1964
and showed how,
well, first of all,
people were a bit frustrated
about not finding this Higgs
boson.
But as they went along,
there was a competition
between the US and Europe
in building the biggest
super collider in the world.
And then, the US decided not
to build the super collider.
And I'll how you some of
the excerpts from the Senate
and Congress discussions
at that time.
And then finally,
the LHC was approved.
And it took about 20 years to
build it and to get it working.
And so that's the whole story.
And of course, it ends
then with a big discovery.
Yeah.
So that's--
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
- Today is a special day.
ROLF LANDUA: That's our
director general speaking.
- Because we hear
two presentations
from the two experiments,
Atlas and CMS,
on their update on a search
for a certain particle.
- Atlas is very pleased to
present here today a big result
on the standard model
[INAUDIBLE] searches.
- I'm kind of nervous
for some reason.
I'm not sure.
- Zooming in this region--
- This is what you see.
[END PLAYBACK]
ROLF LANDUA: And now
there's a flashback to 1964.
You see the papers by Peter
Higgs and some others.
And then of course,
in the '80s, the Run
for the Super Collider, which
was announced by Ronald Reagan.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
- The superconducting
super collider
is the doorway to that new
world of quantum change,
of quantum progress for
science and for our economy.
[END PLAYBACK]
ROLF LANDUA: And then at that
time, the cost had risen.
And there was a
heated discussion
in the Congress and the Senate.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
- I urge my
colleagues to support
the termination of funding
for the super collider.
- It is time to call it quits.
It's time to kill
the super collider.
- Should we abandon
or even delay
the superconducting
super collider?
The Europeans will build
the world's largest smasher
and will reap the
harvest, the spin-offs,
that will be an outgrowth
of this project.
- You may get nothing!
You may get nothing out of this!
- It would be a shame
for our great nation
to shrink from this
intellectual adventure.
[END PLAYBACK]
ROLF LANDUA: Then Leon
Lederman was quite frustrated
and wrote the book about the god
damned particle, which was then
called the god particle, because
the editor didn't want it.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
- This is what you see.
- One big spike.
ROLF LANDUA: And
then 20 years later--
- We have a discovery.
[APPLAUSE]
We have a discovery at CERN,
a new particle [INAUDIBLE]
[APPLAUSE]
- Maybe one--
[END PLAYBACK]
ROLF LANDUA: Well, the whole
story is about 15 minutes long,
so I have no time to
show everything to you.
But I think it's
worthwhile digging
into all these different
stages of the discovery.
So now, that brings me
to the third chapter
of my talk, which is the
story about the Big Bang.
Now, you know that
our universe is
about 13.8 billion years old.
And it has gone
through several stages.
Now, we wanted to create
a little app, which is not
too complicated, which tells
the story of the universe
and goes exactly together with
the whole concept of Google
Arts and Culture, namely
taking one big work of art
and showing every
single pixel of it.
Now, the universe is a
big work of art, you know?
It's kind of a 10 to
the 80 pixel work,
which we try to understand.
And we try to understand
how did it evolve
into the stage it is today.
So it is something which might
also inspire young people
to help us to find out more of
these mysteries, of which there
are many remaining.
And finally for myself,
I think it is also
important to give people the
possibility to look at this
and to put themselves into a
cosmic perspective, you know?
Because clearly, it's is a very
important message, I think,
to many of us nowadays,
especially nowadays,
to take into account that we
exist only for about 100,000th
of the age of the universe.
We are all the same species
and have the same origin.
And we live just on
this tiny little planet
in a giant universe.
And I think these are all
messages which are somehow
contained in this
little app, you know?
Now, if you look at
this picture, which
is very often shown, you
see that astrophysicists
have dominated, a little bit,
the evolution of the universe.
There's always like a Big Bang.
And then suddenly, there
is a star and the galaxies.
And all the rest is
basically about astrophysics.
But particle
physicists, like me,
they say, hey, we are there
at the very beginning.
What happened in the
very first seconds?
Because that is basically
when all the decisive parts
of the universe were made.
So the challenge was
to take all these books
on the early universe,
gravitation, standard model,
and put them into seven minutes.
It's 13.8 billion years
compressed in 7 minutes.
Now, without being
too scientific,
of course, we put it into
the entertainment section.
But it should also be
a little bit emotional.
I had to leave out some
complex parts, which
are maybe too complex.
And sometimes, we even
don't know the answers.
So maybe that's the part where
our young generation can help.
How do you visually represent
everything, is a big question.
And finally, also, we
wanted a very nice voice
and a famous speaker.
So I contacted Tilda
Swinton, and she
was happy to do the voiceover,
at least in the English.
So in the script,
what do we have?
We have the Big Bang
itself, at least
from a certain tiny moment
after the beginning,
the particle creations.
The protons and neutrons form.
The [INAUDIBLE] nuclei form.
The atoms come about,
and so on, and so forth.
The first stars and
the nucleus [INAUDIBLE]
after about 200 million years.
Stars explode and
produce nebula.
And then the solar system
and the Earth form, something
like nine billion years
after the Big Bang.
What was very important for
me, and for my colleagues,
and for everybody, I think,
who is in this field,
is that the timing is correct.
Because the timing
is very tricky,
because the times at
the very beginning
are extremely short, and
then become extremely long.
So we have to make sure that
we are not losing people.
So there's a little timer which
runs along the [INAUDIBLE]..
You can see that later on.
Now, of course, the
temperature of the universe
is also very important.
And now after I've said
what is in the app,
you ask yourself, what
is not in the app?
And there's a lot of things
which are not in the app,
for example, things which we
really believe we understand,
but not so well.
For example, the very first
stage of the universe, which
is called inflation, when space
and time didn't contain much,
except some kind
of false energy,
we call it, some inflaton field,
which nobody has ever seen,
but maybe it existed.
Why did the
antimatter disappear?
How did the Higgs
boson field come along?
What is the lithium 7
problem, a horizon fragment--
I mean, there are lots
of different details
which were too
complicated to put in.
And of course, the dark matter
and the dark energy question--
what keeps the
galaxies together?
And why is the universe
accelerating faster suddenly
after 6, 7 billion
years of its existence?
We don't know that.
And that's some of the part
which we try to understand.
Also, the size of the universe--
we know the observable universe
has a diameter of something
like 90 billion light years
nowadays.
But we don't know if the
real universe is maybe 10
to the 10 times bigger.
It could be, you know?
So we don't know that.
Then step two was to
find all the visuals.
We don't know how a
particle looks like,
so we have to represent
it with some kind
of little smarty sphere--
green and blue
representing color charges,
electric charges, and so on.
And then, of course, when
you go into the astrophysics,
fortunately, we
have big pictures
from Hubble, and from
ESO, and from VLT,
which give us an idea,
for example, about how
protoplanetary disks
actually look like.
Then there's always
nitty-gritty details
where you fight with the
animators about how they have
to present certain parts,
and how do we get more action
at the beginning?
Is the background
opaque and transparent,
the background temperature.
The nuclei have to be
spherical and not linear.
These are all little things,
but they are very important
in order to give a
good authenticity.
And we fought about the
timing for a long time.
So there were many,
many, many versions.
From the very beginning,
Nexus, this is the company,
they were in a good mood.
And as we all went along,
we were at version number 80
as the launch date approached.
And so we had to
work [INAUDIBLE]..
We worked in batches.
But in the end, I think,
everybody was very happy
with the result.
And so I'll just
show you the
announcement of that,
because I don't have time to
show you all the seven minutes.
And so that is basically our
little publicity announcement.
You'll hear the voice
of Tilda Swinton.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
- The Big Bang, the
moment a tiny speck
packed with energy
suddenly expanded,
giving birth to space and time.
The stars collapse and
explode as giant supernovas.
Planets form, and our
solar system is born.
13.8 million years
after the Big Bang,
you, too, could be a part
of the next big discoveries
about our universe.
[END PLAYBACK]
ROLF LANDUA: So
you are cordially
invited to download
the Big Bang AR app.
It has been downloaded
already quite a lot,
so we're quite successful.
Before I left on
holidays, we were
close to 300,000 downloads.
Yeah, so we hope that we are
getting to 1 million soon.
We got lots of
positive feedback.
Like, "I've only been
through the first chapter,
but I'm already certainly
learning cosmology.
Will never be the same."
Or "It's absolutely incredible."
So as I said, it's something
which we are quite proud of,
and we hope that this
will be the start
of a long and good collaboration
between CERN and Google
Arts and Culture.
As I said, it allows
people to explore
CERN, what we are
doing, it's from home,
and also to learn more about
the evolution of the universe.
So Google Arts and Culture will
come to CERN in a week or two.
And we will discuss how
we'll continue to collaborate
on arts and science.
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
