NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: In the movies, crazy
scientists who build time machines are always
obsessing about power, like it takes so many
jiggawatts of electricity to get the thing
to work.
Well, a bunch of real scientists have been
working for years on one giant experiment,
trying to create exotic particles that haven't
existed in the universe for 14 billion years,
back to the Big Bang itself.
Physicist and correspondent David Wark reports
that, in a way, it's a giant time machine.
Just like in the movies, it's all about energy.
DAVE WARK: (Correspondent): You'd never guess
that, hidden beneath these French mountains,
an army of workers is underground, constructing
the biggest and most complex machine on Earth.
It's a project that's got physicists around
the world brimming with anticipation.
PETER FISHER: It's a big step, this is a big
time.
MEENAKSHI NARAIN: We may find things which
nobody has ever thought of, or told us before.
STEVE AHLEN (Boston University): It's a real
adventure because we don't know if it's going
to work.
DAVE WARK: The goal of this giant construction
project is nothing less than to find the basic
building blocks of the universe.
MEENAKSHI NARAIN: The basic quest of particle
physics is, "What is the world made of?
Do we know everything?
Do we know all the constituents of matter?
Do we have them all?"
DAVE WARK: Scientists have already found a
whole carnival of subatomic particles that
make up the universe.
MEENAKSHI NARAIN: List some names.
STEVE AHLEN: Matter as we know it today...
PETER FISHER: There are protons, neutrons.
That's what we're made of.
MEENAKSHI NARAIN: The top quark...
STEVE AHLEN: ...bottom quark
MEENAKSHI NARAIN: The up...
STEVE AHLEN: ...and the down quarks.
MEENAKSHI NARAIN: ...the charm quark, the
strange quark...
STEVE AHLEN: There was a time when we just
named everything something silly.
PETER FISHER: There are pions, kaons...
MEENAKSHI NARAIN: ...W-bosons, Z-bosons.
PETER FISHER: ...five different upsilon particles...lambdas...
STEVE AHLEN: ...gluons for the strong force...
PETER FISHER: ...omegas, sigmas.
MEENAKSHI NARAIN: ...muons.
STEVE AHLEN: Who ordered that?
PETER FISHER: And my favorite particle is
the tau.
DAVE WARK: This panoply of particles is called
The Standard Model, and it's our best picture
of what the universe is made of.
But as dazzling as it is, we know that the
carnival is incomplete.
There have to be other hidden particles out
there, and we need a new experiment to find
them.
Normally physicists don't get to ride in helicopters,
but today we want to see the world's largest
experiment, and up here's really the only
place you can get a sense of the scale.
Below me is the construction site at CERN,
a particle physics lab.
The new experiment is so big it stretches
from the mountains in France, across the border,
to the Geneva Airport in Switzerland.
That's because the main part consists of a
circular tunnel, 16 miles around.
The tunnel is home to the world's biggest,
most powerful particle accelerator ever, called
the Large Hadron Collider or LHC.
Because it's so big, LHC will let us probe
deeper into the stuff of the universe than
we've ever gone before.
This tunnel is being filled with giant electro-magnets,
and, in fact, you can see some of them on
the ground right there.
This is my stop.
Each tubular magnet costs close to a million
dollars, and the LHC will need more than 1,600
of them.
So what is this?
MARTA BAJKO (Accelerator Technology Group,
CERN): This is the magnet; this is the magnet
which is inside this big blue tube.
DAVE WARK: The magnets are designed to keep
those tiny parts of an atom called protons
flowing in a narrow beam through the tunnel.
When they are all connected together into
a ring, the magnets will create a 16-mile
racetrack for protons.
In the ring, the powerful magnetic fields
force the protons to go round in a circle,
and each time they go round they get a little
kick from an electric field, so they go faster
and faster until, eventually, they are traveling
almost at the speed of light.
MARTA BAJKO: In fact, the particles, they
are traveling in these two tubes.
In one of the tubes the particles are traveling
in one direction, in the other tube in the
opposite direction.
DAVE WARK: So there's actually two beams of
particles, going in opposite directions?
MARTA BAJKO: Exactly.
Yes.
DAVE WARK: One beam going one way and one
beam going the other way.
And there are two beams because you are going
to collide them?
MARTA BAJKO: Exactly.
DAVE WARK: This is a technique that's familiar
to physicists.
A proton traveling close to the speed of light,
although absolutely tiny, will carry a lot
of energy.
Two of them traveling in opposite directions
will carry twice the energy.
Make them collide and most of that energy
can be released in a tiny, but powerful explosion.
With enough energy, the explosion should create
fundamental particles that we've never seen
before.
If that happens, it'll be in a tiny region
smack in the center of a vast underground
cavern.
This is one of the four places around the
ring where the two beams will actually collide.
One beam will come from a tiny beam pipe,
from the middle of that hole over there, and
fly over my head.
The second beam comes through that hole over
there, and high up over my head, in the middle
of the cavity, the two protons will collide.
Now, we're colliding two tiny little protons.
Why do we need this vast cavern to find out
what happens?
Well, in order to detect if any new particles
have been created in a collision, researchers
have to fill this cavern with some of the
most complex scientific instruments ever created.
The one here is called CMS.
This is one end of the vast CMS detector;
the whole detector consists of a series of
these plates, each one of which is instrumented
with thousands of detectors you can see up
here.
As we move down we see a large number of these
which will all be slid together to make the
final detector.
No space at all is wasted.
This big hole looks like a hole in the detector,
but in fact the hole in those detectors is
filled by these detectors.
Different detectors pick up different kinds
of particles, and sandwiched together they'll
create a single enormous cylinder which completely
surrounds the point where the protons collide.
That's important because, as the particles
fly away from the collision through the detector,
they will leave tracks which form a kind of
fingerprint.
It's by analyzing these fingerprints that
scientists should be able to tell if a new
particle was briefly created at the moment
of collision.
PETER FISHER: That's why the experiments are
hugely complicated.
They have to identify all the things that
come out of two protons that hit.
STEVE AHLEN: The LHC experiments are by far
the most difficult that have ever been done
in high energy physics, and maybe any experiment.
DAVE WARK: In fact, the experiments are so
complicated it takes physicists from dozens
of countries to pull them off.
LHC TEAM MEMBER 1: I'm from Switzerland.
LHC TEAM MEMBER 2: I'm from Belgium.
LHC TEAM MEMBER 3: ...sono Italiana, Toscana.
LHC TEAM MEMBER 4: ...France.
LHC TEAM MEMBER 5: ...Japan.
LHC TEAM MEMBER 6: ...Austin, Texas.
LHC TEAM MEMBER 7: ...Russian.
LHC TEAM MEMBER 8: ...UK.
LHC TEAM MEMBER 9: ...California.
LHC TEAM MEMBER 10: I'm from Senegal.
LHC TEAM MEMBER 11: ...New Jersey.
LHC TEAM MEMBER 12: ...Colombia.
LHC TEAM MEMBER 13: ...India, from Bombay.
LHC TEAM MEMBER 14: ...from Germany.
LHC TEAM MEMBER 15: ...Argentina.
LHC TEAM MEMBER 16: I'm from Togo, West Africa.
LHC TEAM MEMBER 17: I'm from Brazil.
LHC TEAM MEMBER 18: And I'm from the Czech
Republic.
JIM BENSINGER (Brandeis University): You meet
people from all over the world.
You talk with them; you get their point of
view; you exchange ideas.
They all tend to be physicists, so it's not
that wide, but I find that's exciting.
If the rest of the world worked the way we
do, we'd have far fewer problems.
DAVE WARK: One problem they do have is analyzing
the vast mountain of data that the LHC is
going to produce, because, when it's running,
it'll create about a billion proton collisions
a second.
And it'll be running 24/7.
TEJINDER VIRDEE: We get 40 million megabytes
of data created every second.
DAVE WARK: Forty million megabytes, 40,000
gigabytes, or that would be 1,000 large discs
for your home computer every second.
TEJINDER VIRDEE: Yes, it's mind boggling.
The amount of data that we are generating
in one year is 10 times bigger than all the
World-Wide-Web-stored data.
DAVE WARK: In fact, the World Wide Web was
invented here at CERN to analyze the results
of earlier experiments.
But the LHC has so much more data, it will
need the power of the Web's successor, something
called "the GRID."
Using millions of computers around the world,
the GRID will turn high-speed computing power
into just another commodity, like music or
telephone service, that, someday soon, everyone
will be able to buy online.
It's all part of a quest to understand the
world in minute detail.
One mystery scientists would love to solve
is why some of the particles now whizzing
around the universe have mass.
STEVE AHLEN: The fact is, from a physicist's
point of view, from a philosopher's point
of view, from an observational point of view,
mass is actually quite mysterious.
DAVE WARK: In our best theory of matter, the
Standard Model, all the really fundamental
particles are like photonsóthe particles
of lightóin that they have no intrinsic mass.
But we know that objects in the real world
have mass, and scientists know that particles
like protons and electrons also have mass.
So where does that mass come from?
PETER FISHER: Why do particles have different
masses?
And why do they have mass at all?
Mass is not something that emerges naturally
from a theory.
MEENAKSHI NARAIN: We basically do not understand
why some particles got mass and others didn't.
What happened?
What gave mass?
DAVE WARK: The leading idea for explaining
mass is something called the Higgs field,
a field which we believe pervades all of space
and which the fundamental particles interact
with.
The Higgs field is like cosmic cotton candy;
it sticks to everything.
And, according to this idea, it's actually
that stickiness that gives particles their
mass.
If the Higgs field, along with a Higgs particle,
really exists, then the Large Hadron Collider
should find it.
And that would be a triumph for the Standard
Model.
But since the LHC will take the particle hunt
to a whole new level, many physicists are
hoping it will uncover types of matter we've
never even dreamed of.
MEENAKSHI NARAIN: The best case, in my mind:
we do not find the Higgs particle, and we
find a whole new set of new particles.
STEVE AHLEN: I don't really care what we find.
You know, I just want to go off there and
look at something and see something no one's
ever seen before.
That's what motivates me.
PETER FISHER: It's just a voyage of discovery.
It's looking out into the cosmos and trying
to see where we fit in it.
