Hey there, Sir Nerds Trace
here, and I am one of you.
A few weeks back I made a
set of short documentaries
about the ongoing zen goings
on at the European Organization
for Nuclear Research while
they were on their long
shut down too.
You probably remember them.
But if not, there are
links in the description
to watch them both.
I think they're both fantastic.
They're like my children,
I don't have a favorite.
But outside of the physical
physics phenomena refurbishment
being finagled at this festival
of quantum familiarization,
these humans are also
experts at what they do.
And as such, they have a lot
of interesting knowledge stored
inside of their
meat jelly brains.
I asked after I made those
two first episodes if people
out there wanted more.
And you all said
yes, so here we are.
Here's a bit more about
what their work is really
like at CERN.
OK, so accelerator physics.
What exactly do you
do, say, day to day?
So we do the
studies to make sure
that the machine is
running smoothly,
but also to try to
make it run better.
So like with the simulations
of the particles,
we have simulated the whole
machine with all of the magnets
and then we see all of
the different effects
that the protons have
among each other.
And we try just to optimize
the machine as much as we can.
OK, so Andrea, she's
like a mechanic.
Accelerator physicists
build particle accelerators
and maintain them optimally.
This is what they do.
Which means, when we're
talking about making beam, that
is like all Andrea thinks
about all day at work
everyday-- making a stable
usable beam, which ain't easy.
Her job is to make sure the
2,556 bunches of protons that
create the beam are consistent.
Because if they're not,
the science isn't solid.
Imagine trying to run an
experiment and the beam--
inconsistent, or
moves around, or it
doesn't collide as often
as you need it to in order
to get the data that
you're looking for.
That would be bad.
So, let's make it good.
Physicists like her have to
make sure a superconducting
super collider so large
that it spans two countries
does its job flawlessly.
Which is hard, because
it was built by humans.
And I don't know if you
noticed, we ain't perfect.
I can tell you something
that I find pretty cool.
Yeah.
So when I was working
operations one of my main jobs
was to measure the
machine resonances.
So what a resonance is--
this is a very cool concept.
When I learned it,
I really liked it.
A bunch of protons when they
travel around the machine--
I'm sure that everybody pictures
it going just like this.
But it oscillates.
So it oscillates in
the horizontal plane
and in the vertical
plane all the time.
And the number of oscillations--
we call it the tune.
That's a technicality.
The thing is that the
machine has magnets,
and these magnets
are not perfect.
Just because we cannot
build perfect things.
They have magnet imperfections.
And this means that sometimes
there's a little error.
For example, you have
an integer tune, which
means imagine that
the bunch starts here,
goes around the
ring, and it does
let's say ten oscillations.
If it's exactly ten, and there
are errors in the machine,
instead of finishing
at the point-- at zero,
let's say, it will be up.
A little bit up.
And if it does this
a million times,
these imperfections are
going to accumulate.
And then at some point we're
going to loose the beam.
The LHC has resonance.
That's amazing, right?
That sounds like something
out of a Dan Brown novel.
It's not nefarious, it's
just a science problem
that needs to be solved.
But what we can do--
just put correctors on.
Let's say this magnet that
gives us these imperfections,
then we're going to put
this other magnet that's
going to compensate for it.
When it's running,
the LHC is flooded
with super stable
helium, and the magnets
are cooled to 1.9 kelvin.
Colder than the
temperature of outer space.
The coldest place in the
known universe-- the coldest.
This makes the magnets
superconducting.
But again, they're handmade.
And I visited the magnet
factory on the CERN campus.
Because nothing in
the world is perfect--
So in the end what
we do it's like we
changed the tune so the number
of oscillations of the beam--
because this can be changed
with the magnets, the magnet
strength, and the magnet fields.
Right.
And we test all of the
different combinations of tunes
and then we see
where we lose it.
Yeah.
And this gives us a map of how
our magnets in the machine are.
A team of CERN physicists
had to make a resonance
map of the magnetic
fields inside of the LHC
so that the beam
wouldn't crash out
of the machine due to the tiny
flaws in the magnets which
would create the resonance.
And that would be bad.
Because that's expensive--
I don't know it's bad,
just trust it's bad.
Yeah.
And this is, for example, what
accelerator physicists do.
If we don't do this, we loose
the beam- we cannot operate.
Yeah, wow.
And it's very difficult.
Like, it's super difficult
to make this beam stable.
If everything is not tuned to
perfection, like, we lose it.
Yeah.
Like even in the
LHC to ramp it up
and in order to not lose
it due to instabilities,
we have to pump up
our octopoles maximum.
So it's, like, it's
highly unstable.
Yeah, but that's awesome.
But we make it work,
it's super cool.
Oh, gosh so cool.
I love learning new
things about stuff.
So I was so lucky to
get to visit CERN,
but I'd love to
visit more places.
And to do that I need your help.
Click the Subscribe button.
Tell someone about the channel.
I can't grow this thing without
you and other great nerds
like you.
We're all in this together.
So thanks.
OK, another story.
Even though we colloquially
call these things massive,
you know, machines--
we call them that.
But we also call them
atom smashers, or even
Hadron Colliders.
But they don't actually
collide or smash anything.
It still seems like brute force.
Smash stuff together
and see what comes out.
The beauty of it is that
we've gotten really,
really more and more precise.
So us sort of cro-magnon
and smashing things
together-- that's use,
the experimentalists.
We smash the things.
In fact particles don't
ever, ever collide.
When you smash
things together you
have a picture in
your mind-- a car
and all the parts falling out.
Right.
In fact, not really
like you're taking
a proton-- another proton and
you're smashing them apart
into their components.
It's actually just that the
components of those particles
got close enough to each
other at a high enough energy
that they interacted.
It's not really a collision.
What you're doing is, you're
taking a whole bunch--
and to give you an idea, we
have a 100 billion protons here,
and 100 million protons here.
And we bring them
through each other, which
is 40 million times a second.
OK, lets just look
at one of these.
100 billion, 100 billion.
Just like Andromeda and the
Milky Way coming together.
Now with Andromeda
and the Milky Way
which is going to happen in--
I forget how many billion years.
8 billion or 4
billion, I don't know.
I think we don't have to
worry too much about it.
But when it happens,
none of the stars
are actually going to hit
because there's a lot of space
there.
Well, turns out the same
thing for these guys.
So the protons-- we have
to squeeze them and really
squeeze 100 billion
and 100 billion
in order to get, like, 50 to
actually go through each other.
I'm going to stay away
from the word collide.
What happens is it means that
50 will pass through each other.
Now for most of these,
they will just do that.
They'll pass through
each other and it
might be that the
electromagnetic forces will
make them scatter--
they'll just sort of move
in different directions.
And that happens most the time.
In fact, only one--
like I said before, I think,
like, one in a million or one
in 10 million of these.
The quarks or the gluons--
that are the force particles
going between the quarks
will actually come close
enough to interact.
When they interact,
they can form--
they can do something.
And the standard
model is actually not
just the particles, but
it's a set of rules which
tells us how they can interact.
I'll give you an example.
The higgs boson-- when the
higgs boson into being it's
because a couple of the
gluons from these two protons
interacted.
And when they interacted, they
interacted through a top quark,
which was a virtual top quark.
OK?
It's not even one that
exists-- that you'll ever see--
this stuff that's
happening on the inside.
And then boom, out of
that came the higgs boson.
Which will then split into a
couple tops, again, top bar.
And we'll do the
same sort of thing
and then they can shoot
off a couple photons.
So it's really kind of
a strange interaction.
But this is all in
the standard model.
So it predicts how
often this can happen.
And then we look for them.
We try to measure
that and we can see
how these interactions happen.
And they form something else,
and that other thing typically
will then decay--
it will transform
into other particles.
That will just happen.
We call those decays,
but decay is a bad word.
A particle--
fundamental particle,
it's not made up of
anything-- can magically
transform into another
particle that's
less massive plus energy.
[INAUDIBLE] like
something bigger
is breaking into its parts.
Instead a more massive particle
transforms to a lighter
particle and some energy.
Alternatively, if we want
to study these particles
we take some energy into
a less massive particle
and then that can produce
more mass of particles.
And that's what we're
doing here at the LHC.
So it's a little--
we're not--
CERN is populated by thousands
of engineers and makers
and builders and designers
and applied physicists
and theorists and every type
of scientist you can think of.
But it's also a living campus
of cafeterias and dormitories
and logistical staff
like the public affairs
person who showed me
around in 2016 and 2019.
When you walk around CERN
you meet so many people
doing so many different things.
When strangers meet each other
they tell you what they do
and when they are
scheduled to depart.
For example, you would
say, like, hey, I'm Trace.
I work in video production.
I'm here till the
end of the month.
The reason they do
this is because most
of these specialists
are at CERN temporarily.
Maybe they're studying
something specific
or they're on a contract
for a set amount of time
from their school or
their government--
and they're going to run
out of funding eventually.
The world of science might
like to think of itself
as an ivory tower, but it's
really more like people
in a hotel and some of them
live there and some of them
visit but they
all have a budget.
If you want to
support science, make
sure you tell
people you love it.
Not just your mom or your friend
or your cat or your Twitter
follower, but your city
council members, your state
legislators, your
Congress people.
Tell your scout leaders,
your professors.
Tell people you
value this stuff,
because the return
on these investments
isn't always tangible.
But science begets more
understanding and more science.
There are millions
of micro discoveries
that come from giant
science experiments
like the Large Hadron Collider
and its associate experiments.
Like Atlas and LHCB and
the Antimatter factory.
When CERN pushes the boundaries
of what science and engineering
needs to be able to do, that
informs biomedical sciences,
aerospace engineering, data
processing and storage.
And those technologies
are not intangible.
We end up using them
every day in some cases.
Crazy engineering like learning
the resonance of a particle
accelerator might seem
far out right now.
But you'll never know
what that knowledge might
be used for in the future.
Let me give you an example.
The concept of
the digital camera
was invented in
the 1960s at JPL.
It was a way for
satellites to create images
without film using photo
receptors to pick up light.
But before that,
spy satellites would
drop canisters of
undeveloped film
that had to be caught by
planes-- seriously it's crazy.
But today, we cannot imagine
a world without the digital
camera.
It wasn't even built till
1975 for the first time.
And even then,
they didn't really
know what it would be for.
They used cassette tapes and
they only got so many photos.
Like 30 photos at
a time because,
like, who needs
more than 30 photos.
I have a hundred and
some thousand photos
in my camera roll.
Digital cameras, they
changed the world.
And something else we cannot
not imagine the world without is
the humble password.
And while it's
not as complicated
as particle physics,
your passwords--
need some help.
Humans literally cannot remember
the hundreds of passwords that
have to be random and
secure and required for all
of the different
websites that we visit.
Computers can crack
millions and passwords
in just seconds or minutes.
Which is why you need a
password manager like Dashlane.
Dashlane is an encrypted
secure password manager
that will create super
secure passwords for you,
store them safely,
and fill them on sites
you visit whether you're
on your phone, tablet,
or your computer.
I spent a week resetting all of
my passwords all over the web
and moving them
all into a password
manager and the feeling
of cozy security--
I just cannot even describe.
It's so, so, so nice
to not have to remember
all of those things.
Ugh.
Now they're all in one
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and they're very hard to break.
Dashlane also take
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alerting you if any
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And has built in VPN so
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Just try it.
I know you're going to enjoy
that sense of security that
comes to having truly
awesome and unique passwords.
Dashlane is free to use,
but for the first 200
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you're going to get 10% off.
Just use the code "trace" or go
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up.
There's a link in
the description.
It supports your digital
safety and directly supports
the making of stories
just like this.
If we don't challenge ourselves,
if we don't push ourselves
to achieve what seems like
unachievable goals, then
what are we even doing here?
What's the point?
What's one scientific
discovery that you
love that came from something
completely unrelated?
Let me know down
in the comments.
If you're subscribed and you've
shared my videos with friends
and you still just want to
help, click over to my Patreon.
Because I use that money to
grow this channel directly.
Every little bit helps.
Thanks to Simon,
Dustin, Jim, Steampunk,
and everyone else who
asked for more CERN videos
when I called it out last time.
I hope you all learn something
because I listened to you
and I made this video.
So thank you.
I am Trace, thanks
again for watching
and I will see
you in the future.
I know why I nodded so
much, that was weird.
