Particle Fever

No, I don't know... a few people.

I was... it was terrible.

Tomorrow's will be better.

I don't think I can say that.

Say it in a public forum.

I need... I need evidence.

It's big, no?

Ever since I entered physics,

people have been talking about this machine.

The Large Hadron Collider,

the biggest machine ever built by human beings,

is finally going to turn on.

And after many, many years

of waiting and theorizing

about how matter got created

and about what the deep fundamental theory

of nature is...

all those theories are finally going to be tested,

and we're gonna know something.

And we don't know what it's gonna be now,

but we will know,

and it's gonna change everything.

And if the LHC sees new particles,

we're on the right track.

And if it doesn't, not only have we missed something,

but we may not ever know how to proceed.

We are at a fork in the road,

and it's either going to be a golden era...

Oh!

Or it's going to be quite stark.

And I've never heard of a moment like this in history,

where an entire field is hinging on a single event.

- Hi. - Hi.

- I'm David. - I'm Fabiola.

Fabiola, nice to meet you.

So, look, I have suggested to be on this side

because this big wheel is quite spectacular.

Yeah, yeah.

More than ever,

this will require the collaboration

between the theory and experimentalists,

so it would be a very nice period

where we work together and, uh...

Well, it's fun to finally interact with experimentalists.

I mean, I used to be just in my office,

coming up with, you know, crazy ideas.

It's a big thing.

There is a general sense waiting for this machine to start,

this massive machine that has taken so many years to build.

We are all in great anticipation of what it might find.

And every time there's even a rumor

that a new particle is discovered...

even before it turns on...

the entire field goes into a fever pitch.

The experiment was designed initially in the mid '80s

and has taken this long to construct.

There are 10,000 people of over 100 nationalities.

That includes countries

which are mortal enemies of each other,

like India and Pakistan, and Georgia and Russia,

and Iran and Israel.

All have physicists working on this machine.

These big blue things are 7-ton

superconducting magnets,

which have to be cooled with liquid helium

to the coldest temperatures on Earth,

colder than empty space.

There are 100,000 computers

connected all over the world to deal with the data.

In fact, the worldwide web was invented at CERN

so that physicists all over the planet

could share the data.

The United States was building a machine just like this,

in fact, a bigger machine, in Texas,

but they ran into a small technical difficulty.

I doubt anyone believes that the most pressing issues

facing the nation include an insufficient understanding

of the origins of the universe.

Unfortunately, the Superconducting Super Collider

was canceled by Congress in 1993.

And finally, he's saying, "Well, if we don't do it,

the Europeans will do it."

Let them do it!

We'll steal their technology like they steal our technology.

It got very political.

It was very expensive, very complicated.

It's hard for physicists to explain

why we do these kinds of experiments.

The purpose of the machine is not military application.

It's not commercial application.

It's to understand something about the basic laws of physics.

There are two kinds of particle physicists:

there are the experimentalists.

They built the big machines, run the experiments,

analyze the data, and try to discover things,

like new particles;

And then there are the theorists, like me.

We construct the theories

that try to explain everything we see in nature.

Without us, the experimentalists are in the dark,

but without them,

we'll never know the truth.

I mean, if you go, it won't be so terrible.

When I was at Stanford, I had a mentor:

Savas Dimopoulos.

Savas only likes to work on the biggest puzzles.

Now, just for fun,

I wanted to tell you that the enabling technologies that...

He has some of the most famous theories

that will be tested at the LHC,

but he doesn't know if any of them are true,

so there's an intensity with which he approaches physics.

If he works on a paper that could result in a Nobel Prize,

he doesn't allow more than three people on the paper,

because you can only share the Nobel Prize

with three people.

That's the level at which he's operating

and the impact he's trying to have.

...takes us beyond the confines of atomic physics.

In particle physics,

you have to have a threshold amount of intelligence,

whatever that means.

But the thing that differentiates scientists

is purely an artistic ability

to discern what is a good idea,

what is a beautiful idea,

what is worth spending time on,

and, most importantly,

what is a problem that is sufficiently interesting,

yet sufficiently difficult

that it hasn't yet been solved,

but the time for solving it has come now?

So people have been waiting for this experiment,

the LHC, for a very long time.

Nothing like it has ever happened.

All the superlatives are justified.

This is the case where the hype is...

the hype is approximately accurate.

To get, you know, 3,000 people

to work on an experiment together,

whose goal is to understand

what's going on at distances a thousand times smaller

than the proton...

this is... this is a really extraordinary testament

to what... to some of the highest ideals

we can have as human beings.

It's...

Nima and I got our PhDs around the same time.

He's a couple years ahead of me.

And Nima is the star of our generation,

and he's the guy we all followed and looked up to

and tried to keep up with

and tried to outpace if we could.

Since the mid '70s,

we've had an amazingly successful theory of nature

that we call the Standard Model of particle physics.

But sitting in the heart of the theory is a sickness,

very, very glaring conceptual problems

that infected this fantastic understanding.

Why is the universe big?

Why is gravity so much weaker than all the other forces?

The kinds of answers that this theory gives to these questions

seems so patently absurd

that we think that we're missing something very, very big.

And on top of all of that,

there is one prediction of this theory...

absolutely crucial for it to even make

internal theoretical sense...

and this is the famous Higgs particle.

The Higgs, or something like it, must show up.

If it doesn't show up,

there's something truly, deeply wrong,

very, very, deeply wrong

with the way we think about physics.

There are strong reasons

to think that some of these questions

will find answers at the LHC.

There's been no shortage of ideas

for what they might be,

but this is really this generation of people's...

my generation of people's... only shot.

Ah, so the boss comes.

I first came to CERN in 1987.

I was a very young undergraduate student,

and I remember the first time I entered the site.

I was a bit scared by the corridors

in the CERN main site,

so I was almost lost in those corridors.

For me, it has been a wonderful experience,

because I had the chance of being involved

right from the beginning

and to see, really, an experiment from starting and...

from zero, essentially.

I've seen two inventors place out of the ten,

and we probably have seen...

I don't think I can describe right now

the excitement about first beam.

I mean, the entire control room

is like a group of six-year-olds

whose birthday is next week, you know,