Wednesday marked the second-ever TEDxCERN, the event organized by the folks at CERN, the famed particle physics research center in Geneva, Switzerland, responsible for bringing us the World Wide Web, the Large Hadron Collider, and confirmation of the existence of the Higgs boson. You know, just a few minor things.
TEDxCERN brought together a mix of experts from across the sciences and the world, people all working to answer the question: “What are the big ideas in science that will help us address tomorrow’s major global problems?” Particle physicist (and three-time TED speaker) Brian Cox served as quippy host, while more than a thousand attendees watched live, in a giant tent nearby CERN’s iconic Globe of Science and Innovation.
If you weren’t one of the lucky thousand, or were too swamped with work to catch the live webcast, don’t despair. We watched for you. And created a list of things we learned.
- Water is weird. So says water molecule expert Marcia Barbosa, who defended the continued study of the molecule by explaining that it has 70 anomalies—much more than that of silicon, a “sexier” subject due to its role in technological innovation. Barbosa closely studies the properties of water flow; and her research involving water and nanotubes could lead to better, faster methods of desalinating ocean water to meet future water demands (as science writer Marcos Pivetta explains here).
. - Thanks to a particle detector mounted on the International Space Station, scientists are keeping tabs on a lot of cosmic rays. The number is over 54,000,000,000, and is increasing every second. CERN physicist Veronica Bindi explains how and why in this TED-Ed lesson.
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- A surprising threat to the rainforest? Noise. When speaker Topher White began working to combat illegal logging in Sumatra, he and his team were stymied by the constant din provided by resident monkeys, birds and other creatures, which actually drowned out the sound of chainsaws being used by unauthorized loggers. To solve the problem, he invented a solar-powered device out of recycled cell phones that detects chainsaw noise and sends an alert to users’ inboxes. (Read about the device here.)
. - The future of antibiotics may lie in silver nanoparticles. Oxford University’s Sonia Trigueros is one of the many people who has put considerable study into the material, which benefits from both silver’s natural antibacterial properties and its ability to kill unwanted cells via hydroxyl radicals. (Read a quite-technical analysis of her and others’ attempts to stabilize the nanoparticles in solution.)
. - Cardiovascular medicine is becoming easier to get in Cameroon. This is thanks to young inventor Andrew Zang, who has created the Cardiopad — an electronic tablet that enables an electrocardiogram (ECG) to be performed on a patient almost anywhere, even in some of the most remote villages, with the results transmitted wirelessly for a specialist to assess. In a country where, in 2013, there was only one physician for every 12,500 people, this is a big deal.
. - We owe our lives to aerosol particles. This has to do with clouds, sun and temperature, and not so much hairspray. TED-Ed explains it best in this enlightening lesson by CERN physicist Jasper Kirkby, member of the CLOUD experiment at CERN, which — appropriately — is searching out fantastic new information about our cumulus, cirrus and other cloud friends.
. - Despite what it may seem at times, we are living in a hugely exciting moment. Julien Lesgourgues is a cosmologist and author of The Cosmic Linear Anisotropy Solving System (CLASS), a code cosmologists use in simulating the universe. Lesgourgues spoke of the massive thrill of living in a world where we are able to glean so much information about our universe from data, and encouraged the audience to “enjoy the privilege of being part of the first generation of humans who understand the secrets of our universe.” Though we’d bet money that there are more secrets to uncover.
Brian Cox hosted TEDxCERN, entertaining 1200 attendees plus an online audience from around the globe. Photo: Courtesy of @TEDxCERN
The Globe of Science and Innovation at CERN, aka the European Organization for Nuclear Research. The famed science hub celebrated its 60th anniversary, just as TEDxCERN was held. Photo: Courtesy of CERN
Topher White, creator of Rainforest Connection’s solar powered noise detectors. Photo: @TEDxCERN
On September 24, TEDxCERN was hosted by physicist Brian Cox (watch his TED Talk: “CERN’s supercollider“), and the world was welcomed to watch for free. Below, an appetite-whetter that originally ran on the TEDx Innovations Blog.
Cosmic rays. Active galactic nuclei. Nucleosynthesis. For physicist Veronica Bindi, this is everyday vocabulary. A ten-year collaborator with AMS-02 — an experiment analyzing the data coming in from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a particle detector mounted on the International Space Station — Bindi deals with dark matter, solar activity, and the ins-and-outs of time of flight particle detectors with ease.
For someone without a double-digit career in particle physics, these topics can seem a bit intimidating. Bindi believes they shouldn’t be. Which is why when she was asked if she would contribute to a series of short physics-related lessons created by TED-Ed for TEDxCERN, she was both ecstatic and a bit daunted by the prospect. How would she make things like cosmic ray detection, collapsing stars, supernovae, black holes, and a years-long dissection of the building blocks of our universe come alive — in a video that clocks in at about four and a half minutes?
She was up for the challenge. She already knew about TED-Ed’s library of original animated lessons, having used other CERN-written lessons to get high school students excited about STEM. (Her favorite is “The beginning of the universe, for beginners” by CERN physicist Tom Whyntie.)
“Sometimes I’d dream about what I would do if I could have the opportunity to develop my own animation,” she says. “So you can imagine my surprise when I received an email from the head of TEDxCERN, Claudia Marcelloni, asking if I was interested in making a proposal for an animation.”
Bindi’s proposal? A primer on cosmic rays — those intriguing particles from outer space that help scientists understand space itself. But after the excitement came the questions: How do you transform a complex scientific concept into an easily-digestible lesson? How do you make astroparticle physics palpable … and palatable?
In tackling these questions, Bindi was not alone. She took on the script, while a team at TED-Ed — including lesson director and veteran animator Jeremiah Dickey — handled the animation. As a non-physicist, Dickey had his own challenges to face; mostly, translating the language of another field into that of his own. He had to transform science into art.
To figure out just how this happened, we spoke with both Bindi and Dickey via email. An edited version of the conversations follows:
Veronica, what was it like working with an animator?
VB: This is my first animation, but I’ve thought many times about doing this. My field of specialization is astroparticles, and more than general physics, it is not easily understandable to people not involved with it. That’s a pity. I believe that animations are a key pathway to draw people’s interest to a new topic. Animations reach where words fail; they allow people to easily understand concepts that would be so complex to understand otherwise. I really liked working with an animation team. I appreciated the opportunity to see the many, tiny details they take care of. And all the steps — and the many different people involved — that lead to the final product.
How involved were you in developing ideas for the animation?
VB: My task was the script, so I wrote the text. But the idea of making an animation was so fun that I ended up imagining and then proposing concepts. I really visualized it, frame after frame, in my mind.
When the TED-Ed team contacted me to show me the first draft of the actual animation, I was extremely excited, but also very scared at the same time. It was time to face the music. Of course, the animation was completely different from the one I had in mind: It was not so Star Wars, but it was much more fluid, more “universal,” and the message was really powerful and impactful. It was fascinating to see my story through the eyes of somebody else. It is amazing how everything changes when looking at it from different perspectives.
Was it difficult to turn a scientific concept into a short lesson?
VB: I’ve done my best. I can assure you it was not an easy task. You need to summarize so many concepts. “Where to start? What to say? When to conclude?” All in just a few minutes. Your mind starts to spin around adding concepts, then deleting them, getting excited and then completely frustrated. “Impossibile!” I said to myself in Italian. “I can’t just summarize all that in a few concepts.” But then after a lot of re-wording and rewriting, the animation takes its shape, word after word, the script is complete. You really just love it.
What was the most exciting part of the project for you?
VB: Just being part of it. The day before you just dream about making an animation, and the next day you are working with a team of professional animators. Is it not fantastic? I get goosebumps.
Jeremiah, how do you go about turning a complex scientific concept into an animation? Did you have a clear idea of what you wanted to do at the start, or do things morph as you go on?
JD: It’s rare that I have a completely clear idea at the start, but I do try to choose lessons to work on that spark some visual ideas at first. Invariably, the next step is then improving my own understanding of the subject, which is often fuzzy at best. I start by printing out the lesson with a lot of space between the lines so I can doodle on the page as I read it over and over. These doodles are usually worthless, but they’re a starting point — they make obvious the areas of the lesson I need to focus on. Research to bridge those gaps, lots of re-reading and more sketching eventually will lead to a cohesive plan that, hopefully, flows well and communicates the material in a compelling way. Figuring out how to visualize the material parallels my own path from ignorance to understanding it.
From what did you draw inspiration while planning out the visuals?
JD: I’m really fond of mid-20th century “space age” art, a lot of which was really kind of propaganda for the Cold War space race between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. There’s a lot of great art that came out of that — on both sides — that is always a pleasure to delve into. I looked at the paintings of Robert McCall, who did a lot of fantastic concept art for NASA from the Apollo era onwards. There are also a couple of animated Disney films dealing with the science of space directed by Ward Kimball in the mid-1950s that always inspire. Not sure if I can say how any of these things directly influenced the animation, but they definitely informed it.
What was it like working with a scientist from CERN?
JD: It’s really an honor to get to work with people who are on the cutting edge of scientific discovery — and, to be honest, a little intimidating to be tasked with visualizing their lessons, as it’s likely how many are being introduced to the concepts they are studying at CERN. But Veronica’s lesson on cosmic rays does a great job presenting the material in a very clear way that really is the essence of good teaching — making the complicated understandable, and in this case, doing it in an appropriately mind-blowing context.
Read more about TED-Ed’s lessons and global network of educators »
]]>Watch Brian Cox’s talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 700+ TEDTalks.
]]>Tonight scientists at CERN are rebooting the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) in an attempt to recreate conditions fractions of a second after the Big Bang by crashing opposing proton beams, traveling at nearly the speed of light, into one another. Shortly after the LHC’s debut last September, a manufacturing glitch in wiring led to a liquid helium explosion that left the surrounding equipment damaged and ice-coated. The LHC faced another (albeit more humorous) setback earlier this month when a bird dropped a piece of baguette into the machine, causing a short circuit.
Now that repairs are completed, scientists hope the LHC will offer insight into several puzzling theories such as dark matter and the Higgs boson, a particle which gives other particles mass. For the latest updates, follow @CERN on Twitter. To learn more about the LHC, check out Brian Cox’s talks on CERN’s supercollider and what went wrong at the LHC.
]]>For more on this upcoming event, check out CERN’s press release. And don’t forget to watch Brian Cox’s talk from TED U in 2009, where he explicitly details what went wrong last year:
Scientists at Argonne National Laboratory are using the IBM Blue Gene supercomputer to model supernovas, and New Scientist has published a gallery of snapshots from the fiery visualizations. The images uncover the beautiful symmetry — and chaos — flowing through these explosive events.
TEDTalks stars Carolyn Porco, Brian Cox and George Smoot also use powerful computers to model big bangs and other phenomena in astrophysics.
(Look for Henry Markram’s talk from TEDGlobal 2009 on TED.com in the coming weeks. Markram uses the Blue Gene supercomputing architecture for a different purpose: modeling the intricate workings of the brain.)
]]>This one’s for the peace-makers:
On Alex Tabarrok’s interview with the TEDBlog:
TED talks are supposed to create debate, not end them.. Seems this one was a success then? — Oli
On Nathan Wolfe’s interview with the TEDBlog:
Bird flu is essentially a veterinary problem. Swine Flu is essentially a human health problem, and so is alarmism and fear. But not information and prevention, those are on our side and also on our side is the augmentation of average temperatures in the coming months and…wash your hands! — Manel via facebook
On Laurie Garrett’s TEDTalk: What can we learn from the 1918 flu pandemic?:
I thought this was particularly insightful given the evolution of the H1n1 virus in Mexico this past week. I heard people are reusing masks even those found in the trash cans. They wash and re-sell them, this is one case where ignorance kills and spreads a flu — Juan via facebook
On Nate Silver’s interview with the TEDBlog:
But yes, he is not pinheaded nor racist. He _is_ a nerdy dude who is big on analyzing and finding relationships within information… public speaking is not his forte. — Toby via facebook
And, sometimes, the community glue is the speaker themselves:
On Brian Cox’s TEDTalk: What went wrong (and what’s next) at the Large Hadron Collider:
If the Higgs bosun particle (God particle), when found, is as congenial as Brian Cox, I think we can all agree to presuppose why the elementary particles cohere. — Adrian
Thanks for keeping the debate alive.
]]>Watch Brian Cox’s 2008 TEDTalk, “An inside tour of the world’s biggest supercollider” >>
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]]>Twenty years ago this month, something happened at CERN that would change the world forever: Tim Berners-Lee handed a document to his supervisor Mike Sendall entitled “Information Management : a Proposal”. “Vague, but exciting” is how Mike described it, and he gave Tim the nod to take his proposal forward. The following year, the World Wide Web was born.
A panel of speakers and dignitaries marked the event with a short symposium, after which Sir Tim and a few others took a private tour of the ATLAS cavern, part of the Large Hadron Collider. Sir Tim is at left, dwarfed by the massive project. (Learn more about what happens at ATLAS by watching Brian Cox’s TEDTalk.)
CERN has built out a helpful website celebrating the web’s birthday — including a look at the very first web site and web server, at info.cern.ch. The site now contains a pocket history of the web, including a photo of the very first web surfer, Robert Cailliau.
Berners-Lee spoke at the celebration today, sharing his vision for the next rev of the Web — one in which data is as open and exchangeable as words and images are on the current Web. Watch his TEDTalk to get the inspiring details >>
Photo: CERN
]]>The show, “Horizon: What Time Is It?” airs in the UK on Dec. 2.
]]>Dr. Stephen Hawking has made a $100 bet that the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, which throws its first beam tomorrow, will not find the elusive particle knows as the Higgs boson.
What makes the Higgs the most highly sought-after particle in physics? In his TEDTalk, Brian Cox describes the Higgs particle “in language a politician can understand”:
What the Higgs does is, it gives mass to the fundamental particles. The whole universe is full of something called the Higgs field, Higgs particles if you will. [Referring to the sketch above] The analogy is that these people in a room are the Higgs particles. Now, when a particle moves through the universe, it can interact with these particles. But imagine someone who’s not very popular moves through the room, and everyone ignores them. They just pass through the room very quickly, essentially at the speed of light. They’re massless.
Now imagine someone incredibly important, and popular, and intelligent … walks into the room, they’re surrounded by people, and their passage is impeded. It’s almost like they get heavy, they get massive. And that’s exactly the way the Higgs mechanism works. The … electrons and the quarks in your body, and in the universe that we see around us, are heavy, they’re massive, because they’re surrounded by Higgs particles. They’re interacting with the Higgs field.
The physicists at the LHC are looking to the Higgs particle to finally explain some mysteries of the universe. And that’s why Dr. Hawking doesn’t really want it to be found, he says:
I think it will be much more exciting if we don’t find the Higgs. That will show something is wrong, and we need to think again. I have a bet of $100 that we won’t find the Higgs.
]]>You can watch the first attempt to circulate a beam in the LHC via CERN’s live webcast on the day. Many universities around the world will be hosting “first beam” lectures, watch parties and even a couple of pajama parties; here’s a list of first beam events in the United States, and if you know of more, drop a comment below or email contact@ted.com.
To get even more psyched up for the fire-up, check out the site for the recent BBC Radio 4 program Big Bang Day, with short (funny!) videos, including a great one from TEDTalks star Brian Cox, and a look at the LHC in science fiction, from Dr. Who to Dan Brown. CERN’s LHC First Beam site has even more background video and articles.
And our own Bruno Giussani, TED’s European Director, who lives near Geneva, has visited the LHC’s tunnel during the construction and wrote a field trip report complete with pictures.
Illustration of physicist Brian Cox at CERN, courtesy of Kate St. Claire, via her Flickr set
]]>
CERN Rap from Will Barras on Vimeo.
Read more about it here >>
PLUS: The LHC just keeps on inspiring art. Check out this new collection of astonishing photos of the LHC >>
]]>Particle physicist and TED favorite Brian Cox (watch his TED talk) has written a must-read essay explaining the science of the LHC, the questions surrounding mass, gravity and dark matter that the experiment is supposed to answer, and the hope that it will lead to “a deeper and more profound knowledge of how our world works”. He also debunks claims circulating on the Internet that turning on the LHC may create black holes that could destroy the planet.
My favorite quote from Brian’s essay, in a paragraph where he describes the human body: “The particles have been around for the entire life of the universe. They are spending the blink of a cosmic eye in the pattern known as ‘you'”.
And if you want to see how the LHC and its gigantic detectors and other machinery look like, here is my own report with pictures from a visit last year to the 27-km underground circular tunnel near Geneva.
]]>Illuminating Genius: Unlocking Creativity: Is creativity innate or learned? Does the innovative brain have distinct structural or chemical features? Can we enhance our creativity? Vilayanur Ramachandran will contribute to this session, along with Nancy Andreasen and David Eagleman.
Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives: Brian Cox will moderate a panel of physicists including Michio Kaku and Max Tegmark as they discuss the possibility of parallel worlds. The panel is to follow a screening of Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives, a film about Hugh Everett, father of the “many-worlds interpretation” of quantum physics and the film’s director, Mark Everett.
Science of Morality: Patricia Churchland, Antonio Damasio and Marc Houser join philosopher Dan Dennett in a discussion of the science of right and wrong: Why do we cooperate? Is altruism innate? How does morality arise from interactions among biological and social systems?
Looking for the Laws of Life: The forms that life could take seem endless — at least in theory. Some scientists are on the verge of creating it in a lab. But are there universal laws of life, much like the fundamental laws of physics? This event features a vibrant discussion with leading astrobiologists Paul Davies, Steven Benner and Maggie Turnbull.
Faith & Science: Many scientists have found a way to accommodate both scientific inquiry and religious teaching in their belief systems. Other scientists are bringing science to bear on religion and spiritual belief. Actress Julia Sweeney contributes to this intimate look at what scientists have to say about their spirituality.
For more information about event schedules and to purchase tickets, visit the World Science Festival’s website.
]]>
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This is the Large Hadron Collider. It’s 27 kilometers in circumference, it’s the biggest scientific experiment ever attempted. Over 10,000 physicists and engineers from 85 countries around the world have come together over several decades to build this machine. What we do is we accelerate protons, so hydrogen nuclei, around 99.999999% the speed of light. Right? At that speed, we go around that 27 kilometers 11,000 times a second. And we collide them with another beam of protons going in the opposite direction. We collide them inside giant detectors. They’re essentially digital cameras.
(slide of diagram of collider)
And this is the one that I work on, Atlas. You get some sense of the size, you can just see these EU standard — size people underneath — then you get some sense of the size. 44 meters wide, 22 meters in diameter, 7,000 tons. And we re-create the conditions that were present less than a billionth of a second after the universe began — up to 600 million times a second inside that detector. There’re immense numbers. And if you see those metal bits there — those are huge magnets that bend electrically charged particles so it can measure how fast they’re traveling.
(picture of interior of collider detector)
This is a picture about a year ago. Those magnets are in there, and again, an EU standard-size real person, so you get some sense of the scale. And it’s in there those mini big bangs’ll be created, sometime in the summer this year. And actually, this morning I got an email saying that we’ve just finished, today, building the last piece of Atlas. So as of today, it’s finished. I’d like to say that I planned that, for TED, but I didn’t. So it’s been completed as of today. (applause) Yeah, it’s a wonderful achievement.
So, you might be asking why. Why create the conditions that were present less than a billionth of a second after the universe began? Well, particle physicists are nothing if not ambitious. And the aim of particle physics is to understand what everything’s made of, and how everything sticks together. And by everything, I mean, of course, me, and you, the earth, the sun — the hundred billion suns in our galaxy-
(photo of galaxies)
and the hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe. Absolutely everything.
Now you might say, well OK, but why not just look at it? You know? If you want to know what I’m made of, let’s look at me. Well, we found that as you look back in time, the universe gets hotter and hotter, denser and denser, and simpler and simpler. Now there’s no real reason I’m aware of for that, but that seems to be the case. So, way back in the early times of the universe, we believe it was very simple, and understandable. All this complexity, all the way to these wonderful things human brains, are a property of an old and cold and complicated universe. Back at the start, in the first billionth of a second, we believe, or we’ve observed, it was very simple. It’s almost like — imagine a snowflake in your hand, and you look at it, and it’s an incredibly complicated, beautiful object. But as you heat it up, it’ll melt into a pool of water, and you would be able to see that actually it was just made of H2O, water.
It’s in that same sense that we look back in time to understand what the universe is made of. And as of today, it’s made of these things.
(chart of elementary particles: (6 kinds of quarks, 6 kinds of leptons) and 4 force carriers)
Just 12 particles of matter, stuck together by four forces of nature. The quarks, these pink things, are the things that make up protons and neutrons that make up the atomic nuclei in your body. The electron thing that goes around the atomic nucleus — held around in orbit, by the way, by the electromagnetic force, that’s carried by this thing, the photon. The quarks are stuck together by other things called gluons. And these guys, here, they’re the weak nuclear force, probably the least familiar. But without it, the sun wouldn’t shine. And when the sun shines, you get copious quantities of these things, called neutrinos, pouring out. Actually, if you just look at your thumbnail — about a square centimeter — there are something like 60 billion neutrinos per second from the sun, passing through every square centimeter of your body. But you don’t feel them, because the weak force is correctly named. Very short range and very weak, so they just fly through you.
And these particles have been discovered over the last century, pretty much. The first one, the electron, was discovered in 1897, and the last one, this thing called the Tau neutrino, in the year 2000, actually just — I was gonna say just up the road, in Chicago. I know it’s a big country, America, isn’t it. (laughter) Just up the road. Relative to the universe, it’s just up the road. (laughter and scattered applause) So this thing was discovered in the year 2000, so it’s a relatively recent picture.
One of the wonderful things, actually, I find, is that we’ve discovered any of them, when you realize how tiny they are. You know, they’re a step in size from the entire visible universe. So 100 billion galaxies, 13.7 billion light years away — a step in size from that to Monterey, actually, is about the same as from Monterey to these things. Absolutely exquisitely minute, and yet we’ve discovered pretty much the full set.
So one of my most illustrious forebears at Manchester University, Ernest Rutherford, discoverer of the atomic nucleus, once said all science is either physics or stamp collecting. Now I don’t think he meant to insult the rest of science, although he was from New Zealand, so it’s possible. (laughter) But what he meant was that what we’ve done, really, stamp collect there — OK, we’ve discovered the particles, but unless you understand the underlying reason for that pattern — you know, why it’s built the way it is — really you’ve done stamp collecting, you haven’t done science.
Fortunately, we have probably one of the greatest scientific achievements of the 20th century that underpins that pattern. It’s the Newton’s laws, if you want, of particle physics. It’s called the standard model, beautifully simple mathematical equation. You could stick it on the front of a t-shirt, which is always the sign of elegance. This is it-
(long equation, t-shirt size)
I’ve been a little disingenuous, ’cause I’ve expanded it out in all it’s gory detail. This equation, though, allows you to calculate everything, other than gravity, that happens in the universe. So you want to know why the sky is blue, why atomic nuclei stick together — in principle, you got a big enough computer, why DNA is the shape it is. In principle, you should be able to calculate it from that equation.
But, there’s a problem. (raises hand) Can anyone see what it is? A bottle of champagne for anyone that tells me. I’ll make it easier, actually, by blowing one of the lines up.
(blows up line of equation)
Basically, each of these terms refer to some of the particles. Those Ws there refers to the Ws, and how they stick together, these carriers of the weak force, the Zeds, the same, but there’s an extra symbol in this equation — H. Right, H. H stands for Higgs particle. Higgs particles have not been discovered. But they’re necessary — they’re necessary to make that mathematics work. So all the exquisitely detailed calculations we can do with that wonderful equation wouldn’t be possible without an extra bit — so it’s a prediction. A prediction of a new particle.
What does it do?
(cartoon of crowd at cocktail party)
Well, we had a long time to come up with good analogies, and back in the 1980s, when we wanted the money for the LHC from the UK government, Margaret Thatcher, at the time, said “if you guys can explain, in language a politician can understand, what the hell it is that you’re doing, you can have the money. I want to know what this Higgs particle does.” And we came up with this analogy, it seemed to work. Well, the Higgs does, is it gives mass to the fundamental particles. And the picture is that the whole universe, and that doesn’t mean just space, it means me as well, and inside you — the whole universe is full of something called a Higgs field. Higgs particles, if you will.
The analogy is that these people in a room are the Higgs particles. Now when a particle moves through the universe, it can interact with these Higgs particles. But imagine someone who’s not very popular moves through the room, then everyone ignores them. They can just pass through the room very quickly, essentially the speed of light. They’re massless. And imagine someone incredibly important, and popular, and intelligent —
(same party with Thatcher-like woman moving through room, mobbed by Higgs particles)
— walks into the room, they’re surrounded by people. And their passage through the room is impeded, it’s almost like they get heavy, they get massive.
And that’s exactly the way the Higgs mechanism works. The picture is that the electrons, and the quarks, in your body, and in the universe that we see around us, are heavy, in a sense, and massive because they’re surrounded by Higgs particles, they’re interacting with the Higgs field. If that picture’s true, then we have to discover those Higgs particles at the LHC. If it’s not true, because it’s quite a convoluted mechanism, although it’s the simplest we’ve been able to think of, then whatever does the job of the Higgs particles we know have to turn up at the LHC. So that’s one of the prime reasons we built this giant machine.
I’m glad you recognize Margaret Thatcher, actually. I thought about making it more culturally relevant, but — (laughter) — anyway. So that’s one thing. That’s essentially a guarantee that what the LHC’ll find. There are many other things.
You’ve heard many of the big problems in particle physics. One of them you heard about — dark matter — dark energy. There’s another issue, which is that the forces in nature, it’s quite beautiful, actually — seem, as you go back in time, they seem to change in strength. Well, they do change in strength. So the electromagnetic force, the force that holds us together, gets stronger as you go to higher temperatures. The strong force, the strong nuclear force — sticks nuclei together — gets weaker. And what you see in the standard model, you can calculate how these change — is the forces — the three forces, other than gravity — almost seem to come together at one point.
(diagram of standard particles, and Higgs particle, and one showing how forces diverge as plotted against time)
It’s almost as if there was one beautiful kind of super-force, back at the beginning of time. But they just miss. Now there’s a theory called supersymmetry,
(same diagram paired with one of SUSY particles, diagram showing force vectors meeting)
which doubles the number of particles in the standard model. Which, at first sight, doesn’t sound like a simplification. But actually, with this theory, we find that the forces of nature do seem to unify together, back at the big bang. Absolutely beautiful prophecy. The model wasn’t built to do that, but it seems to do it. Also, those supersymmetric particles are very strong candidates for the dark matter. So a very compelling theory. That’s really mainstream physics. And if I was to put money on it, I would put money on — in a very unscientific way — that these things would also crop up at the LHC.
Many other things that the LHC could discover. But in the last few minutes, I just want to give you a different perspective of what I think what particle physics really means to me. Particle physics and cosmology. And that’s that I think it’s given us a wonderful narrative — almost a creation story, if you’d like — about the universe. From modern science, over the last few decades. And I’d say that it deserves, in the spirit of Wade Davis’ talk, to be at least put up there with these wonderful creation stories of the peoples of high Andes and the frozen north. This is a creation story, I think, equally as wonderful.
The story goes like this. We know that the universe began 13.7 billion years ago,
(map of the lifespan of the universe)
in an immensely hot, dense state, much smaller than a single atom. It began to expand about a million billion billion billion billionth of a second — I think I got that right — after the big bang. Gravity separated away from the other forces. The universe then underwent an exponential expansion called inflation. In about the first billionth of a second or so, the Higgs field kicked in, and the quarks, and the gluons, and the electrons that make us up got mass. The universe continued to expand and cool. After about a few minutes, there was hydrogen and helium in the universe. That’s all. The universe was about 75% hydrogen, 25% helium. It still is today. It continued to expand about 300 million years, then light began to travel through the universe. It was big enough to be transparent to light, and that’s what we see in the cosmic microwave background George Smoot described as looking at the face of God.
After about 400 million years, the first stars formed, and that hydrogen, that helium, then began to cook into the heavier elements. So the elements of life — carbon, and oxygen, and iron, all the elements that we need to make us up were cooked in those first generations of stars, which then run out of fuel, exploded, threw those elements back into the universe. They then recollapsed into another generation of stars and planets, and on some of those planets-
(photo of earth from space)
the oxygen which had been created in that first generation of stars could fuse with hydrogen to form water. Liquid water on the surface. On at least one, and on maybe only one of those planets, primitive life evolved, which evolved over millions of years into things that walked upright, and left footprints about 3 and a half million years ago in the mud flats of Tanzania, and eventually, left a footprint on another world.
(photos of mud flat footprint fossils and lunar footprint)
And, built this civilization, this wonderful picture, that turned the darkness into night, and you can see the civilization from space. (in background — space photo of lit continents)
As one of my great heroes, Carl Sagan, said, these are the things — and actually, not only these, but I was looking around (wanders around stage to look at various displays of the artifacts of civilization) — these are the things, like Saturn V rockets, and Sputnik, and DNA, and literature, and science — these are the things that hydrogen atoms do when given 13.7 billion years. Absolutely remarkable. And, the laws of physics. Right? So, the right laws of physics. They’re beautifully balanced. If the weak force had been a little bit different, then carbon and oxygen wouldn’t be stable inside the hearts of stars, and there would be none of that in the universe.
And I think that’s a wonderful and significant story. 50 years ago I couldn’t have told that story, because we didn’t know it. It makes me really feel that that civilization-
(cut to night space photo of continents)
which, as I say, is, if you believe the scientific creation story, has emerged purely as a result of the laws of physics and a few hydrogen atoms. Then I think, to me anyway, it makes me feel incredibly valuable.
(ariel photo of accelerator again)
So that’s the LHC. The LHC is certainly, when it turns on in summer, gonna write the next chapter of that book. And I’m certainly looking forward with immense excitement to it being turned on. Thanks.
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