Particle Fever (2013) Movie Script
- 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,
and there's going to be cake,
and there's going to be
presents,
and all their friends
are going to be there,
and they just, you know...
they just know
it's going to be great.
You know,
they're kind of scattered,
and I can't imagine, 'cause
they're not that big, right?
I've been a postdoc here
for a year,
so I'm a relative newcomer.
But my timing
is sort of perfect.
I mean,
to be on the ground floor
when the data first comes...
it's awesome.
That means I have 5,000 emails.
There's a huge difference
between theorists
and experimentalists.
I mean, when I started college,
I absolutely did not
want to do physics.
Physics meant to me
everything that was boring:
Textbooks, theories, proofs.
But then I discovered
the experimental side,
and the experimental side
is the hands-on aspect.
It's about taking a theory,
which is abstract,
and making it real.
How do you build an experiment
to discover something
that the theory predicts?
And that aspect is what I love.
Of course, when constructing
the whole thing,
we several times thought,
"What if the whole thing
just does not work?"
I really believe now
this will work,
but the next thing is,
will we ever find something?
So maybe we will
just find nothing new.
It would be a catastrophe
for physics.
We would, somehow...
none of the open questions
which we have at the moment
would've been answered.
So the LHC is basically the
most fundamental of experiments.
It's like what any child
would design as an experiment.
You take two things,
and you smash them together.
And you get a lot of stuff that
comes out of that collision,
and you try
to understand that stuff.
Now, in this case,
what we're smashing together
is tiny protons,
which are inside the center
of every atom.
And in order to get them
going as fast as possible,
we have to build
this huge 17-mile ring,
and we run those protons
around the ring multiple times
to build up speed,
almost to the speed of light,
and then we collide two beams
going in opposite directions
at four points,
and at those four points
are four different experiments:
ATLAS, LHCb, CMS, and ALICE.
Now, I work
on the ATLAS experiment.
And ATLAS is like
a huge seven-story camera
that takes a snapshot
of every single collision,
and that's billions
of collisions.
And the hope is that we'll see
the very famous Higgs particle.
But every time we've turned on
the new accelerator
at a higher energy,
we've always been surprised.
So the real hope
is that we'll see the Higgs,
but that there's also something
amazingly new.
You can liken it to
when we put a man on the moon.
It's that level
of collaborative effort.
I would say,
even bigger than that.
This is closer to something like
human beings
building the Pyramids.
Why did they do it?
Why are we doing it?
We actually have two answers.
One answer
is what we tell people,
and the other answer
is the truth.
I'll tell you both.
And there's nothing incorrect
about the first answer.
It's just... it doesn't... it's
not the thing that drives us.
It's not how we think about it,
but it's something
you can say quickly,
and the person you're talking to
won't, you know,
get diverted or pass out
or pick up the SkyMall catalog
if you happen to be next to them
on an airplane.
Answer number one:
We are reproducing the physics,
the conditions,
just after the big bang.
We're doing it in this collider,
and we're reproducing that
so we can see what it was like
when the universe just started.
This is what we tell people.
Okay, answer two:
We are trying to understand
the basic laws of nature.
It sounds slightly more mild,
but this is really where we are
and what we're trying to do.
We study particles,
because just after the big bang,
all there was was particles,
and they carried the information
about how our universe started
and how it got to be
the way it is
and its future.
At the beginning of the 1900s,
it became clear
that all known matter,
everything that we know about,
is made of atoms,
and that atoms are made
of just three particles:
The electron, the proton,
and the neutron.
In the '30s,
other particles were discovered,
and by the 1960s,
there were hundreds
of new particles,
with a new particle discovered
every week.
And there was mass confusion,
until a number
of theorists realized
that there was a simple
mathematical structure
that explained all of this,
that most of these particles
were made of the same
three little bits
we call quarks,
and that there are only
a handful
of truly fundamental particles,
which all fit together
in a nice, neat pattern.
And there was born
the Standard Model.
Eventually, all the particles
in the theory
were discovered,
except one: The Higgs.
And the Higgs
is unlike any other particle.
It's the linchpin
of the Standard Model.
Its theory was written down
in the 1960s by Peter Higgs
and a number of other theorists.
We believe
it is the crucial piece
responsible
for holding matter together.
It is connected to a field
which fills all of space
and which gives particles,
like the electron, mass
and allowed them
to get caught in atoms
and thus is responsible
for the creation of atoms,
molecules, planets, and people.
Without the Higgs, life
as we know it wouldn't exist.
But to prove that it's true,
we have to smash particles
together at high enough energy
to disturb the field
and create a Higgs particle.
If the Higgs exists,
the LHC is the machine
that will discover it.
Let's assume you're successful
and everything comes out okay.
- Sure.
- What do we gain from it?
What's the economic return?
How do you justify all this?
By the way, I am an economist.
I don't hold it against you.
The question
by an economist was,
"What is the financial gain of
running an experiment like this
and the discoveries that we
will make in this experiment?"
And it's a very,
very simple answer.
I have no idea.
We have no idea.
When radio waves
were discovered,
they weren't called radio waves,
because there were no radios.
They were discovered
as some sort of radiation.
Basic science
for big breakthroughs
needs to occur at a level
where you're not asking,
"What is the economic gain?"
You're asking,
"What do we not know,
and where
can we make progress?"
So what is the LHC good for?
Could be nothing other than
just understanding everything.
The first time
I ever saw ATLAS was in 2005.
I had come out just to see
what ATLAS would look like
because there was a possibility
that I could be working on it
as a postdoc.
I can remember walking in
and just being like...
You know, just stunned.
I mean, me, stunned,
you know, just, you know,
already kind of having an idea
of the magnitude.
People tell you,
"Oh, it's five stories tall."
And you go, "Oh, okay,
five stories tall."
And then you see.
Five stories completely filled
with microelectronics...
All custom designed,
all hand-soldered.
You know, it's like as if
it's a five-story Swiss watch.
There was this issue
about the BCIDs.
We had our extended barrel
out earlier,
but it should be back in,
and we should be...
everything running normal.
Okay, so one more
announcement.
We have to be extremely careful
what we do to the system.
I mean, we know that anybody
who's even updating
a number somewhere
might stop our system for
more than an hour quite easily.
So please be absolutely sure
that you yourself
and everybody in your system
is not touching the system,
unless it's been agreed
by the shift leader, yeah?
Nothing should be touched, yeah?
And that includes all things
that you're absolutely
dead certain
they will not do anything wrong.
Especially those things.
It's being called the
largest scientific experiment
in history,
and some say
one that could cause Armageddon.
It's the strangest
experiment ever:
Mankind's most ambitious attempt
to understand
how we all got here.
Thousands of scientists
from around the world
spent 20 years designing
an extraordinary machine.
It cost 5 billion
and will switching on very soon.
This is a genesis machine,
a window on creation.
Five months of testing on...
They're looking for something
called the God Particle,
but skeptics are saying nobody
knows what will happen
when they turn on the switch.
A group of French scientists
believe the collider
might create a black hole
that could swallow up the earth,
and they filed suit to stop
the project from going forward.
Hello?
No, absolutely not.
Well, no, there is no scientific
ground to what they say.
It's not possible that the LHC
is going to destroy the world.
It's absolutely ridiculous.
Okay, it is 9:15.
We are 15 minutes away
from beam.
We've been sitting here,
about 7:00,
and absolutely nobody
brought food.
Again, 15 minutes to beam.
- Ciao, ciao.
- Stress levels are high.
Ciao.
But since I'm in a room
full of Italians,
the stress level's
pretty cool here.
But we have no coffee either.
No coffee.
Who didn't bring coffee?
What we're going to see today
is the launch
of the first beam of protons
around this enormous ring.
Very shortly, Lyn Evans,
the project director,
is going to be addressing
CERN staff,
who are gathered
at different points
around this massive complex.
It's just the first glimpse
at the fact the machine can run.
I mean, so what you need,
really,
is, you need two beams
colliding together
for quite a few...
quite a long period of time
before you calculate,
get enough...
sufficient statistics
in which to actually
be able to look
for the new physics.
But single beam,
the first beam, isn't even that.
You're not even getting
any collisions.
It's just one beam
going around in a circle,
not even at the high energies.
Just one beam going
around in the low energy circle,
that sort of says, "Okay,
we made it around the ring once
for the first time."
And it's a huge event.
Right, after 19 years,
you've been waiting
for this first step.
Let's get started, everybody.
Now comes the day of reckoning.
Five, four, three,
two, one...
Now.
No beam.
Yeah.
So where are we
with the injection kicker?
Oh, well...
they're out.
Okay, never mind.
Let's go.
Five, four, three,
two, one, zero.
We get a beam on this pulse?
I hope so.
Yes!
Well, last night I was,
like, waking up constantly.
Like, "Did we set that right?
What about... did we disable...
oh, my gosh!"
Marzio.
I have a plot for you.
Okay, check this out.
This is Z.
This is timing, in nanoseconds,
which we knew
from the cosmic data.
- That is very nice.
- Yes.
Upstairs, I think people
were more excited about this.
If you're in Google,
that means... that's the world.
This is the most important thing
today.
This is the first,
and this tells us
a lot of things.
It tells us that
the magnetic properties
of the machine are good,
that the aperture is clear.
There's nothing is sticking into
the beam pipe anywhere.
So a very, very encouraging sign
and remarkable progress.
Did you guys see
our beautiful plot?
- What?
- Okay, I want to show you this.
Come on, show them the plot.
You can take a picture of...
here you go.
Well, see if you can get it.
I don't think
there's anyone else
I can show my plot to, so...
It worked.
It just worked.
And there are so few times
in life where it just works.
And there are so
even fewer times in life
where it just works great.
We rocked.
I mean, Tile, first beam...
We destroyed that shit.
They got a beam circulating.
They've had beams circulating
for a full 30 seconds.
So let me understand.
This is one beam going one way?
They have one beam
going one way,
and then they went to the
other beam going the other way.
Well, does it work?
The second beam,
did it go fully around?
- Everything...
- they both went around.
I think
they had the beam go around
about a million times.
Something like that.
Yeah, their Twitter feed
said 10 million.
Now we'll become, you know,
CERN Twitter junkies.
I guess this is exciting.
My logical self
wants to be excited.
My psychological self
is very cautious.
My parents are both Iranian
and both physicists,
and my father in particular
had real political difficulties
with the regime,
and we had to go underground
for a number of years,
and we ended up escaping
from Iran
through the border of Turkey.
But then, through
a number of wonderful accidents,
we ended up in Canada.
I got interested in physics
when I was 13 or 14 years old.
It just offered the way
to combine the two things
I really loved:
Mathematics
and things in the natural world.
You almost done?
Yeah.
- It's just saying "What if?"
- It's, uh... yeah.
You're preparing
a broader audience for this.
Okay, now I'm going
to just do something fun.
Just do something fun.
What would be fun?
No, don't write "hell."
It's a public...
All right, I'm sorry!
- How about that?
- There we go.
Thinking about the LHC
has been the center
of my intellectual life
for about 15, 16 years now.
Depending on what happens
with the LHC,
you know, these are 15 years
I could come to see
as the best possible thing
I could've been doing
with this time,
or it could just be
that the entire 15 years
might as well have not happened,
had no impact,
and then that's just 15 years
that are gone.
It's not the sort of thing
where there's
a consolation prize.
You know,
it's a fairly binary situation.
I definitely won't feel,
"Oh, well,
"I gave it
a good old college try.
"It's all fine anyway.
It's just trying that counts."
I don't believe that.
I don't believe
it's just trying that counts.
I believe getting it right
is what counts.
Okay, please take your seats.
Now it's time
for the entertainment part.
So as with every
great physics event,
we're going to start
with a big bang,
the ATLAS big bang event,
and that's going to follow
with music all evening,
people from ATLAS, who are
going to be performing for you.
So let's get started.
Take 2,000 intelligent,
ambitious,
type "A" personalities.
You make them work 16-hour days,
high-pressure situation,
lots of stress.
You know, that's the recipe
for disaster.
Or at least it's a recipe for
a reality television program.
But all that physics,
Higgs, extra dimensions,
supersymmetry,
microscopic black holes,
macroscopic black holes,
Z-primes, you name it,
the physics that the theorists
only dream of
is ours to discover.
Thank you.
Oh, yeah
Thanks to
the Large Hadron Collider
Thank you, ATLAS!
I grew up in Turkey
from Greek parents
and a middle-class family,
and then, in the '60s,
we became refugees.
We had to leave Turkey
because of ethnic tensions
between Greeks and Turks
over the island of Cyprus,
and there were a lot
of political cross currents,
left, right,
and I was a young,
impressionable 13-year-old
hearing the pro-left
and pro-right arguments,
so one day I would be convinced
that one side was right.
The other day,
I would be convinced
the other side was right.
And then I was getting confused.
How could both of these things
be true
if they were contrary
to each other?
So I decided to focus on a field
where the truth didn't depend
on the eloquence of the speaker.
The truth was absolute.
Of course, when I started out,
I thought that within
maybe five years
the theories
that I was working on
were going to be tested
and I was going to know
the experimental truth
and move on to the next round
of ideas after that.
Little did I know
that the experiments
would take far longer,
and here I am, 30 years after,
still not knowing the truth.
Peter?
I can show you
here a nice event.
Did you see this from...
- Ah, no.
- Andreas showed me this.
- I haven't seen it.
- This is from yesterday night.
This is now a real
beam gas event.
So you see the tracks
also bent...
- Bent by the field?
- Very nice.
Ah, no, I haven't seen...
In some sense, I started
form the wrong perspective
and in the wrong way,
because I'd been studying
a lot of literature
when I was at high school level.
So literature, art,
philosophy, history,
and very little physics
and mathematics.
I'd also been studying music,
piano,
and so I was very much
attracted by art.
There are many similarities
between music and physics.
Classical music
follows rules of harmony,
which are really rules
of physics and mathematics.
But, also, I was fascinated
by big questions.
That is the possibility
of addressing
and answering big questions
about nature, the universe,
why, when, how,
and when I finished high school,
I thought that physics allow us
to address this big question
in a more practical way
than, for instance, philosophy.
That's why I decided
to study physics.
Yes, we lost
these two there...
I managed to go through, like,
the four gallons of milk
that I had in the fridge, but...
We were just waiting
for collisions,
waiting for collisions.
And finally,
then this helium leak,
which really, uh...
it's really frustrating.
We cannot even go there
and investigate what happened.
You have to warm up the magnets,
and warming up the magnets
needs to be done
on a very slow pace and...
in order not to break them...
then you can investigate
and cool them down again.
The world's largest
atom smasher,
the Large Hadron Collider,
is to be shut down
for at least two months.
CERN, the European Organization
for Nuclear Research...
Scientists at CERN are trying
to put on a brave face.
A faulty electrical connection
between two magnets
led to a ton of liquid helium
being leaked into
the 27-kilometer tunnel.
The first high-speed
particle collisions
were due to take place
later this month.
The goal now
is simply to get this
vastly complex machine working.
Fucking hell, look at that.
This is just unbelievable.
You've got magnets
just sheared off their jacks.
We've actually
put in enough energy
to melt it and to vaporize
a whole tube of...
And the stuff's all covered in
a sort of black, metallic dust.
Completely catastrophic, eh?
Completely catastrophic.
There's no more vacuum
in the beam vacuum,
so can as well open it up and
see whether there's any dust,
because if there's dust,
it means
we have to clean all the way
until it's...
I hope, in the worst case,
we have not to take out
more than 20 or so magnets.
Both my family and my students
detect a definite level of...
let's say pessimism
and disappointment.
The built expectation
that now we were going to know
the truth,
it fizzled and delayed,
and it's just, uh...
I thought
I was stronger than this.
It surprised me.
I did say that I thought
it was a mistake
for CERN to have
this gigantic celebration
for things just when
it just had a few protons
wandering around in one
direction around the ring,
that it was just a bad idea
to have so much hoopla
before anything
was actually happening.
At the time
when people were asking me
if I was going to CERN
to celebrate,
I said, "I'm going to go to CERN
"when there's a reason
to celebrate, you know,
"when things are colliding
into each other,
"when something
is starting to happen,
not for some crappy PR reason."
And that backfired.
That, I think... really,
that really backfired,
and I think
that was a PR disaster.
It was a PR disaster
largely of CERN's own making.
You don't go around, you know,
having gigantic parties
before anything has happened.
So the magnets that have
come out are being refurbished,
and so they're sort of
trundling through
about six magnets a week now.
So that's no longer
the bottleneck.
Now they're kind of
getting to the state
where they're ready to start
redoing the interconnects
in the tunnel,
and they're already about a week
or two behind on that.
Given the complexity...
The other thing
is that they're drilling
these bloody holes
in the magnets.
- Because they, like...
- what I heard this last time,
they were saying that
all their tools are breaking
and that sort of business.
But it begs the question,
of course,
you know, what are the risks?
I mean, you kind of basically,
you're going...
I don't know.
We didn't actually think so much
about the collateral effects
of the helium.
- Nobody has.
- Yeah, nobody.
- Yeah.
- Nobody.
Well, there's been
a lot of investigations
into the cause
of the original problem,
and the general agreement
is that we run
at half design energy.
Experimentalists
aren't going to be happy.
Well...
So, yeah...
so the latest schedule is this:
We just put out is D-Day,
beams back on
the 21st of September.
Isn't that a bit optimistic?
Isn't that a bit
optimistic for, uh, this year?
When you're dealing
with something
that is a long-term project...
and the LHC
is a long-term project.
It's a 20-year project.
You can't think about the end.
Ever.
If you start out
a marathon thinking,
"I can't wait
to get to the finish line;
"I'm gonna have my Gatorade
at the finish line;
I'm gonna have my greasy french
fries at the finish line,"
or whatever motivates you...
if you start thinking that
at mile one
and it's, like,
ten minutes into the race,
and you're thinking to yourself,
"Wow, I'm only at mile one.
I've got 25.2 miles to go."
And if you're thinking that
at the start,
then you're done.
Mentally, you are done.
This is what doing
discovery physics means.
This is what doing
discovery means.
Why do people have curiosity?
Why do we care about how
distant parts of the universe,
things that happened
billion years ago,
like the big bang,
why do we find them
that interesting?
It doesn't affect
what we do day-to-day.
But nevertheless,
once you have curiosity,
you can't control it.
It'll ask questions
about the universe.
It will ask questions
about harmonic patterns
that create art, music.
- That's a sculpture?
- That's a sculpture.
Yeah, doesn't it look like
a bunch of broken tiles?
That's what it's supposed
to look like.
And it's, uh...
and when I saw it,
I thought it was just rubble
left over from the construction.
Right, yeah.
You can, in principle,
move it.
So people go up
and move pieces?
- No, people don't.
- But people could.
Why would they have it
so you can move it around
if you weren't going
to move it around?
No, I think you're right.
I think you're allowed
to move it around.
It's certainly
a different experience of it.
I agree.
See, I thought
that that belonged here.
It's just...
it's the perfect spot.
It certainly
changes everything.
- It does.
- Slate and granite.
I guess that's the granite,
and that's the slate.
Hmm.
It's interesting.
There's something
philosophically
about this piece of art
that bothers me.
It's taking a lot of
sort of random things
and making some order out of it.
Yes.
It's trying to make order
out of something
where there isn't any,
instead of taking things
that don't seem ordered
and figuring out
that there is order.
The way we try to reduce
the complexity of the world
is by looking for patterns,
what we call symmetries.
We take all the particles
we know today,
and we attempt to fit them
into some kind
of underlying structure.
Are they the remnants
of some more beautiful
and complete picture
of the laws of nature?
It's like, you go to Egypt,
and you see ruins.
If you look at it the right way,
I could draw a pyramid
and see that
these chunks of stone
are actually the remains
of something very clean
and very symmetric,
very beautiful.
We know that the Standard Model
is incomplete.
We know that there's
other stuff out there,
that there are other particles
that we haven't seen yet.
Dark matter
is a speculated particle
which we think
actually dominates the universe,
and yet we've never seen it
directly,
and it's not part
of the Standard Model.
That's one of those rocks.
We think, possibly,
that that and many other
particles are still out there
and are all part
of a much bigger symmetry,
a much bigger theory
that includes the Standard
Model, but much more.
The most popular theory
is called supersymmetry,
or SUSY for short.
Supersymmetry was a theory
that sort of started to develop
in the late '70s.
Savas was one
of the first authors
of the first theories
of supersymmetry.
It is the unfathomable
depths of...
Supersymmetry is our best
guess of what else is out there,
the bigger theory
that incorporates
our current theories,
the Standard Model.
But for it to be true,
we have to discover
those other particles.
If I could choose a dream
of any theory
that the LHC could find,
actually, I would love
for them to see supersymmetry.
Supersymmetry says,
for every type of particle,
say the electron,
there's a heavy superpartner.
So you have the...
and they have really stupid
names, unfortunately,
called the selectron.
You just add an S to the name.
The squark.
Uh, the sup, the sdown.
Supersymmetry, or SUSY,
is extremely important
for the theoretical community
because it solves
many mathematical problems
with the Standard model.
Now, experimentally, it would be
the experimentalists' dream.
You know, tons of particles
that are just coming out,
and you just don't even know
what to do with...
you know, can't even
write the data fast enough
in order to discover them.
So that'd be my dream.
It used to be
that in the control room life,
it was kind of a luxury.
You know, you could kind of...
you could, you know, kind
of style your hair for the day
because you didn't have to wear
a hard helmet all day.
You could wear nice shoes,
you know,
because you were in
the control room environment.
Now, it's all back to, you know,
bring the dirtiest clothes
that you own to work
because you're gonna be crawling
around in, like,
you know, hard helmets,
steel-toed boots.
Not the most attractive shoes,
but, you know,
I kind of like them.
We're pulling out
the electronics.
We're fixing things that
we didn't actually have time
to get to
during the last shutdown.
The goal of this is
that it would be
in even better shape
for next beam.
Okay, so that is, I think,
all that I have to say.
Hope the theorists
aren't driving you crazy.
Don't listen to them,
by the way,
because theorists,
they can sometimes...
Just telling you.
You got to come back
to the experimental world
so that you can touch bases
with reality.
All right,
I'll talk to you soon.
One of the most basic facts
about the universe
is that it's big.
So you might wonder,
"Why is the universe big?"
There's actually
a single number,
called
the cosmological constant,
that plays a crucial role
in determining
what the universe looks like.
In fact, around ten years ago,
astronomers discovered
a really remarkable fact:
The universe is getting bigger
and bigger
at a faster and faster rate.
But this rate
is a million, billion,
billion, billion, billion,
billion, billion times slower
than what we'd actually predict.
When you're off by
a factor of a million, billion,
billion, billion, billion,
billion, billion,
there's something very wrong
with your understanding
of basic physics.
Even worse,
this one number,
the cosmological constant,
needs to have
this extremely precise value.
And if the value
is different even by a tiny bit,
we would radically change what
the world looks like around us.
If you saw a situation where,
if the parameter
has a very dangerous value
and you change it a little bit,
the world
would change radically,
and we'd be dead.
We couldn't possibly live.
You would wonder
where that came from.
You know, how is that possible?
So just on the face of it,
you would look at the situation
and say,
"Wow, someone really cared
to put this parameter
"at just the right value
so that we get to be here
"and that
it's a pleasant universe
and really cares a lot."
This is the sort of thing that
really keeps you up at night.
It really makes you wonder,
"Maybe we've got something
"about the whole picture,
the big picture,
totally, totally,
totally wrong."
Before I went
to elementary school,
my mother started telling me
biblical stories.
She told me that if we are good,
we'll go to paradise,
and we will stay there forever.
And when she said "forever,"
I started panicking.
I kept asking, "Forever?"
"Forever?"
You mean, it never ends?
Like, you wake up,
and you know that then,
you go back to sleep,
and this never ends, never ends,
never ends.
I started crying.
She told me,
"What's wrong with you?
"This is paradise.
"It will be a lot of fun.
You'll be very happy there."
But this idea of eternity,
something infinite,
scared me.
There is
a scientific alternative
to believing there's
someone out there who loves us,
twiddling the dials very finely
for things to work out.
And this alternative,
said briefly,
is that everything we see
in our observed universe
is actually a very small part
of a much,
much vaster multiverse.
You might
literally imagine that,
from some bird's eye
point of view,
if you went
to enormous distances,
you would see that our universe
is actually a little pocket
inside a vastly bigger space.
In this picture,
these mysterious numbers,
like the cosmological constant,
are actually basically random.
And out there in the multiverse,
next to us somewhere,
is another region
where these numbers take on
some other random value,
and then another region
where they take on
some other random value still.
Only in a tiny sliver,
a minuscule part
of this gigantic multiverse,
for completely
accidental reasons,
do these numbers take on
the very, very special values
which allows structures to grow,
stars to form, galaxies to form.
Ultimately,
things like us to form.
This is the really
opposite extreme interpretation
of the presence of fine-tuning
as intelligent designers
would want to give.
If you believe
that someone out there cares
and twiddles the parameters
so that you can exist,
that puts our existence
at the very core of reality.
If you believe
that our entire universe
is a tiny, little,
minuscule spec
in a gigantic multiverse
which is mostly lethal,
that's a polar opposite
philosophy
for what the universe
looks like.
In fact, it's an idea
that many physicists loathe,
because certain questions
then become things
that we will not hope
to be able to understand.
Nima is now an advocate
for this idea
that the laws of physics
are different
in different parts
of this multiverse,
that what we measure
in experiments
are not deep mysteries
of nature,
but they're just random
accidents in our universe,
that maybe even the Higgs itself
is a random accident that
has occurred in our universe
and let's life exist,
but has no explanation.
In a sense,
it's the end of physics.
On the one hand,
we have the direction
that we've been on
for the last 400 years,
towards increasing beauty,
simplicity, symmetry,
and a path
that has time and time again
paid off with deeper
and deeper insights
about the way the world works.
On the other hand, we have
the idea of the multiverse,
which would move us
to a real picture
not of symmetry and beauty
and order,
but fundamentally of chaos
on enormous distances.
This is the really
very, very big-scale question
which the LHC
is going to push us in
one way or the other.
What happens, for example,
if...
Oh, blimey.
Yeah, there's a lot of...
Hi, Katja.
You all right?
Oh, you're not recording this,
huh?
Yes, we're all on the...
Yeah, don't worry
about all the other crap.
We've got the beams
going around again.
The magnet repairs
are holding up well,
and our next challenge
is to take these beams
up to high energy
and collide them.
Okay.
We're very, very aware
of the damage we can do.
Here we go.
That's what worries me stiff
at the moment.
The original proposal
for ATLAS was in 1989.
And you're kind of riding
this idea.
You've got this dream
of physics.
This dream of physics
is what pulled everyone along
for those 19 years.
And so here, now, today,
finally,
with high-energy collisions,
we can start to look
for that dream of new physics.
Uh, blue.
The control room, yes.
The control room.
This is the control room.
The pressure of it being
an event, of course, is there.
And, of course, anything
can go wrong, and it has.
Last weekend
was a complete disaster.
We were discussing
the possibility
that we do collisions
during the night
rather than the plan,
9:00 in the morning.
Of course,
this has caused major,
sort of knock-ons for,
one, the experiments,
and two, for the media service.
Good morning, everybody.
I propose we start.
I will take you briefly
over the whole summary
of the weekend,
just to get you
up to date what happened.
During the night,
we tried to set up again
for high intensities,
for 450 GeV collisions,
but then we were cut short
because we encountered a vacuum.
What everybody wants,
from a physics point of view
and from being sure,
is doing it secretly before
and showing it to the media
during the day.
And I think this was also
the wish of Fabiola.
It's the wish of everybody,
because this is, of course,
then you're much more certain.
But this does not work nowadays.
Media wants to see
this little risk.
I understand.
So that means
we have to adapt to that.
Let's see.
This...
this is not it.
It doesn't seem like...
You got to hit the reload.
I'm reloading it.
Yeah, I wonder
if we should stop.
Everyone is reloading it.
Maybe we should stop.
There you go.
- Hey!
- All right.
Okay, now.
And, indeed, welcome to CERN,
the European Organization
for Nuclear Research,
in Geneva.
Welcome to
the CERN control center.
And here on the screen
we can see the four
different experiments:
ATLAS, CMS, LHCb, and ALICE.
And the program for today
is to first send one beam
in one direction, a second
beam in the opposite direction.
They will circulate
in parallel for a while,
and when everything is ready
and under control,
the separation
is going to be removed,
and the beams
are going to be made to collide
in the four points
around the LHC machine.
I just think to myself,
if you imagine, like,
Thomas Edison, like,
inventing the lightbulb...
if he had tried to invent
the lightbulb with, like,
a hundred camera crews
in his workshop,
and they would've been like,
"Oh, my God,
"you can't even turn it on?
"Come on!
Turn it on now!
"Come... ugh,
we're still waiting?
Come on. Ah, come on.
What's wrong with this guy?"
So the violet... there's always
one vertical, horizontal beam.
One beam.
Shh!
Please.
So a few minutes.
Okay, thank you.
Thank you, bye.
Wow.
Everybody hear?
Few minutes away.
So we should watch that one,
our trigger rate,
this one, the separation bumps,
and the event displays.
Okay, these are
the three screens to watch.
If you have three eyes,
one there, one here,
and one over there.
So, okay,
both beams are at 3.5 TeV,
and we've just collapsed
the separation bumps
and brought the beams
into collision
inside the four experiments.
- Starting.
- They're starting.
They're starting.
- Oh.
- Ooh.
Okay, they're starting.
Two beams,
one in blue, one in red,
each circulating
in opposite directions.
They have
to get closer and closer.
When the numbers
on the four readers say zero,
it means that the beams
are finally aligned.
This is the historical moment
we were all expecting.
It can be anytime now.
Wow! Wow!
Fantastic!
Beautiful.
- Wow.
- We are ready.
First things first.
I just have to say:
"data."
It's... it's unbelievable
how fantastic data is.
You have this invariant mass.
This is for the Z
to mu-mu channel.
And you have this mass peak
of the Z,
in order to estimate
your backgrounds.
It's like the world
at ATLAS and LHC and CMS
and all those places
has suddenly changed.
I mean, it's like,
all of a sudden, there's data.
And after so many years
of not having data
and new data, new physics,
there's just so much
possibility,
and even though
you're rediscovering
the Standard Model,
that is more exciting.
But the most exciting thing
about the data
is not the first collision.
Because the first collision,
okay, great.
First collision,
everyone loves the first.
But the most exciting thing
about the data is the, you know,
1 millionth collision
or the 2 millionth collision
or the fact that collisions
just keep coming and coming
and coming and coming,
and the more and more
collisions we have,
the more and more chance we have
to look
at the interesting physics,
because it just means more
and more and more data for us.
The running is pretty good.
But right now,
it's running amazingly.
Yeah, right now,
but the day of reckoning
is in several months.
We heard rumors on that.
Well, we should be hearing
rumors now.
We really should be
hearing rumors now.
I'm a little worried,
actually.
Yeah.
- Well, we're hearing murmurs.
- What, what's...
Murmurs.
We're hearing murmurs.
There either...
there isn't much there,
or they're doing a very good job
keeping a poker face.
Or they're still at the point
where half of...
where they're still trying
to figure out
what's a murmur
and what's a rumor, internally.
And I think
that's probably actually true.
Right.
The problem is that, also,
I take completely innocent
remarks
and vastly over-interpret them.
Obviously, we're going to
learn about the first discovery
on Twitter and Facebook.
That's so sad,
but I think it's true.
It is.
You mean, I shouldn't check
the arXiv
first thing in the morning...
I need to check my Facebook?
- The arXiv is the last thing.
- The arXiv is the last...
First, like,
check Nima's Twitter feed.
Then check the arXiv.
If Nima has a Twitter feed,
then there's something
has been discovered.
It is August 7, 2011,
and, this is a significant time
for the LHC.
The first big set of data
was presented
at the end of July.
The data
has little extra bits in it
which could be interpreted
as a Higgs.
Even though the LHC
is running at half power,
it actually has gotten data
much, much faster
than anybody expected.
And that allowed them to be
sensitive to the Higgs boson.
It's fucking cool right now.
There was huge excitement
because the Higgs' results
of the two main detectors,
CMS and ATLAS, were first shown,
together, in the same meeting.
For me, as Run Coordinator,
I discussed every little problem
where we lost here
a little bit of data
and there a little bit of data,
so somehow I really feel
attached to this data set.
So somehow it makes me proud
if the Higgs is found
or not with this data set.
The three, two, ones,
so the effect...
The mass of the Higgs,
namely the weight of the Higgs,
can actually tell us
or give us a hint
about what comes next.
If the mass
is on the lighter side,
then that's consistent
with some of the standard things
we've been looking for.
Supersymmetry generally favors
that the Higgs
is as light as possible.
About 115 times
the mass of the proton.
It's 115 GeV:
Giga electron volts.
If, on the other hand,
the Higgs is 140 GeV,
140 times the mass
of the proton,
it's a terrible mass,
because 140 GeV
is associated with theories
that rely on the multiverse.
ATLAS has a little bump here,
a small excess visible near 140.
And now, holy crap.
It's 140!
It's starting to look like
nature has made its choice.
What do we learn
if the LHC does discover
a Higgs at 140 and nothing else?
Chaos. Okay?
The problem
with the multiverse
is that it says the Higgs
might be the last particle
we ever see.
- So what we should do...
- I think the Higgs mass issue...
If we don't see any new
particles besides the Higgs,
we don't get any explanation
for dark matter.
We don't know
how the Higgs itself got a mass.
We never get access
to the deeper theory.
All that information
could be in the other universes.
We may be at the end
of the road.
That's it.
I guess, um...
Well, if it's right
at that number,
then it would be
so fucking astounding.
Where the F is SUSY, right?
I mean, there's nothing.
I mean,
where's all the other stuff?
Where are the other particles?
What happened to dark matter?
I mean...
I've heard of many theories
saying that new particles
might be
at even higher energies, so...
Right.
Who knows? I mean,
it always comes differently.
Who knows if there
are other interesting things.
You know, somehow
it always comes differently
than you expect.
I know that the theorists
are all up in arms,
because, you know,
it could be a heavy Higgs,
but, you know,
I've always said, like,
the worst-case scenario,
I think,
would be Higgs and Higgs only.
- Who knows?
- I know. I know.
Come on,
it's just a little excess.
If this doesn't show up
by the end of next year,
then we can change subject,
I think.
If you don't see
any supersymmetric signal...
Well, but if it's 140,
that would be serious.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Don't tell me.
This is my nightmare.
It's only 30 for me.
At the moment, it's scary.
- At the moment, it's scary.
- It's scary.
Yes, then we have to wait
another couple of years
for the next round.
No, another two years,
I'm saying...
But still, it doesn't matter.
You'll be working harder.
No, but independent of that,
I think you'll know the truth.
Yes, yes, no.
And that's
the important thing.
No, you're right.
Yes, of course.
Coffee
is a very serious business
in the life of a theorist.
It's not like physics research,
where you can wait for 30 years
before you know
if you are right.
Within a few minutes,
it pays off.
If you succeed, it's great.
If you fail,
you get to try another one
in another minute.
In particle physics,
you construct
a theory 20 years ago,
and it may take that long
before you know
if you're on the right track.
Jumping from failure to failure
with undiminished enthusiasm
is the big secret to success.
Well, the hint
that the Higgs was 140 GeV
has disappeared.
All of the new data
that just came in
didn't make the peak bigger.
It sort of filled in the gaps.
And now the peak
doesn't look very good.
In fact, the belief
is that it's gone away
and that the Higgs
can't be 140 GeV.
In order for us to believe
that we've discovered it,
that peak needs to be big
and basically keep growing
as the data comes in.
It's a statistical thing.
We call it the Greek letter
"sigma."
If you reach a height
of 5 sigma,
that's when you know
that you've seen something.
And the probability that
that just happens by accident
is 1 in 31/2 million.
But the Higgs, it's not at 140,
which is a bit of a relief,
because there's still hope
it might be down around 115.
We like 115,
because if the Higgs
is that light,
the theory says
there has to be new particles,
like supersymmetry,
otherwise the universe
is unstable.
It wouldn't have survived
this long.
This is one of the one
of the few truly perfect
academic institutions
in the world.
I mean, there's no excuse...
no excuse at all...
not to think and work
and get things done.
That's its only problem.
There's no excuse at all
not to think
and work and get things done.
You can't blame it on anything
if it doesn't work.
Okay, supersymmetry
versus multiverse.
Oh, boy.
All right.
That's, uh...
If we're going to start
doing that,
this is going to be interesting.
We have been anticipating
that whatever happens
is going to throw the field
in one direction or another.
Oh, shit!
Now that we're really
on the doorstep
of actually knowing
the actual number,
I really care intensely
about what that number is.
Well, faster than we thought,
there's news that there's
going to be another announcement
about the Higgs.
I've heard tons of rumors,
and I've heard
they're things on blogs,
and there's already stuff
in the newspaper.
18 hours or so
until the announcement,
so I'm really looking forward
to what they're going to say,
and I want to be there.
Actually, I'm thinking
of going early in the morning,
or I'll send
my young colleagues,
who have more stamina to sit
and occupy a chair for me.
It is July 3rd...
the night of July 3, 2012,
and I am driving to Princeton,
to the Institute,
to hang out with Nima
and a big crowd,
who are all staying up
until 3:00 in the morning
because they're going to
present the Higgs data at CERN
at 9:00 in the morning
Geneva time.
Certainly the biggest thing
that's happened...
the discovery
of new fundamental particles...
in my lifetime.
And the Higgs is a particle
like no other,
like nothing
we've ever seen before,
and it is weird,
and we do not understand it,
but...
but, uh...
and I missed my exit.
Cinq, six, sept, huit, neuf.
You need quite some skills
to sit on it.
- It's possible.
- Okay.
You know,
there's one ball missing.
Oh, it's, uh... exactly.
No, there's one ball missing,
so it's... you always
think you fall down.
Okay.
Look at some of these people,
like, totally asleep.
Yeah, no,
those are the sleeping bags.
My volume is up.
I don't know why
I'm not getting sound.
There isn't like, a thing
on here with sound, is there?
Who reads lips here?
Can anyone see
if they get sound?
Try streaming it
in their offices or something?
Many apologies, guys.
I don't know what's going on.
- Ah, Peter Higgs.
- Ah, there he is.
- Here he is.
- Very good.
Someone with an iPad.
Not as well seated
as my summer student.
- No!
- Right.
Peter Higgs doesn't even get
a good seat.
Good morning,
everybody here in Geneva.
Today is a special day:
We hear two presentations
from the two experiments.
ATLAS and CMS.
We are starting
in a non-alphabetical order,
and I ask Joe Incandela
from CMS to take the floor.
Okay.
Okay.
So I will give the status
of the CMS Higgs search.
I want to really dedicate this
to the CMS collaboration.
This is a picture
we took last week.
We had a party.
This is only 400 or 500 people.
Remember, there are 4,000 people
in the experiment.
This is not
the real CMS detector.
That's down underground.
This is the spare
that we keep upstairs.
So one page for the theorists.
That's all they deserve.
No, I'm kidding.
The Standard Model is here...
is shown here.
This is what we know.
And we have now...
But one of the big stories
of this year was,
as you know...
those of you in the field...
is pile-up.
We had to deal
with very intense beams
like never before seen
in the field
with many, many interactions,
and this slide shows...
the colors correspond to tracks
from different particles.
And it was in these
kind of events
that we're looking for one of
the rarest particles ever made,
and that's what we call
the Higgs.
And so this is where
things stood last week.
As you know, if you look
at the radiative corrections...
So if you know the W
and top mass very well,
you can actually predict
a long band.
Yeah, yeah,
so we're there at four.
One at the Tevatron.
They really had
a tour de force measurement.
Ah, sorry, yeah, here it is.
And we end up
with four event classes...
Ah, there it is!
Okay, so, to wrap up,
in summary:
We conclude by saying
that we have observed
a new boson with a mass
of 125.3 plus or minus 0.6 GeV
at 4.9 standard deviations.
Thank you.
125.3.
Okay, so now...
Wow, 125?
Do you know ATLAS's result?
This isn't...
You heard about this?
Okay.
I think I can only say
congratulations to everybody.
I will say a few words more
later.
Now we go immediately to ATLAS.
Fabiola Gianotti, please.
Thank you.
Good morning.
ATLAS is very pleased to present
here today
updated results
on Standard Model Higgs searches
based on up to 10.7
inverse femtobarn of data
recorded in 2011 and 2012,
and it's a big honor
and a big emotion for me
to represent this fantastic
collaboration at this occasion.
So let's go to the results
for this channel.
You can see here
the results for the 2011 to 2012
and the combination of the two.
The gamma jet
and jet-jet background
with one or both jet...
requirement that the energy
in a cone around the photon
is below...
a structure
which reproduces very well
the LHC bunch rate
with three bunch,
small gaps...
so then, of course,
we collect...
Yeah.
A few GeV and a few hundred
GeV at the level...
is fit in the nine
different categories
with an exponential function
to model the background,
so, no theoretical prediction,
no Monte Carlo.
The background is determined
from the side bands
of the possible signal.
From this spectrum,
the background fit,
you get this plot here.
Now the grand combination.
Here it goes.
So this distribution
is extremely clean,
except one big spike here...
in this region here.
Excess with a local significance
of 5.0 sigma
at a mass of 126.5 GeV.
Good.
As a layman, I would now say,
"I think we have it."
- Come, Lyn, come here.
- Come here!
Okay.
- There's Peter.
- Peter is there.
- Yeah. Get Peter.
- Peter's there.
Peter!
Well, I would like to add
my congratulations
to everybody involved
in this tremendous achievement.
For me, it's really
an incredible thing
that it has happened
in my lifetime.
Not only in your lifetime,
Peter.
That's a great day, huh?
That's a great day.
And I think all of us,
and all of the people
outside watching it
in the different meeting rooms,
everybody who was involved
and is involved in the project
can be proud of this day.
Okay, enjoy it.
We found the Higgs!
Scientists
this morning announced
they are almost certain
they have discovered
what's being
called the "God Particle."
It is not every day
that you see a whole bunch
of scientists
standing up with champagne
bottles and cheering.
Now, the God Particle,
we physicists wince
when we hear those words...
It's the last piece
of the puzzle
physicists have been looking for
for decades.
- Thank you all.
- Thank you for your attention.
Thanks to everybody
on the panel.
If I could just ask you all
to remain seated
just for a few minutes.
Clear passage here, please.
Can we have a clear passage?
- Thank you.
- Thank you.
Congratulations.
Thank you. Thank you.
I did feel a sense of pride
when the Higgs was announced,
but I felt a sense of pride
for humanity,
that, you know, we little people
on a little planet
with tiny brains
can go so deep
and understand what happens.
Now we're talking
about subnuclear distances
a thousand times smaller
than an atomic nucleus.
Nevertheless,
we can get things right,
and just the power
of the human mind.
It's astonishing that there are
any laws of nature at all,
that they're describable
by mathematics,
that mathematics is a tool
that humans can understand,
that the laws of nature
can be written on a page.
It's the greatest
of all mysteries.
There is a strong sense that we
are hearing nature talk to us.
Turns out, the Higgs mass
is about as interesting
as it could be.
It's sort of in no man's land.
It doesn't prefer symmetries,
and it doesn't prefer
multiverse,
but it's right in the middle.
The data is puzzling enough
that it hasn't excluded
any of the theories
I was involved with,
but it hasn't
confirmed them either.
But until we look at detailed
properties of the Higgs,
and until we have
the high-energy version
of the LHC in a couple of years,
we will not be able
to make a stronger statement.
The most important,
first lesson
of the discovery of the Higgs
is that physics works.
The Higgs, on the one hand,
completes the most successful
scientific theory
we've ever had,
on the other hand,
opens the door
to some very major paradoxes
that we now must address.
We're at a fork in the road,
and the LHC
is steadfastly refusing
to push us
in one direction or the other:
The multiverse on the one side,
and some beautiful symmetry
on the other side.
It's cranking up the suspense
as much as it possibly can.
Before the LHC started,
we would always say,
"New physics
is just around the corner."
And now we're kind of like,
"New physics
is still out there."
And, for one,
I'm not discouraged by this,
by any means, because we know
that new physics
has to be out there.
The next step is,
the LHC goes into a shutdown,
stays off for two years
for improvements and upgrades,
and when it returns, it's
going to be twice the energy.
And for sure,
my vote's for supersymmetry.
Jesus.
That was exciting.
If this is true,
the Higgs is about 125 GeV,
and that means...
um, yeah, actually
almost all of my models
are ruled out,
which...
all the supersymmetry models,
which is pretty cool.
I mean, supersymmetry
could still be true,
but it would have to be a very
strange version of the theory.
And if it's the multiverse...
well, other universes
would be amazing, of course,
but it could also mean no
other new particles discovered,
and then
a Higgs with a mass of 125
is right at a critical point
for the fate of our universe.
Without any other new particles,
that Higgs is unstable.
It's temporary.
And since the Higgs
holds everything together,
if the Higgs goes,
everything goes.
It's amazing that the Higgs,
the center
of the Standard Model,
the thing we've all
been looking for,
could actually also be the thing
that destroys everything.
The creator and the destroyer.
But we could discover
new particles,
and then none of that
would be true.
And anyway,
we have something to do.
There is a very nice sentence
in the Divine Comedy by Dante
who says, "Nati
non fummo a viver come bruti,
ma per seguir
virtute e canoscenza,"
which means, "We were not born
"to live as animals,
but to pursue knowledge
and virtue."
So science and knowledge
are very important,
like art is very important.
It's a need of mankind.
I just saw, two weeks ago,
Werner Herzog talking about
and then screening
his new movie.
But it was about
these incredible caves
that they discovered
a few years ago in France.
Stunningly beautiful.
Gorgeously drawn horses, bison,
rhinoceros, lions,
because, 40,000 years ago,
this is what was going on there.
- In exploration...
- and science is exploration...
there needs to be
the set of people
who have no rules,
and they are going
into the frontier
and come back
with the strange animals
and the interesting rocks
and the amazing pictures,
and to show us what's out there,
discover something.
Why do humans do science?
Why do they do art?
The things that are least
important for our survival
are the very things
that make us human.
- 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,
and there's going to be cake,
and there's going to be
presents,
and all their friends
are going to be there,
and they just, you know...
they just know
it's going to be great.
You know,
they're kind of scattered,
and I can't imagine, 'cause
they're not that big, right?
I've been a postdoc here
for a year,
so I'm a relative newcomer.
But my timing
is sort of perfect.
I mean,
to be on the ground floor
when the data first comes...
it's awesome.
That means I have 5,000 emails.
There's a huge difference
between theorists
and experimentalists.
I mean, when I started college,
I absolutely did not
want to do physics.
Physics meant to me
everything that was boring:
Textbooks, theories, proofs.
But then I discovered
the experimental side,
and the experimental side
is the hands-on aspect.
It's about taking a theory,
which is abstract,
and making it real.
How do you build an experiment
to discover something
that the theory predicts?
And that aspect is what I love.
Of course, when constructing
the whole thing,
we several times thought,
"What if the whole thing
just does not work?"
I really believe now
this will work,
but the next thing is,
will we ever find something?
So maybe we will
just find nothing new.
It would be a catastrophe
for physics.
We would, somehow...
none of the open questions
which we have at the moment
would've been answered.
So the LHC is basically the
most fundamental of experiments.
It's like what any child
would design as an experiment.
You take two things,
and you smash them together.
And you get a lot of stuff that
comes out of that collision,
and you try
to understand that stuff.
Now, in this case,
what we're smashing together
is tiny protons,
which are inside the center
of every atom.
And in order to get them
going as fast as possible,
we have to build
this huge 17-mile ring,
and we run those protons
around the ring multiple times
to build up speed,
almost to the speed of light,
and then we collide two beams
going in opposite directions
at four points,
and at those four points
are four different experiments:
ATLAS, LHCb, CMS, and ALICE.
Now, I work
on the ATLAS experiment.
And ATLAS is like
a huge seven-story camera
that takes a snapshot
of every single collision,
and that's billions
of collisions.
And the hope is that we'll see
the very famous Higgs particle.
But every time we've turned on
the new accelerator
at a higher energy,
we've always been surprised.
So the real hope
is that we'll see the Higgs,
but that there's also something
amazingly new.
You can liken it to
when we put a man on the moon.
It's that level
of collaborative effort.
I would say,
even bigger than that.
This is closer to something like
human beings
building the Pyramids.
Why did they do it?
Why are we doing it?
We actually have two answers.
One answer
is what we tell people,
and the other answer
is the truth.
I'll tell you both.
And there's nothing incorrect
about the first answer.
It's just... it doesn't... it's
not the thing that drives us.
It's not how we think about it,
but it's something
you can say quickly,
and the person you're talking to
won't, you know,
get diverted or pass out
or pick up the SkyMall catalog
if you happen to be next to them
on an airplane.
Answer number one:
We are reproducing the physics,
the conditions,
just after the big bang.
We're doing it in this collider,
and we're reproducing that
so we can see what it was like
when the universe just started.
This is what we tell people.
Okay, answer two:
We are trying to understand
the basic laws of nature.
It sounds slightly more mild,
but this is really where we are
and what we're trying to do.
We study particles,
because just after the big bang,
all there was was particles,
and they carried the information
about how our universe started
and how it got to be
the way it is
and its future.
At the beginning of the 1900s,
it became clear
that all known matter,
everything that we know about,
is made of atoms,
and that atoms are made
of just three particles:
The electron, the proton,
and the neutron.
In the '30s,
other particles were discovered,
and by the 1960s,
there were hundreds
of new particles,
with a new particle discovered
every week.
And there was mass confusion,
until a number
of theorists realized
that there was a simple
mathematical structure
that explained all of this,
that most of these particles
were made of the same
three little bits
we call quarks,
and that there are only
a handful
of truly fundamental particles,
which all fit together
in a nice, neat pattern.
And there was born
the Standard Model.
Eventually, all the particles
in the theory
were discovered,
except one: The Higgs.
And the Higgs
is unlike any other particle.
It's the linchpin
of the Standard Model.
Its theory was written down
in the 1960s by Peter Higgs
and a number of other theorists.
We believe
it is the crucial piece
responsible
for holding matter together.
It is connected to a field
which fills all of space
and which gives particles,
like the electron, mass
and allowed them
to get caught in atoms
and thus is responsible
for the creation of atoms,
molecules, planets, and people.
Without the Higgs, life
as we know it wouldn't exist.
But to prove that it's true,
we have to smash particles
together at high enough energy
to disturb the field
and create a Higgs particle.
If the Higgs exists,
the LHC is the machine
that will discover it.
Let's assume you're successful
and everything comes out okay.
- Sure.
- What do we gain from it?
What's the economic return?
How do you justify all this?
By the way, I am an economist.
I don't hold it against you.
The question
by an economist was,
"What is the financial gain of
running an experiment like this
and the discoveries that we
will make in this experiment?"
And it's a very,
very simple answer.
I have no idea.
We have no idea.
When radio waves
were discovered,
they weren't called radio waves,
because there were no radios.
They were discovered
as some sort of radiation.
Basic science
for big breakthroughs
needs to occur at a level
where you're not asking,
"What is the economic gain?"
You're asking,
"What do we not know,
and where
can we make progress?"
So what is the LHC good for?
Could be nothing other than
just understanding everything.
The first time
I ever saw ATLAS was in 2005.
I had come out just to see
what ATLAS would look like
because there was a possibility
that I could be working on it
as a postdoc.
I can remember walking in
and just being like...
You know, just stunned.
I mean, me, stunned,
you know, just, you know,
already kind of having an idea
of the magnitude.
People tell you,
"Oh, it's five stories tall."
And you go, "Oh, okay,
five stories tall."
And then you see.
Five stories completely filled
with microelectronics...
All custom designed,
all hand-soldered.
You know, it's like as if
it's a five-story Swiss watch.
There was this issue
about the BCIDs.
We had our extended barrel
out earlier,
but it should be back in,
and we should be...
everything running normal.
Okay, so one more
announcement.
We have to be extremely careful
what we do to the system.
I mean, we know that anybody
who's even updating
a number somewhere
might stop our system for
more than an hour quite easily.
So please be absolutely sure
that you yourself
and everybody in your system
is not touching the system,
unless it's been agreed
by the shift leader, yeah?
Nothing should be touched, yeah?
And that includes all things
that you're absolutely
dead certain
they will not do anything wrong.
Especially those things.
It's being called the
largest scientific experiment
in history,
and some say
one that could cause Armageddon.
It's the strangest
experiment ever:
Mankind's most ambitious attempt
to understand
how we all got here.
Thousands of scientists
from around the world
spent 20 years designing
an extraordinary machine.
It cost 5 billion
and will switching on very soon.
This is a genesis machine,
a window on creation.
Five months of testing on...
They're looking for something
called the God Particle,
but skeptics are saying nobody
knows what will happen
when they turn on the switch.
A group of French scientists
believe the collider
might create a black hole
that could swallow up the earth,
and they filed suit to stop
the project from going forward.
Hello?
No, absolutely not.
Well, no, there is no scientific
ground to what they say.
It's not possible that the LHC
is going to destroy the world.
It's absolutely ridiculous.
Okay, it is 9:15.
We are 15 minutes away
from beam.
We've been sitting here,
about 7:00,
and absolutely nobody
brought food.
Again, 15 minutes to beam.
- Ciao, ciao.
- Stress levels are high.
Ciao.
But since I'm in a room
full of Italians,
the stress level's
pretty cool here.
But we have no coffee either.
No coffee.
Who didn't bring coffee?
What we're going to see today
is the launch
of the first beam of protons
around this enormous ring.
Very shortly, Lyn Evans,
the project director,
is going to be addressing
CERN staff,
who are gathered
at different points
around this massive complex.
It's just the first glimpse
at the fact the machine can run.
I mean, so what you need,
really,
is, you need two beams
colliding together
for quite a few...
quite a long period of time
before you calculate,
get enough...
sufficient statistics
in which to actually
be able to look
for the new physics.
But single beam,
the first beam, isn't even that.
You're not even getting
any collisions.
It's just one beam
going around in a circle,
not even at the high energies.
Just one beam going
around in the low energy circle,
that sort of says, "Okay,
we made it around the ring once
for the first time."
And it's a huge event.
Right, after 19 years,
you've been waiting
for this first step.
Let's get started, everybody.
Now comes the day of reckoning.
Five, four, three,
two, one...
Now.
No beam.
Yeah.
So where are we
with the injection kicker?
Oh, well...
they're out.
Okay, never mind.
Let's go.
Five, four, three,
two, one, zero.
We get a beam on this pulse?
I hope so.
Yes!
Well, last night I was,
like, waking up constantly.
Like, "Did we set that right?
What about... did we disable...
oh, my gosh!"
Marzio.
I have a plot for you.
Okay, check this out.
This is Z.
This is timing, in nanoseconds,
which we knew
from the cosmic data.
- That is very nice.
- Yes.
Upstairs, I think people
were more excited about this.
If you're in Google,
that means... that's the world.
This is the most important thing
today.
This is the first,
and this tells us
a lot of things.
It tells us that
the magnetic properties
of the machine are good,
that the aperture is clear.
There's nothing is sticking into
the beam pipe anywhere.
So a very, very encouraging sign
and remarkable progress.
Did you guys see
our beautiful plot?
- What?
- Okay, I want to show you this.
Come on, show them the plot.
You can take a picture of...
here you go.
Well, see if you can get it.
I don't think
there's anyone else
I can show my plot to, so...
It worked.
It just worked.
And there are so few times
in life where it just works.
And there are so
even fewer times in life
where it just works great.
We rocked.
I mean, Tile, first beam...
We destroyed that shit.
They got a beam circulating.
They've had beams circulating
for a full 30 seconds.
So let me understand.
This is one beam going one way?
They have one beam
going one way,
and then they went to the
other beam going the other way.
Well, does it work?
The second beam,
did it go fully around?
- Everything...
- they both went around.
I think
they had the beam go around
about a million times.
Something like that.
Yeah, their Twitter feed
said 10 million.
Now we'll become, you know,
CERN Twitter junkies.
I guess this is exciting.
My logical self
wants to be excited.
My psychological self
is very cautious.
My parents are both Iranian
and both physicists,
and my father in particular
had real political difficulties
with the regime,
and we had to go underground
for a number of years,
and we ended up escaping
from Iran
through the border of Turkey.
But then, through
a number of wonderful accidents,
we ended up in Canada.
I got interested in physics
when I was 13 or 14 years old.
It just offered the way
to combine the two things
I really loved:
Mathematics
and things in the natural world.
You almost done?
Yeah.
- It's just saying "What if?"
- It's, uh... yeah.
You're preparing
a broader audience for this.
Okay, now I'm going
to just do something fun.
Just do something fun.
What would be fun?
No, don't write "hell."
It's a public...
All right, I'm sorry!
- How about that?
- There we go.
Thinking about the LHC
has been the center
of my intellectual life
for about 15, 16 years now.
Depending on what happens
with the LHC,
you know, these are 15 years
I could come to see
as the best possible thing
I could've been doing
with this time,
or it could just be
that the entire 15 years
might as well have not happened,
had no impact,
and then that's just 15 years
that are gone.
It's not the sort of thing
where there's
a consolation prize.
You know,
it's a fairly binary situation.
I definitely won't feel,
"Oh, well,
"I gave it
a good old college try.
"It's all fine anyway.
It's just trying that counts."
I don't believe that.
I don't believe
it's just trying that counts.
I believe getting it right
is what counts.
Okay, please take your seats.
Now it's time
for the entertainment part.
So as with every
great physics event,
we're going to start
with a big bang,
the ATLAS big bang event,
and that's going to follow
with music all evening,
people from ATLAS, who are
going to be performing for you.
So let's get started.
Take 2,000 intelligent,
ambitious,
type "A" personalities.
You make them work 16-hour days,
high-pressure situation,
lots of stress.
You know, that's the recipe
for disaster.
Or at least it's a recipe for
a reality television program.
But all that physics,
Higgs, extra dimensions,
supersymmetry,
microscopic black holes,
macroscopic black holes,
Z-primes, you name it,
the physics that the theorists
only dream of
is ours to discover.
Thank you.
Oh, yeah
Thanks to
the Large Hadron Collider
Thank you, ATLAS!
I grew up in Turkey
from Greek parents
and a middle-class family,
and then, in the '60s,
we became refugees.
We had to leave Turkey
because of ethnic tensions
between Greeks and Turks
over the island of Cyprus,
and there were a lot
of political cross currents,
left, right,
and I was a young,
impressionable 13-year-old
hearing the pro-left
and pro-right arguments,
so one day I would be convinced
that one side was right.
The other day,
I would be convinced
the other side was right.
And then I was getting confused.
How could both of these things
be true
if they were contrary
to each other?
So I decided to focus on a field
where the truth didn't depend
on the eloquence of the speaker.
The truth was absolute.
Of course, when I started out,
I thought that within
maybe five years
the theories
that I was working on
were going to be tested
and I was going to know
the experimental truth
and move on to the next round
of ideas after that.
Little did I know
that the experiments
would take far longer,
and here I am, 30 years after,
still not knowing the truth.
Peter?
I can show you
here a nice event.
Did you see this from...
- Ah, no.
- Andreas showed me this.
- I haven't seen it.
- This is from yesterday night.
This is now a real
beam gas event.
So you see the tracks
also bent...
- Bent by the field?
- Very nice.
Ah, no, I haven't seen...
In some sense, I started
form the wrong perspective
and in the wrong way,
because I'd been studying
a lot of literature
when I was at high school level.
So literature, art,
philosophy, history,
and very little physics
and mathematics.
I'd also been studying music,
piano,
and so I was very much
attracted by art.
There are many similarities
between music and physics.
Classical music
follows rules of harmony,
which are really rules
of physics and mathematics.
But, also, I was fascinated
by big questions.
That is the possibility
of addressing
and answering big questions
about nature, the universe,
why, when, how,
and when I finished high school,
I thought that physics allow us
to address this big question
in a more practical way
than, for instance, philosophy.
That's why I decided
to study physics.
Yes, we lost
these two there...
I managed to go through, like,
the four gallons of milk
that I had in the fridge, but...
We were just waiting
for collisions,
waiting for collisions.
And finally,
then this helium leak,
which really, uh...
it's really frustrating.
We cannot even go there
and investigate what happened.
You have to warm up the magnets,
and warming up the magnets
needs to be done
on a very slow pace and...
in order not to break them...
then you can investigate
and cool them down again.
The world's largest
atom smasher,
the Large Hadron Collider,
is to be shut down
for at least two months.
CERN, the European Organization
for Nuclear Research...
Scientists at CERN are trying
to put on a brave face.
A faulty electrical connection
between two magnets
led to a ton of liquid helium
being leaked into
the 27-kilometer tunnel.
The first high-speed
particle collisions
were due to take place
later this month.
The goal now
is simply to get this
vastly complex machine working.
Fucking hell, look at that.
This is just unbelievable.
You've got magnets
just sheared off their jacks.
We've actually
put in enough energy
to melt it and to vaporize
a whole tube of...
And the stuff's all covered in
a sort of black, metallic dust.
Completely catastrophic, eh?
Completely catastrophic.
There's no more vacuum
in the beam vacuum,
so can as well open it up and
see whether there's any dust,
because if there's dust,
it means
we have to clean all the way
until it's...
I hope, in the worst case,
we have not to take out
more than 20 or so magnets.
Both my family and my students
detect a definite level of...
let's say pessimism
and disappointment.
The built expectation
that now we were going to know
the truth,
it fizzled and delayed,
and it's just, uh...
I thought
I was stronger than this.
It surprised me.
I did say that I thought
it was a mistake
for CERN to have
this gigantic celebration
for things just when
it just had a few protons
wandering around in one
direction around the ring,
that it was just a bad idea
to have so much hoopla
before anything
was actually happening.
At the time
when people were asking me
if I was going to CERN
to celebrate,
I said, "I'm going to go to CERN
"when there's a reason
to celebrate, you know,
"when things are colliding
into each other,
"when something
is starting to happen,
not for some crappy PR reason."
And that backfired.
That, I think... really,
that really backfired,
and I think
that was a PR disaster.
It was a PR disaster
largely of CERN's own making.
You don't go around, you know,
having gigantic parties
before anything has happened.
So the magnets that have
come out are being refurbished,
and so they're sort of
trundling through
about six magnets a week now.
So that's no longer
the bottleneck.
Now they're kind of
getting to the state
where they're ready to start
redoing the interconnects
in the tunnel,
and they're already about a week
or two behind on that.
Given the complexity...
The other thing
is that they're drilling
these bloody holes
in the magnets.
- Because they, like...
- what I heard this last time,
they were saying that
all their tools are breaking
and that sort of business.
But it begs the question,
of course,
you know, what are the risks?
I mean, you kind of basically,
you're going...
I don't know.
We didn't actually think so much
about the collateral effects
of the helium.
- Nobody has.
- Yeah, nobody.
- Yeah.
- Nobody.
Well, there's been
a lot of investigations
into the cause
of the original problem,
and the general agreement
is that we run
at half design energy.
Experimentalists
aren't going to be happy.
Well...
So, yeah...
so the latest schedule is this:
We just put out is D-Day,
beams back on
the 21st of September.
Isn't that a bit optimistic?
Isn't that a bit
optimistic for, uh, this year?
When you're dealing
with something
that is a long-term project...
and the LHC
is a long-term project.
It's a 20-year project.
You can't think about the end.
Ever.
If you start out
a marathon thinking,
"I can't wait
to get to the finish line;
"I'm gonna have my Gatorade
at the finish line;
I'm gonna have my greasy french
fries at the finish line,"
or whatever motivates you...
if you start thinking that
at mile one
and it's, like,
ten minutes into the race,
and you're thinking to yourself,
"Wow, I'm only at mile one.
I've got 25.2 miles to go."
And if you're thinking that
at the start,
then you're done.
Mentally, you are done.
This is what doing
discovery physics means.
This is what doing
discovery means.
Why do people have curiosity?
Why do we care about how
distant parts of the universe,
things that happened
billion years ago,
like the big bang,
why do we find them
that interesting?
It doesn't affect
what we do day-to-day.
But nevertheless,
once you have curiosity,
you can't control it.
It'll ask questions
about the universe.
It will ask questions
about harmonic patterns
that create art, music.
- That's a sculpture?
- That's a sculpture.
Yeah, doesn't it look like
a bunch of broken tiles?
That's what it's supposed
to look like.
And it's, uh...
and when I saw it,
I thought it was just rubble
left over from the construction.
Right, yeah.
You can, in principle,
move it.
So people go up
and move pieces?
- No, people don't.
- But people could.
Why would they have it
so you can move it around
if you weren't going
to move it around?
No, I think you're right.
I think you're allowed
to move it around.
It's certainly
a different experience of it.
I agree.
See, I thought
that that belonged here.
It's just...
it's the perfect spot.
It certainly
changes everything.
- It does.
- Slate and granite.
I guess that's the granite,
and that's the slate.
Hmm.
It's interesting.
There's something
philosophically
about this piece of art
that bothers me.
It's taking a lot of
sort of random things
and making some order out of it.
Yes.
It's trying to make order
out of something
where there isn't any,
instead of taking things
that don't seem ordered
and figuring out
that there is order.
The way we try to reduce
the complexity of the world
is by looking for patterns,
what we call symmetries.
We take all the particles
we know today,
and we attempt to fit them
into some kind
of underlying structure.
Are they the remnants
of some more beautiful
and complete picture
of the laws of nature?
It's like, you go to Egypt,
and you see ruins.
If you look at it the right way,
I could draw a pyramid
and see that
these chunks of stone
are actually the remains
of something very clean
and very symmetric,
very beautiful.
We know that the Standard Model
is incomplete.
We know that there's
other stuff out there,
that there are other particles
that we haven't seen yet.
Dark matter
is a speculated particle
which we think
actually dominates the universe,
and yet we've never seen it
directly,
and it's not part
of the Standard Model.
That's one of those rocks.
We think, possibly,
that that and many other
particles are still out there
and are all part
of a much bigger symmetry,
a much bigger theory
that includes the Standard
Model, but much more.
The most popular theory
is called supersymmetry,
or SUSY for short.
Supersymmetry was a theory
that sort of started to develop
in the late '70s.
Savas was one
of the first authors
of the first theories
of supersymmetry.
It is the unfathomable
depths of...
Supersymmetry is our best
guess of what else is out there,
the bigger theory
that incorporates
our current theories,
the Standard Model.
But for it to be true,
we have to discover
those other particles.
If I could choose a dream
of any theory
that the LHC could find,
actually, I would love
for them to see supersymmetry.
Supersymmetry says,
for every type of particle,
say the electron,
there's a heavy superpartner.
So you have the...
and they have really stupid
names, unfortunately,
called the selectron.
You just add an S to the name.
The squark.
Uh, the sup, the sdown.
Supersymmetry, or SUSY,
is extremely important
for the theoretical community
because it solves
many mathematical problems
with the Standard model.
Now, experimentally, it would be
the experimentalists' dream.
You know, tons of particles
that are just coming out,
and you just don't even know
what to do with...
you know, can't even
write the data fast enough
in order to discover them.
So that'd be my dream.
It used to be
that in the control room life,
it was kind of a luxury.
You know, you could kind of...
you could, you know, kind
of style your hair for the day
because you didn't have to wear
a hard helmet all day.
You could wear nice shoes,
you know,
because you were in
the control room environment.
Now, it's all back to, you know,
bring the dirtiest clothes
that you own to work
because you're gonna be crawling
around in, like,
you know, hard helmets,
steel-toed boots.
Not the most attractive shoes,
but, you know,
I kind of like them.
We're pulling out
the electronics.
We're fixing things that
we didn't actually have time
to get to
during the last shutdown.
The goal of this is
that it would be
in even better shape
for next beam.
Okay, so that is, I think,
all that I have to say.
Hope the theorists
aren't driving you crazy.
Don't listen to them,
by the way,
because theorists,
they can sometimes...
Just telling you.
You got to come back
to the experimental world
so that you can touch bases
with reality.
All right,
I'll talk to you soon.
One of the most basic facts
about the universe
is that it's big.
So you might wonder,
"Why is the universe big?"
There's actually
a single number,
called
the cosmological constant,
that plays a crucial role
in determining
what the universe looks like.
In fact, around ten years ago,
astronomers discovered
a really remarkable fact:
The universe is getting bigger
and bigger
at a faster and faster rate.
But this rate
is a million, billion,
billion, billion, billion,
billion, billion times slower
than what we'd actually predict.
When you're off by
a factor of a million, billion,
billion, billion, billion,
billion, billion,
there's something very wrong
with your understanding
of basic physics.
Even worse,
this one number,
the cosmological constant,
needs to have
this extremely precise value.
And if the value
is different even by a tiny bit,
we would radically change what
the world looks like around us.
If you saw a situation where,
if the parameter
has a very dangerous value
and you change it a little bit,
the world
would change radically,
and we'd be dead.
We couldn't possibly live.
You would wonder
where that came from.
You know, how is that possible?
So just on the face of it,
you would look at the situation
and say,
"Wow, someone really cared
to put this parameter
"at just the right value
so that we get to be here
"and that
it's a pleasant universe
and really cares a lot."
This is the sort of thing that
really keeps you up at night.
It really makes you wonder,
"Maybe we've got something
"about the whole picture,
the big picture,
totally, totally,
totally wrong."
Before I went
to elementary school,
my mother started telling me
biblical stories.
She told me that if we are good,
we'll go to paradise,
and we will stay there forever.
And when she said "forever,"
I started panicking.
I kept asking, "Forever?"
"Forever?"
You mean, it never ends?
Like, you wake up,
and you know that then,
you go back to sleep,
and this never ends, never ends,
never ends.
I started crying.
She told me,
"What's wrong with you?
"This is paradise.
"It will be a lot of fun.
You'll be very happy there."
But this idea of eternity,
something infinite,
scared me.
There is
a scientific alternative
to believing there's
someone out there who loves us,
twiddling the dials very finely
for things to work out.
And this alternative,
said briefly,
is that everything we see
in our observed universe
is actually a very small part
of a much,
much vaster multiverse.
You might
literally imagine that,
from some bird's eye
point of view,
if you went
to enormous distances,
you would see that our universe
is actually a little pocket
inside a vastly bigger space.
In this picture,
these mysterious numbers,
like the cosmological constant,
are actually basically random.
And out there in the multiverse,
next to us somewhere,
is another region
where these numbers take on
some other random value,
and then another region
where they take on
some other random value still.
Only in a tiny sliver,
a minuscule part
of this gigantic multiverse,
for completely
accidental reasons,
do these numbers take on
the very, very special values
which allows structures to grow,
stars to form, galaxies to form.
Ultimately,
things like us to form.
This is the really
opposite extreme interpretation
of the presence of fine-tuning
as intelligent designers
would want to give.
If you believe
that someone out there cares
and twiddles the parameters
so that you can exist,
that puts our existence
at the very core of reality.
If you believe
that our entire universe
is a tiny, little,
minuscule spec
in a gigantic multiverse
which is mostly lethal,
that's a polar opposite
philosophy
for what the universe
looks like.
In fact, it's an idea
that many physicists loathe,
because certain questions
then become things
that we will not hope
to be able to understand.
Nima is now an advocate
for this idea
that the laws of physics
are different
in different parts
of this multiverse,
that what we measure
in experiments
are not deep mysteries
of nature,
but they're just random
accidents in our universe,
that maybe even the Higgs itself
is a random accident that
has occurred in our universe
and let's life exist,
but has no explanation.
In a sense,
it's the end of physics.
On the one hand,
we have the direction
that we've been on
for the last 400 years,
towards increasing beauty,
simplicity, symmetry,
and a path
that has time and time again
paid off with deeper
and deeper insights
about the way the world works.
On the other hand, we have
the idea of the multiverse,
which would move us
to a real picture
not of symmetry and beauty
and order,
but fundamentally of chaos
on enormous distances.
This is the really
very, very big-scale question
which the LHC
is going to push us in
one way or the other.
What happens, for example,
if...
Oh, blimey.
Yeah, there's a lot of...
Hi, Katja.
You all right?
Oh, you're not recording this,
huh?
Yes, we're all on the...
Yeah, don't worry
about all the other crap.
We've got the beams
going around again.
The magnet repairs
are holding up well,
and our next challenge
is to take these beams
up to high energy
and collide them.
Okay.
We're very, very aware
of the damage we can do.
Here we go.
That's what worries me stiff
at the moment.
The original proposal
for ATLAS was in 1989.
And you're kind of riding
this idea.
You've got this dream
of physics.
This dream of physics
is what pulled everyone along
for those 19 years.
And so here, now, today,
finally,
with high-energy collisions,
we can start to look
for that dream of new physics.
Uh, blue.
The control room, yes.
The control room.
This is the control room.
The pressure of it being
an event, of course, is there.
And, of course, anything
can go wrong, and it has.
Last weekend
was a complete disaster.
We were discussing
the possibility
that we do collisions
during the night
rather than the plan,
9:00 in the morning.
Of course,
this has caused major,
sort of knock-ons for,
one, the experiments,
and two, for the media service.
Good morning, everybody.
I propose we start.
I will take you briefly
over the whole summary
of the weekend,
just to get you
up to date what happened.
During the night,
we tried to set up again
for high intensities,
for 450 GeV collisions,
but then we were cut short
because we encountered a vacuum.
What everybody wants,
from a physics point of view
and from being sure,
is doing it secretly before
and showing it to the media
during the day.
And I think this was also
the wish of Fabiola.
It's the wish of everybody,
because this is, of course,
then you're much more certain.
But this does not work nowadays.
Media wants to see
this little risk.
I understand.
So that means
we have to adapt to that.
Let's see.
This...
this is not it.
It doesn't seem like...
You got to hit the reload.
I'm reloading it.
Yeah, I wonder
if we should stop.
Everyone is reloading it.
Maybe we should stop.
There you go.
- Hey!
- All right.
Okay, now.
And, indeed, welcome to CERN,
the European Organization
for Nuclear Research,
in Geneva.
Welcome to
the CERN control center.
And here on the screen
we can see the four
different experiments:
ATLAS, CMS, LHCb, and ALICE.
And the program for today
is to first send one beam
in one direction, a second
beam in the opposite direction.
They will circulate
in parallel for a while,
and when everything is ready
and under control,
the separation
is going to be removed,
and the beams
are going to be made to collide
in the four points
around the LHC machine.
I just think to myself,
if you imagine, like,
Thomas Edison, like,
inventing the lightbulb...
if he had tried to invent
the lightbulb with, like,
a hundred camera crews
in his workshop,
and they would've been like,
"Oh, my God,
"you can't even turn it on?
"Come on!
Turn it on now!
"Come... ugh,
we're still waiting?
Come on. Ah, come on.
What's wrong with this guy?"
So the violet... there's always
one vertical, horizontal beam.
One beam.
Shh!
Please.
So a few minutes.
Okay, thank you.
Thank you, bye.
Wow.
Everybody hear?
Few minutes away.
So we should watch that one,
our trigger rate,
this one, the separation bumps,
and the event displays.
Okay, these are
the three screens to watch.
If you have three eyes,
one there, one here,
and one over there.
So, okay,
both beams are at 3.5 TeV,
and we've just collapsed
the separation bumps
and brought the beams
into collision
inside the four experiments.
- Starting.
- They're starting.
They're starting.
- Oh.
- Ooh.
Okay, they're starting.
Two beams,
one in blue, one in red,
each circulating
in opposite directions.
They have
to get closer and closer.
When the numbers
on the four readers say zero,
it means that the beams
are finally aligned.
This is the historical moment
we were all expecting.
It can be anytime now.
Wow! Wow!
Fantastic!
Beautiful.
- Wow.
- We are ready.
First things first.
I just have to say:
"data."
It's... it's unbelievable
how fantastic data is.
You have this invariant mass.
This is for the Z
to mu-mu channel.
And you have this mass peak
of the Z,
in order to estimate
your backgrounds.
It's like the world
at ATLAS and LHC and CMS
and all those places
has suddenly changed.
I mean, it's like,
all of a sudden, there's data.
And after so many years
of not having data
and new data, new physics,
there's just so much
possibility,
and even though
you're rediscovering
the Standard Model,
that is more exciting.
But the most exciting thing
about the data
is not the first collision.
Because the first collision,
okay, great.
First collision,
everyone loves the first.
But the most exciting thing
about the data is the, you know,
1 millionth collision
or the 2 millionth collision
or the fact that collisions
just keep coming and coming
and coming and coming,
and the more and more
collisions we have,
the more and more chance we have
to look
at the interesting physics,
because it just means more
and more and more data for us.
The running is pretty good.
But right now,
it's running amazingly.
Yeah, right now,
but the day of reckoning
is in several months.
We heard rumors on that.
Well, we should be hearing
rumors now.
We really should be
hearing rumors now.
I'm a little worried,
actually.
Yeah.
- Well, we're hearing murmurs.
- What, what's...
Murmurs.
We're hearing murmurs.
There either...
there isn't much there,
or they're doing a very good job
keeping a poker face.
Or they're still at the point
where half of...
where they're still trying
to figure out
what's a murmur
and what's a rumor, internally.
And I think
that's probably actually true.
Right.
The problem is that, also,
I take completely innocent
remarks
and vastly over-interpret them.
Obviously, we're going to
learn about the first discovery
on Twitter and Facebook.
That's so sad,
but I think it's true.
It is.
You mean, I shouldn't check
the arXiv
first thing in the morning...
I need to check my Facebook?
- The arXiv is the last thing.
- The arXiv is the last...
First, like,
check Nima's Twitter feed.
Then check the arXiv.
If Nima has a Twitter feed,
then there's something
has been discovered.
It is August 7, 2011,
and, this is a significant time
for the LHC.
The first big set of data
was presented
at the end of July.
The data
has little extra bits in it
which could be interpreted
as a Higgs.
Even though the LHC
is running at half power,
it actually has gotten data
much, much faster
than anybody expected.
And that allowed them to be
sensitive to the Higgs boson.
It's fucking cool right now.
There was huge excitement
because the Higgs' results
of the two main detectors,
CMS and ATLAS, were first shown,
together, in the same meeting.
For me, as Run Coordinator,
I discussed every little problem
where we lost here
a little bit of data
and there a little bit of data,
so somehow I really feel
attached to this data set.
So somehow it makes me proud
if the Higgs is found
or not with this data set.
The three, two, ones,
so the effect...
The mass of the Higgs,
namely the weight of the Higgs,
can actually tell us
or give us a hint
about what comes next.
If the mass
is on the lighter side,
then that's consistent
with some of the standard things
we've been looking for.
Supersymmetry generally favors
that the Higgs
is as light as possible.
About 115 times
the mass of the proton.
It's 115 GeV:
Giga electron volts.
If, on the other hand,
the Higgs is 140 GeV,
140 times the mass
of the proton,
it's a terrible mass,
because 140 GeV
is associated with theories
that rely on the multiverse.
ATLAS has a little bump here,
a small excess visible near 140.
And now, holy crap.
It's 140!
It's starting to look like
nature has made its choice.
What do we learn
if the LHC does discover
a Higgs at 140 and nothing else?
Chaos. Okay?
The problem
with the multiverse
is that it says the Higgs
might be the last particle
we ever see.
- So what we should do...
- I think the Higgs mass issue...
If we don't see any new
particles besides the Higgs,
we don't get any explanation
for dark matter.
We don't know
how the Higgs itself got a mass.
We never get access
to the deeper theory.
All that information
could be in the other universes.
We may be at the end
of the road.
That's it.
I guess, um...
Well, if it's right
at that number,
then it would be
so fucking astounding.
Where the F is SUSY, right?
I mean, there's nothing.
I mean,
where's all the other stuff?
Where are the other particles?
What happened to dark matter?
I mean...
I've heard of many theories
saying that new particles
might be
at even higher energies, so...
Right.
Who knows? I mean,
it always comes differently.
Who knows if there
are other interesting things.
You know, somehow
it always comes differently
than you expect.
I know that the theorists
are all up in arms,
because, you know,
it could be a heavy Higgs,
but, you know,
I've always said, like,
the worst-case scenario,
I think,
would be Higgs and Higgs only.
- Who knows?
- I know. I know.
Come on,
it's just a little excess.
If this doesn't show up
by the end of next year,
then we can change subject,
I think.
If you don't see
any supersymmetric signal...
Well, but if it's 140,
that would be serious.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Don't tell me.
This is my nightmare.
It's only 30 for me.
At the moment, it's scary.
- At the moment, it's scary.
- It's scary.
Yes, then we have to wait
another couple of years
for the next round.
No, another two years,
I'm saying...
But still, it doesn't matter.
You'll be working harder.
No, but independent of that,
I think you'll know the truth.
Yes, yes, no.
And that's
the important thing.
No, you're right.
Yes, of course.
Coffee
is a very serious business
in the life of a theorist.
It's not like physics research,
where you can wait for 30 years
before you know
if you are right.
Within a few minutes,
it pays off.
If you succeed, it's great.
If you fail,
you get to try another one
in another minute.
In particle physics,
you construct
a theory 20 years ago,
and it may take that long
before you know
if you're on the right track.
Jumping from failure to failure
with undiminished enthusiasm
is the big secret to success.
Well, the hint
that the Higgs was 140 GeV
has disappeared.
All of the new data
that just came in
didn't make the peak bigger.
It sort of filled in the gaps.
And now the peak
doesn't look very good.
In fact, the belief
is that it's gone away
and that the Higgs
can't be 140 GeV.
In order for us to believe
that we've discovered it,
that peak needs to be big
and basically keep growing
as the data comes in.
It's a statistical thing.
We call it the Greek letter
"sigma."
If you reach a height
of 5 sigma,
that's when you know
that you've seen something.
And the probability that
that just happens by accident
is 1 in 31/2 million.
But the Higgs, it's not at 140,
which is a bit of a relief,
because there's still hope
it might be down around 115.
We like 115,
because if the Higgs
is that light,
the theory says
there has to be new particles,
like supersymmetry,
otherwise the universe
is unstable.
It wouldn't have survived
this long.
This is one of the one
of the few truly perfect
academic institutions
in the world.
I mean, there's no excuse...
no excuse at all...
not to think and work
and get things done.
That's its only problem.
There's no excuse at all
not to think
and work and get things done.
You can't blame it on anything
if it doesn't work.
Okay, supersymmetry
versus multiverse.
Oh, boy.
All right.
That's, uh...
If we're going to start
doing that,
this is going to be interesting.
We have been anticipating
that whatever happens
is going to throw the field
in one direction or another.
Oh, shit!
Now that we're really
on the doorstep
of actually knowing
the actual number,
I really care intensely
about what that number is.
Well, faster than we thought,
there's news that there's
going to be another announcement
about the Higgs.
I've heard tons of rumors,
and I've heard
they're things on blogs,
and there's already stuff
in the newspaper.
18 hours or so
until the announcement,
so I'm really looking forward
to what they're going to say,
and I want to be there.
Actually, I'm thinking
of going early in the morning,
or I'll send
my young colleagues,
who have more stamina to sit
and occupy a chair for me.
It is July 3rd...
the night of July 3, 2012,
and I am driving to Princeton,
to the Institute,
to hang out with Nima
and a big crowd,
who are all staying up
until 3:00 in the morning
because they're going to
present the Higgs data at CERN
at 9:00 in the morning
Geneva time.
Certainly the biggest thing
that's happened...
the discovery
of new fundamental particles...
in my lifetime.
And the Higgs is a particle
like no other,
like nothing
we've ever seen before,
and it is weird,
and we do not understand it,
but...
but, uh...
and I missed my exit.
Cinq, six, sept, huit, neuf.
You need quite some skills
to sit on it.
- It's possible.
- Okay.
You know,
there's one ball missing.
Oh, it's, uh... exactly.
No, there's one ball missing,
so it's... you always
think you fall down.
Okay.
Look at some of these people,
like, totally asleep.
Yeah, no,
those are the sleeping bags.
My volume is up.
I don't know why
I'm not getting sound.
There isn't like, a thing
on here with sound, is there?
Who reads lips here?
Can anyone see
if they get sound?
Try streaming it
in their offices or something?
Many apologies, guys.
I don't know what's going on.
- Ah, Peter Higgs.
- Ah, there he is.
- Here he is.
- Very good.
Someone with an iPad.
Not as well seated
as my summer student.
- No!
- Right.
Peter Higgs doesn't even get
a good seat.
Good morning,
everybody here in Geneva.
Today is a special day:
We hear two presentations
from the two experiments.
ATLAS and CMS.
We are starting
in a non-alphabetical order,
and I ask Joe Incandela
from CMS to take the floor.
Okay.
Okay.
So I will give the status
of the CMS Higgs search.
I want to really dedicate this
to the CMS collaboration.
This is a picture
we took last week.
We had a party.
This is only 400 or 500 people.
Remember, there are 4,000 people
in the experiment.
This is not
the real CMS detector.
That's down underground.
This is the spare
that we keep upstairs.
So one page for the theorists.
That's all they deserve.
No, I'm kidding.
The Standard Model is here...
is shown here.
This is what we know.
And we have now...
But one of the big stories
of this year was,
as you know...
those of you in the field...
is pile-up.
We had to deal
with very intense beams
like never before seen
in the field
with many, many interactions,
and this slide shows...
the colors correspond to tracks
from different particles.
And it was in these
kind of events
that we're looking for one of
the rarest particles ever made,
and that's what we call
the Higgs.
And so this is where
things stood last week.
As you know, if you look
at the radiative corrections...
So if you know the W
and top mass very well,
you can actually predict
a long band.
Yeah, yeah,
so we're there at four.
One at the Tevatron.
They really had
a tour de force measurement.
Ah, sorry, yeah, here it is.
And we end up
with four event classes...
Ah, there it is!
Okay, so, to wrap up,
in summary:
We conclude by saying
that we have observed
a new boson with a mass
of 125.3 plus or minus 0.6 GeV
at 4.9 standard deviations.
Thank you.
125.3.
Okay, so now...
Wow, 125?
Do you know ATLAS's result?
This isn't...
You heard about this?
Okay.
I think I can only say
congratulations to everybody.
I will say a few words more
later.
Now we go immediately to ATLAS.
Fabiola Gianotti, please.
Thank you.
Good morning.
ATLAS is very pleased to present
here today
updated results
on Standard Model Higgs searches
based on up to 10.7
inverse femtobarn of data
recorded in 2011 and 2012,
and it's a big honor
and a big emotion for me
to represent this fantastic
collaboration at this occasion.
So let's go to the results
for this channel.
You can see here
the results for the 2011 to 2012
and the combination of the two.
The gamma jet
and jet-jet background
with one or both jet...
requirement that the energy
in a cone around the photon
is below...
a structure
which reproduces very well
the LHC bunch rate
with three bunch,
small gaps...
so then, of course,
we collect...
Yeah.
A few GeV and a few hundred
GeV at the level...
is fit in the nine
different categories
with an exponential function
to model the background,
so, no theoretical prediction,
no Monte Carlo.
The background is determined
from the side bands
of the possible signal.
From this spectrum,
the background fit,
you get this plot here.
Now the grand combination.
Here it goes.
So this distribution
is extremely clean,
except one big spike here...
in this region here.
Excess with a local significance
of 5.0 sigma
at a mass of 126.5 GeV.
Good.
As a layman, I would now say,
"I think we have it."
- Come, Lyn, come here.
- Come here!
Okay.
- There's Peter.
- Peter is there.
- Yeah. Get Peter.
- Peter's there.
Peter!
Well, I would like to add
my congratulations
to everybody involved
in this tremendous achievement.
For me, it's really
an incredible thing
that it has happened
in my lifetime.
Not only in your lifetime,
Peter.
That's a great day, huh?
That's a great day.
And I think all of us,
and all of the people
outside watching it
in the different meeting rooms,
everybody who was involved
and is involved in the project
can be proud of this day.
Okay, enjoy it.
We found the Higgs!
Scientists
this morning announced
they are almost certain
they have discovered
what's being
called the "God Particle."
It is not every day
that you see a whole bunch
of scientists
standing up with champagne
bottles and cheering.
Now, the God Particle,
we physicists wince
when we hear those words...
It's the last piece
of the puzzle
physicists have been looking for
for decades.
- Thank you all.
- Thank you for your attention.
Thanks to everybody
on the panel.
If I could just ask you all
to remain seated
just for a few minutes.
Clear passage here, please.
Can we have a clear passage?
- Thank you.
- Thank you.
Congratulations.
Thank you. Thank you.
I did feel a sense of pride
when the Higgs was announced,
but I felt a sense of pride
for humanity,
that, you know, we little people
on a little planet
with tiny brains
can go so deep
and understand what happens.
Now we're talking
about subnuclear distances
a thousand times smaller
than an atomic nucleus.
Nevertheless,
we can get things right,
and just the power
of the human mind.
It's astonishing that there are
any laws of nature at all,
that they're describable
by mathematics,
that mathematics is a tool
that humans can understand,
that the laws of nature
can be written on a page.
It's the greatest
of all mysteries.
There is a strong sense that we
are hearing nature talk to us.
Turns out, the Higgs mass
is about as interesting
as it could be.
It's sort of in no man's land.
It doesn't prefer symmetries,
and it doesn't prefer
multiverse,
but it's right in the middle.
The data is puzzling enough
that it hasn't excluded
any of the theories
I was involved with,
but it hasn't
confirmed them either.
But until we look at detailed
properties of the Higgs,
and until we have
the high-energy version
of the LHC in a couple of years,
we will not be able
to make a stronger statement.
The most important,
first lesson
of the discovery of the Higgs
is that physics works.
The Higgs, on the one hand,
completes the most successful
scientific theory
we've ever had,
on the other hand,
opens the door
to some very major paradoxes
that we now must address.
We're at a fork in the road,
and the LHC
is steadfastly refusing
to push us
in one direction or the other:
The multiverse on the one side,
and some beautiful symmetry
on the other side.
It's cranking up the suspense
as much as it possibly can.
Before the LHC started,
we would always say,
"New physics
is just around the corner."
And now we're kind of like,
"New physics
is still out there."
And, for one,
I'm not discouraged by this,
by any means, because we know
that new physics
has to be out there.
The next step is,
the LHC goes into a shutdown,
stays off for two years
for improvements and upgrades,
and when it returns, it's
going to be twice the energy.
And for sure,
my vote's for supersymmetry.
Jesus.
That was exciting.
If this is true,
the Higgs is about 125 GeV,
and that means...
um, yeah, actually
almost all of my models
are ruled out,
which...
all the supersymmetry models,
which is pretty cool.
I mean, supersymmetry
could still be true,
but it would have to be a very
strange version of the theory.
And if it's the multiverse...
well, other universes
would be amazing, of course,
but it could also mean no
other new particles discovered,
and then
a Higgs with a mass of 125
is right at a critical point
for the fate of our universe.
Without any other new particles,
that Higgs is unstable.
It's temporary.
And since the Higgs
holds everything together,
if the Higgs goes,
everything goes.
It's amazing that the Higgs,
the center
of the Standard Model,
the thing we've all
been looking for,
could actually also be the thing
that destroys everything.
The creator and the destroyer.
But we could discover
new particles,
and then none of that
would be true.
And anyway,
we have something to do.
There is a very nice sentence
in the Divine Comedy by Dante
who says, "Nati
non fummo a viver come bruti,
ma per seguir
virtute e canoscenza,"
which means, "We were not born
"to live as animals,
but to pursue knowledge
and virtue."
So science and knowledge
are very important,
like art is very important.
It's a need of mankind.
I just saw, two weeks ago,
Werner Herzog talking about
and then screening
his new movie.
But it was about
these incredible caves
that they discovered
a few years ago in France.
Stunningly beautiful.
Gorgeously drawn horses, bison,
rhinoceros, lions,
because, 40,000 years ago,
this is what was going on there.
- In exploration...
- and science is exploration...
there needs to be
the set of people
who have no rules,
and they are going
into the frontier
and come back
with the strange animals
and the interesting rocks
and the amazing pictures,
and to show us what's out there,
discover something.
Why do humans do science?
Why do they do art?
The things that are least
important for our survival
are the very things
that make us human.