It's going to be just incredible excitement.
We have been building this detector for 10 years or more and it's finally turning on
and this is the moment of beam and it's going to be out of control excitement.
I think simultaneously it's going to be incredibly stressful and almost panic because here you
are you have finally you've waited 10 years and you'd better make sure you've gotten it right.
We're about to unfold for you an adventure in the world of science.
Here we're united by a quest to understand the mysteries of the universe and it's a
wonderful thing to be a part of. Could they be some kind of particle? Exactly my question.
What happened at the beginning of time that made us made our reality end up as it is is so
fundamental. They look deep into the unit of light with a microscope inside the cell.
One of these things is a spectacular piece of engineering and then to put thousands of them
together and make the whole thing work is just really cool and there's only one like it in the
one of the greatest achievements of the human mind. I love the aspect that there is no answer in the
back of the book. Scientists are still not quite sure what to look for. In a few months we're
going to turn on this accelerator. Who knows what we're going to see.
The most famous goal is to look for what often people call the God particle or the Higgs boson.
It's a particle that is predicted by the model that we have right now for how matter interacts but
it hasn't been seen yet. And wooden scientists like to think up an experiment that would answer
that question. For 27 kilometers underneath the suburbs of Geneva Switzerland there are 1,200
magnets like the one behind me here and what these magnets do is keep protons going two
directions at 99.99999% the speed of light. At the end at four locations around the machine you
take a proton beam going one direction one going the other direction and you get them to collide.
So the protons smash into each other when we're lucky and all of the energy that they're
carrying because of their mass and their velocity combines and forms particles that weren't there
previously. The energy that they were carrying turns into mass in different forms and the point
is to try to record the information of these new particles these different particles that come out
so that we can figure out what is there what kinds of particles exist. It's like searching for a
needle in a haystack that we're looking for this one particular type of collision in many millions
of collisions. The Higgs particle is not something that you or I would experience on a daily basis
but it's required by the theory. It is the only particle in a standard model that has yet to be
discovered. Why are things made the way they are which is sort of a God's question why do I exist
as I am. So this particle would help us explain in our theories why things exist as they exist how
we perceive them. Mind you this is just a theory but it makes sense. Many scientists are at work
trying to see if it is really correct. That's extremely interesting Dr. Baxter but there's
something I don't understand. My day-to-day tasks involve debugging software. We have 30,000
computers in this room. We have millions of channels of information coming out. Every year
that the LHC is in operation we're talking about 15 petabytes of data being produced. Trying to
get hardware to work as it ought to. And we have 10,000 components. When it's operating it has about
12,000 amps of DC running through the coil. They have to figure out how you're going to fit human
beings into these positions because you have to you know be able to position a detector just right.
Each one of these magnets the magnet itself operates at two degrees Kelvin so that's colder than
outer space. The forces involved inside are huge. This is going to be in a high radiation field,
high magnetic field. I've got this coil trying to rip itself apart. One of the most important things
for the electronics that I work on is that it has to be 100% reliable. You cannot have a single
failure. How do we make sure those 10,000 components work perfectly every single day 365
days a year? That's another reminder that the most powerful instrument in the cause of science is
the human mind. It's not about one country or one laboratory working on a project. This thing
is so huge that you can't do it alone. And so it's a collaboration of countries across the planet,
scientists from all over the world working together on one project for one cause. I love
particle physics because it's the fundamentals. It's what everything is made up of. It's the
most basic question of what we see every day. All of our interactions are walking down the
street chewing gum. Everything relies on the interaction of fundamental particles and fundamental
forces. Are we going to discover entirely new physics that changes our entire understanding of
the universe? I mean, who doesn't want that job? This is, you know, I mean, people say,
what do you do for a living? And I think I get to answer the big questions in the universe.
The power of the human mind to observe, to inquire, to reason, to imagine the existence of
particles that are too small to see or things too great to measure. That power of the mind is
unlocking the deepest secrets of nature. For the mind is the great lever of all things. Human
thought is the process by which human ends are ultimately answered.
