StarTalk Live: The Particle Party (Part 1)

How does Neil deGrasse Tyson celebrate the discovery of the Higgs boson? By throwing a StarTalk Live “Particle Party” with Bill Nye the Science Guy and Kyle Cranmer, one of the CERN physicists who discovered the Higgs.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:35Speaker 03

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

• 1:44Speaker 03

  StarTalk begins right now.

• 1:56Speaker 04

  Welcome to another super fun-filled evening of StarTalk.

• 2:06Speaker 04

  It is now my great pleasure to bring out Neil Tyson.

• 2:19Speaker 04

  Sarah Vowell.

• 2:28Speaker 04

  From 30 Rock, Scott Adsett.

• 2:36Speaker 04

  And Neil?

• 2:38Speaker 05

  Welcome to the Particle Party.

• 2:43Speaker 05

  And...

• 2:44Speaker 04

  Nerds!

• 2:47Speaker 05

  The Particle Party is gonna be all about the Higgs boson.

• 2:56Speaker 05

  I'm feeling it. I can only take you so far in that subject. We had to go to the folks who really do this work. And we went to NYU. Professor Kyle Cranmer, come on out. How you doing, man?

• 3:12Speaker 05

  He is one of the scientists who works at CERN. Okay, so...

• 3:22Speaker 05

  Okay, and I got a blank chair here. Join me in the warmest New York welcome for the man I call Sir William to the rest of the world, he is Bill Nye!

• 3:45Speaker 05

  So let's get this Particle Party started. You may remember, the date was July 4th. I tweeted that morning.

• 3:58Speaker 05

  I don't know if you saw it.

• 4:01Speaker 05

  My tweet was, "On the day America chooses to declare its own greatness, July 4th, Europe, who had just announced the discovery of the Higgs particle that morning, Europe reminds us how much America sucks at science."

• 4:24Bill Nye?

  Wow.

• 4:26Speaker 05

  I'm just saying, you know, we could have done that.

• 4:29Bill Nye?

  We would have done it in 1993. Well, I mean, the US could have done it by building the Superconductor-Supercollider, which was cancelled in 1993.

• 4:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 4:35Bill Nye?

  3+ times the energy.

• 4:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, so what's happened?

• 4:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, Kyle.

• 4:39Speaker 05

  What the hell's wrong with you physicists?

• 4:41Speaker 07

  I was still in high school.

• 4:45Speaker 04

  Ooh, I'm Doogie Howser of physics.

• 4:50Speaker 07

  No, actually, I was just graduating and on my way, and I was going to school in Texas, even in college, and I would go to Waukesha Haci and was excited about it until...

• 4:59Speaker 05

  That's where they were digging the hole for the Supercollider.

• 5:01Speaker 07

  That's right. Before they made the world's largest mushroom farm.

• 5:04Speaker 05

  Underground, yes. So now you're like, full-up physicist, you've been a professor of physics at NYU for five years, you got your PhD here, but you were in residence at CERN. CERN stands for what?

• 5:15Speaker 07

  The Center for European Research Nucleaire in French, so, you know, all the acronyms are backwards.

• 5:21Speaker 05

  Alright, so let's get a primer going here. I want it so we understand the structure of nature, okay? So, last I looked, we had four forces, so remind us of what the forces are.

• 5:31Speaker 07

  Right, so there's gravity that...

• 5:33Speaker 05

  Gravity we all know and love.

• 5:34Speaker 07

  We all know and love.

• 5:35Speaker 05

  Do you guys know and love gravity?

• 5:36Speaker 07

  Yeah, like, see?

• 5:38Speaker 05

  Okay, good. Okay. Since this is radio, let the record show.

• 5:44Bill Nye?

  And that's pretty far from the microphone. It was a sheaf of papers that was pulled to the floor.

• 5:48Speaker 07

  I dropped it to the floor and it fell.

• 5:50Bill Nye?

  There.

• 5:51Speaker 07

  Yeah, sure.

• 5:51Bill Nye?

  But wait, there's more. Not only was the paper pulled toward the floor by the gravity of the earth, the earth was ever so slightly pulled up.

• 6:00Speaker 04

  Could you feel it? Ever so slight. And may I ask, what stopped the papers from going through the stage?

• 6:06Speaker 07

  That's a very good question. It was largely the electromagnetic interaction that binds atoms together. Yeah.

• 6:12Speaker 05

  Yeah. That's another force, electromagnetic.

• 6:14Speaker 07

  That's right. It's also what's, uh, the lights that are shining on us right now, why your cellphone works, uh, why, pretty much, all of chemistry.

• 6:21Speaker 05

  I said it's two forces.

• 6:22Speaker 07

  That's right. And then the other two are things that most people aren't familiar with.

• 6:25Speaker 05

  Such as?

• 6:26Speaker 07

  They're inside the nucleus of an atom. There's one called the strong nuclear force.

• 6:30Speaker 05

  I bet it's, it's strong.

• 6:31Speaker 07

  Yeah, that's right. You can actually tell a riddle that a lot of people would know. You know that positive charges want to repel each other, and you know that atoms have a lot of protons in them. So why don't those protons just fly apart? The strong force.

• 6:43Bill Nye?

  Where'd they get the idea for the name?

• 6:45Speaker 07

  Well, I think it's because it's really strong. Yeah.

• 6:49Bill Nye?

  And it's a force.

• 6:50Speaker 07

  And then there's the weak force. And that one has to do with things like radioactivity and why the sun burns and things like that.

• 6:55Speaker 05

  Wait, wait, why the sun gives you a sunburn or why the sun itself burns?

• 6:59Speaker 07

  Why, they're sort of related.

• 7:05Bill Nye?

  One thing leads to another, after all. But do you use the verb burning when it's, uh, fusion in a star?

• 7:11Speaker 07

  Yeah, no, we talk about stars burning their nuclear fuel.

• 7:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, so do chemists just want to kick your ass for saying that? Because burning is a chemical reaction, not nuclear.

• 7:20Speaker 07

  It is, but, you know.

• 7:21Bill Nye?

  Wow, we're geeking out.

• 7:22Speaker 04

  I don't know what you're arguing about.

• 7:26Speaker 04

  You're both mad at the word burning, apparently. And Neil's mad on behalf of people who aren't here.

• 7:33Speaker 05

  All right, so now we got 12 particles.

• 7:35Speaker 07

  Yeah, so the reason the chemists are really mad is they have a chip on their shoulder that the periodic table is not the right way to think about the universe and what it's made out of. It is really 12 fundamental particles.

• 7:46Speaker 05

  All right, there's a posse gathering here for you later.

• 7:50Speaker 07

  It's great. It's just not the fundamental picture that we have. The fundamental picture that we have is much more concise. We only have 12 fundamental particles, and everything in this room is really just made out of three of them.

• 8:00Speaker 05

  Okay, so give us the inventory.

• 8:01Speaker 07

  There are six quarks, and there are six other things which go into the...

• 8:04Speaker 04

  Do you not know what they are?

• 8:08Speaker 04

  I don't know what they are. You're like, there's six squirts, and there's a cheese, and then...

• 8:14Speaker 07

  There are things like the electron, which are called the leptons. Everything's got on at the end, so it's not the Higgs boson, it's the Higgs boson.

• 8:22Bill Nye?

  Leptons, which include...

• 8:24Speaker 07

  Electrons, and then there are sort of heavier brothers, the muon and the tau, which you may not have ever heard.

• 8:30Speaker 05

  Tau doesn't end in -on, just in case.

• 8:32Speaker 07

  Tau-on.

• 8:35Bill Nye?

  But leptons would include positrons.

• 8:37Speaker 07

  Right, and all of these 12 have antiparticles, so antimatter...

• 8:41Speaker 05

  So 12 particles have another 12 antimatter counterparts.

• 8:44Speaker 07

  That's right, but we don't really count them as 12 more, because they're just so related to the other ones that we just group them together.

• 8:50Speaker 05

  Okay, so it's like the good particle and the bad particle.

• 8:53Speaker 04

  It's like Owlman to Batman.

• 8:56Speaker 07

  Wow.

• 8:58Speaker 04

  Sorry. I'm gonna leave now.

• 9:03Speaker 07

  You're speaking to a very narrow nerd audience in a very narrow nerd audience.

• 9:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, but there's like one person who's like, "Oh, boy."

• 9:12Speaker 07

  And that's me.

• 9:15Bill Nye?

  What does Owlman do? What has he got going?

• 9:17Speaker 04

  He's from an alternate evil universe.

• 9:19Speaker 07

  In the modern DC Universe, there's an Earth 2, an alternate reality, where Batman's counterpart would be Owlman, who is part of the Injustice League, am I right?

• 9:39Speaker 05

  And now, there are the force-carrying particles. What do you got there?

• 9:42Speaker 07

  That's right. So each of the forces have these force-carrying particles, so that for the electromagnetic interaction, the particle of light is called the photon. The other ones have, you know, not-so-great names. So the weak force has the W and Z bosons, which...

• 9:55Bill Nye?

  Where does Z come from?

• 9:57Speaker 07

  Because that happens after his W, I guess. I don't know.

• 9:59Bill Nye?

  Doesn't happen right after W.

• 10:01Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 10:02Bill Nye?

  It's coming. I can feel it coming.

• 10:04Speaker 05

  W, X, Y, Z.

• 10:06Bill Nye?

  And then right there.

• 10:06Speaker 07

  I'm a scientist, not a...

• 10:08Speaker 04

  Namer.

• 10:08Speaker 07

  Person.

• 10:09Bill Nye?

  An alphabetician.

• 10:10Speaker 04

  You're telling us how it is. You didn't make up these mistakes.

• 10:13Speaker 07

  That's right. And then you'll like this one, the strong force, since it's so strong, has the gluon.

• 10:20Bill Nye?

  I like gluon.

• 10:21Speaker 07

  Yeah, for obvious reasons.

• 10:22Speaker 04

  Now I get why science is not popular.

• 10:27Speaker 05

  Kyle, this seems like a profound absence of literacy among physicists.

• 10:33Speaker 04

  It does sound like it was all made by child geniuses.

• 10:39Speaker 07

  Well, the quarks is at least a reference to a poem, right?

• 10:42Speaker 05

  Yeah. Oh, to Finnegan's wake, actually.

• 10:45Bill Nye?

  But that aside, what are the 12?

• 10:47Speaker 07

  Electron, the muon, and the tau. And then they have things called neutrinos associated to them.

• 10:53Speaker 05

  Electron neutrino, tau neutrino, muon neutrino.

• 10:56Speaker 07

  Exactly. And then there are the quarks. So there's the up and the down, the charm and the strange, and the top and the bottom.

• 11:02Bill Nye?

  And which of these 12 is considered the Judas particle?

• 11:09Bill Nye?

  He was framed.

• 11:10Speaker 05

  So on top of all of these 12 particles, there's a God particle.

• 11:14Speaker 07

  Well, actually, all we know right now is it's a god-like particle. There's another particle which is sort of key to this whole story that we have.

• 11:21Bill Nye?

  The keyon.

• 11:21Speaker 07

  Yeah, the keyon.

• 11:25Speaker 07

  That's actually the best proposal I've heard for a different name. Yeah, so there's this particle which is why we're here today called the Higgs boson. And it's key to like the consistency of this whole picture. And if it wasn't there, none of the theory would hold together. You know, we were talking about atoms and like why this piece of paper didn't go through the floor. If there was no Higgs boson, atoms wouldn't form in the same way and the universe would just look nothing at all like we know it to be.

• 11:50Bill Nye?

  Well, we couldn't observe it.

• 11:51Speaker 07

  We wouldn't be here.

• 11:52Bill Nye?

  That's what I'm saying.

• 11:53Speaker 04

  Because there'd be no mass, right?

• 11:54Speaker 07

  There would be no floor for the non-paper to not go through.

• 11:57Bill Nye?

  But hold it. This verifies or helps enhance the veracity of a theory.

• 12:03Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 12:03Bill Nye?

  Like, the universe is probably okay the way it is whether or not we called it the Higgs and whether or not we built this thing and went looking for it, right?

• 12:10Speaker 07

  Well, we just wouldn't understand it. I mean, yeah, I mean, the universe is here, obviously, but, uh...

• 12:13Speaker 05

  You still don't understand it if you're calling it a Higgs-like particle.

• 12:17Speaker 07

  Right. Now, that's just conservatism on the side of the scientists. You know, we already...

• 12:21Speaker 05

  You could tell us, you could...

• 12:22Speaker 07

  That's right. This is... We're at five sigma, though, right?

• 12:26Speaker 05

  It's the Higgs. You could leave your error bars outside and just talk.

• 12:30Speaker 07

  No, there's no...

• 12:31Speaker 05

  You're among friends here.

• 12:32Speaker 07

  There's no doubt that there's a new particle. Even the director of CERN has now used the word discovery, which is the first time we've used that since 1995. This is the most significant discovery in my lifetime. So this is a high watermark for particle physics.

• 12:44Bill Nye?

  A hand for Kyle, people.

• 12:50Speaker 05

  So, when you say "high water mark", so on that day, what were the parties like?

• 12:57Speaker 07

  Right.

• 12:59Speaker 07

  Well, at NYU, we had about 25 people at 3 o'clock in the morning, and, you know, we had several bottles of champagne, so it was good. Is that the latest you guys have ever stayed up?

• 13:10Speaker 07

  And also, the day before the announcement at CERN, Fermilab also made an announcement that they were seeing hints to the US shutting down.

• 13:18Speaker 05

  Fermilab outside of Chicago.

• 13:19Speaker 07

  Exactly, and the data that they had collected prior to having been shut down, which was roughly a year ago.

• 13:24Speaker 05

  Fermilab's been shut down?

• 13:25Speaker 07

  Well, the lab is running, but the large accelerator that does this kind of physics is off.

• 13:29Speaker 05

  Why?

• 13:30Speaker 04

  Stem cells?

• 13:33Speaker 07

  The funding was stopped. I mean, I think it was seen that it had sort of reached its, uh...

• 13:37Bill Nye?

  Limit of its power, of its acceleration.

• 13:39Speaker 07

  We were getting too close. Yeah, exactly.

• 13:42Bill Nye?

  If only they'd used their accelerations for goodness. So, let me ask you this, Kyle, if I may. Is it not a coincidence that this announcement was made on the 4th of July?

• 13:54Speaker 07

  I think it was avoidable coincidence.

• 13:57Speaker 05

  It was an avoidable coincidence.

• 13:59Speaker 07

  It was both a coincidence and an avoidable coincidence. The situation was that...

• 14:02Speaker 05

  I have no idea what that sentence means.

• 14:04Bill Nye?

  It means they could have avoided it.

• 14:05Speaker 04

  They could have done it a different day, but also, it's fine.

• 14:11Speaker 05

  You don't think they were sticking it to America?

• 14:13Speaker 07

  It's a mystery wrapped in a riddle.

• 14:15Speaker 04

  Not sticking it to America. America can now celebrate finding God and 4th of July.

• 14:20Speaker 07

  Right. I mean, the situation was that we got a lot more data, a lot faster than we expected to, and no one expected we were going to be claiming discovery now. We thought it was going to be more like December or January time. But the accelerator ran so well, we got so much data, that right before this major conference being held in Australia, everyone kind of clued into the fact that we were likely going to claim discovery. And CERN didn't want it to be announced in Australia. They wanted to have it on their home turf. And there was basically no time between when everyone was flying over to Australia and the time that that decision was made. So, I think it could have been held on the 3rd, which would have been nice. I mean, there were certainly things in the media, but there was... It didn't make nearly the splash.

• 15:00Speaker 04

  I can't believe Geneva didn't celebrate our 4th of July properly.

• 15:06Speaker 05

  Finish telling me why you're calling it a god particle.

• 15:09Speaker 07

  The story of the name comes partially from a book that Nobel laureate Leon Letterman wrote, which is called "The God Particle." Originally, the name was chosen partially by his publicist and editor, and there's a story that he wanted to call it "The God Damn Particle" because it's so hard to find. But clearly, god particle sells a lot of books. There are a lot of people, including myself, that aren't very happy with using that word. It looks like there's some sort of competition with science and religion or something.

• 15:35Bill Nye?

  I think it's never happened.

• 15:43Speaker 04

  Science is co-opting god now.

• 15:46Speaker 07

  Right, so I think the thing that is true is that, you know, the universe would just look nothing like it does if this particle didn't exist.

• 15:53Bill Nye?

  So is this something that tells us why there's something instead of nothing?

• 15:57Speaker 07

  Some people go that far.

• 15:59Bill Nye?

  I just did.

• 16:00Speaker 07

  You did.

• 16:02Speaker 07

  The people that think a lot about string theory and things like that, there is a tie in here in terms of why we're here and what it means to exist, and the Higgs has a very big role to play in that whole story.

• 16:13Speaker 05

  Why was it so hard to find?

• 16:14Speaker 04

  Had you looked under the table.

• 16:18Speaker 07

  It's somehow related to this mystery of quantum mechanics, which is that when you put something together, you know, nature in its most fundamental way has this funny probabilistic, like, "Why is it so hard to flip a head six times in a row?" or something like that, and it's just a...

• 16:32Speaker 04

  You mean of a coin?

• 16:33Speaker 07

  Of a coin.

• 16:35Speaker 04

  Just clarifying.

• 16:39Speaker 04

  They're easy to flip a head six times. Harder with a coin.

• 16:46Bill Nye?

  So, anyway, you go to do experiments, and they don't always come out exactly the same way because nature has a probabilistic, a statistical feature.

• 16:54Speaker 07

  Right, and we can't control it at all. Yeah, we have no ability to control this part.

• 16:58Bill Nye?

  It is precisely explained by...

• 16:59Speaker 07

  Quantum mechanics predicts what should happen, and it tells you you're gonna have to try really hard. So you're doing the experiment. What does that entail?

• 17:08Speaker 05

  Like, you push the button.

• 17:11Speaker 07

  And the monkey comes out.

• 17:13Speaker 05

  Like, what happens?

• 17:14Speaker 07

  Outside of Geneva, there's this ring under the ground that's about 17 miles around. And it's filled with superconducting magnets and all sorts of wizardry.

• 17:23Bill Nye?

  Engineering.

• 17:24Speaker 07

  Engineering wizardry.

• 17:28Bill Nye?

  That's alright, Mr. Scientist.

• 17:30Speaker 04

  There's a 17-mile ring made out of Harry Potters.

• 17:34Speaker 07

  So, the one ring. Yeah, so, and it whizzes, uh... One ring to... With wizards. That's ruling all of you, right now. And it whizzes these particles around. They're called protons. At essentially the speed of light. And they collide at a couple spots inside of this ring where we have these huge particle detectors, which basically act as like big digital cameras. And when these particles run into each other, it's so hot, it's like the moments after the Big Bang. And there's enough energy to ignite the production of new particles. So it's not that it's breaking apart, it's actually making new particles. And you have a chance, a very small chance, to make a Higgs boson.

• 18:10Speaker 05

  And so how many times did they have to do this?

• 18:13Speaker 07

  I looked this one up beforehand, so that I'd be prepared, so that...

• 18:17Speaker 05

  You work there. What do you mean you had to look it up? You're with people who are inventing the thing.

• 18:22Speaker 07

  No, no, I just, I tried to come up with some good ways to describe it. So, for the scientists, we had 10 to the 15. So that's one with 15 zeros behind it collisions.

• 18:31Speaker 05

  That'd be quadrillion.

• 18:32Speaker 07

  Yeah, so that's a million-billion collisions that we've had in the last two years. And of that, we made basically thousands-ish of Higgs bosons.

• 18:41Speaker 04

  And that's particle...

• 18:42Speaker 05

  Wait, you've made thousands of them. And you're just now saying...

• 18:48Speaker 04

  That's why he was like, "We could've mentioned it July 3rd."

• 18:55Speaker 05

  Well, you're basically like in a cop show. The coroner shows up, and the cop is like, "What's the cause of death?" And there's like, a guy with his head bashed in, and there's a shove...

• 19:03Speaker 07

  And the coroner refuses to make a finding until he gets back to the lab, even though clearly the guy's head was bashed into the shovel. There's just something about scientists that you... Right. Now, so to put it into perspective, if you took a large Olympic-sized swimming pool and you filled it with sand, there would be trying to find a thousand red-colored sand grains in a swimming pool full of sand. So that's our job.

• 19:27Speaker 04

  That sounds harder than the...

• 19:28Speaker 07

  Harder than the puzzle.

• 19:30Speaker 04

  Than the shovel.

• 19:33Speaker 04

  It sounds doable, and I would have maybe told people July 2nd about it, but...

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• 23:26Speaker 05

  Tell me about superconducting wires and superconductivity in general.

• 23:30Speaker 07

  To get a particle that's going at nearly the speed of light to turn a corner isn't easy. And so you need a really-

• 23:37Bill Nye?

  Tell me about it.

• 23:40Bill Nye?

  I've talked to him and I've talked to him. But there's a method, right? A technique.

• 23:45Speaker 07

  Yeah, basically you need powerful magnets. And the way you make powerful magnets is you need a lot of electrical current.

• 23:50Speaker 05

  Well, you need a magnet because a charged particle that's moving responds to the magnetic field.

• 23:55Speaker 07

  It will curve.

• 23:56Speaker 05

  You will curve that particle.

• 23:57Speaker 07

  That's right. That's how like the old fashioned TV sets worked in the big CRT type TVs.

• 24:02Speaker 05

  You know what I used to do when I was a kid? You'd take a magnet up to the tube-

• 24:05Speaker 07

  Right.

• 24:05Speaker 05

  And you could totally mess with the faces on the screen.

• 24:08Speaker 04

  Parents loved that.

• 24:10Speaker 05

  Sometimes it left a permanent impression on the screen.

• 24:13Bill Nye?

  They thought that was cool.

• 24:14Speaker 05

  Well, these are beams of electrons and they would avoid the magnetic field. It was like early Photoshop, you know, where you could like mess with-

• 24:22Bill Nye?

  But I gotta say, the origin for me is cooler than that. So Michael Faraday, 1831, has got the magnet in the coil of wire that's connected to another coil of wire and the compass moves.

• 24:32Speaker 07

  Right.

• 24:33Bill Nye?

  And the woman comes up to him and says, "Of what use is it?" And he says-

• 24:37Speaker 05

  "Of what use is a newborn baby?"

• 24:38Bill Nye?

  Yes. Newborn babes, not that useful.

• 24:43Speaker 07

  But you know, to make these incredibly powerful magnets, you need a lot of electricity, a lot of current. And the way you get that is by using superconducting cables.

• 24:52Speaker 05

  And what is superconductivity? It's a new superhero. I'm superconduct- you know, I'm a-

• 24:56Speaker 07

  Superconductor. It's basically a wire that when you get it really, really cold, it has no resistance. Not just a little resistance, no resistance whatsoever.

• 25:04Bill Nye?

  And that is a quantum mechanical effect.

• 25:06Speaker 07

  It's a quantum mechanical effect also. To do it though, you have to be sitting about two degrees above absolute zero. So this is colder than deep outer space.

• 25:14Speaker 04

  What, like 1.9 Kelvin?

• 25:16Speaker 07

  Bingo!

• 25:17Bill Nye?

  Wow.

• 25:18Speaker 04

  Yeah!

• 25:20Speaker 07

  Nailed it!

• 25:22Bill Nye?

  It was a wrist flip, you know, the hockey player skating backwards, just poop, just put it right in.

• 25:26Speaker 05

  Kyle, the universe is warmer than that, at 2.73 degrees.

• 25:31Speaker 07

  That's right, exactly. Deep space, like in the middle of outer space, it's warmer than it is in the middle of the LHC. The LHC, as far as we know, is the largest and coldest extended structure in the universe.

• 25:44Bill Nye?

  Okay, so you get this thing really cold, fabulous coils of wire, you buy a tank of hydrogen?

• 25:52Speaker 07

  Liquid helium. We have some very large fraction of the world's helium supply that's earned.

• 25:57Bill Nye?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 25:58Speaker 05

  The Macy's Day Parade has the rest.

• 25:59Bill Nye?

  Yeah, that's right, yeah.

• 26:01Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 26:01Bill Nye?

  A result of nuclear, yeah, fission. So, then we have a tank of hydrogen, and we electrostatically get these...

• 26:08Speaker 07

  Oh, to make the, that's right. Yeah, we use hydrogen to get to seed the beam itself, the beam of particles, you just take pure... To seed the beam.

• 26:15Speaker 04

  What does it mean to seed the beam?

• 26:18Speaker 04

  I mean, I know how it feels, but what does it mean?

• 26:25Speaker 07

  I walked right into that one. It's amazing for the complexity of this whole thing, the beginning is really just some...

• 26:31Bill Nye?

  Scuba tank.

• 26:32Speaker 07

  It's a scuba tank, and the guy goes, "Psst." That's it.

• 26:35Speaker 04

  Like Sarah was saying, where you just press a button.

• 26:37Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 26:37Speaker 04

  It sounds like a valve more.

• 26:38Speaker 07

  Yeah, exactly.

• 26:39Speaker 04

  And then it sprays what, hydrogen?

• 26:41Speaker 07

  Yeah, a little hydrogen.

• 26:42Speaker 05

  That's your source of protons.

• 26:43Speaker 07

  That's our source of proton.

• 26:44Speaker 05

  Themselves comprised of three quarks.

• 26:47Speaker 07

  Three quarks. Two ups and a down. Yeah.

• 26:49Speaker 05

  Two ups and a down.

• 26:50Speaker 07

  That's right.

• 26:51Speaker 05

  Okay, so, that's where you get your protons, because the hydrogen nucleus is a proton.

• 26:56Speaker 07

  That's right.

• 26:57Speaker 05

  Okay, so now you got them. You got your superconducting coils.

• 27:01Speaker 07

  Right.

• 27:02Speaker 05

  You get high current going through, you get high magnetic field, you're curling these babies, you're accelerating these babies. Don't you have another beam going the other way?

• 27:12Speaker 07

  Exactly, yeah. So there's, the magnets actually have two holes drilled in them, and there's two different magnetic fields, and we have to get, you know, all of this working together.

• 27:19Bill Nye?

  So, if I want to get these things going very near the speed of light, I time the, uh...

• 27:25Speaker 07

  Current.

• 27:26Bill Nye?

  Sign, the current, on these magnets, bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop, in sequence, right, in fantastically fast sequence.

• 27:31Speaker 07

  That's right.

• 27:32Bill Nye?

  Now, let me ax you this. So...

• 27:37Speaker 05

  Bill gets ghetto on Kyle.

• 27:41Speaker 05

  Let me ax you this. I'll bring you to Brooklyn and now you like Brooklyn in the house.

• 27:48Bill Nye?

  Brooklyn, okay, I'm impressed with Brooklyn, but I grew up in the city of Washington, okay? When I was in junior high, a guy got shot. Okay, now everybody's doing it, but it was new, alright?

• 28:02Bill Nye?

  Alright, how do we then get the particles going as fast, or nearly as fast as light? I believe I know the answer, but how can we time the magnets to keep up with those? Like the greyhound chasing the rabbit?

• 28:14Speaker 07

  So, you know, like if you use your cellphone, there's electromagnetic waves, right? There's all sorts of waves going back and forth between your phone and the cell tower.

• 28:21Speaker 05

  The microwaves.

• 28:22Speaker 07

  Microwaves. So we use essentially the same kind of idea, they're just very, very, very intense. So there's some sort of wave that's traveling along this beam, and that's what gets them going faster. And then we have big magnets to help them turn. To get the beam to be very intense, we have to add more and more protons. It's amazing, because it's sort of like trying to merge lanes on a freeway, except for you're driving at the speed of light. The engineers at CERN are so good at what they do, that they can merge lanes from protons from the booster accelerator into the big accelerator, and put them in the same little bucket that you have.

• 28:53Bill Nye?

  Do the beams go around each other like braids of Holla spiral?

• 28:59Speaker 07

  Yeah, but really, like Holla.

• 29:01Speaker 04

  That's accurate.

• 29:04Speaker 07

  So the way that the LHC works, they're just really two different beams that are right next to each other. They don't really circle around each other, but they do try to recycle the magnetic field from one to the other, so that you don't need twice as much electricity.

• 29:16Bill Nye?

  By the way, how much electricity does CERN use when it's cranked?

• 29:19Speaker 05

  Does Geneva dim when they flick the switch?

• 29:23Speaker 07

  Well, we have a deal that we basically only run.

• 29:25Speaker 05

  He didn't just say no. He's gotta like explain.

• 29:36Speaker 05

  Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson. You're listening to our show recorded live at the Bell House in Brooklyn, New York on July 17th, 2012. Along with Eugene Mirman, Scott Adsett, and Sarah Vowell. Onstage with me that night were Bill Nye the Science Guy and Kyle Cranmer, particle physicist. In this next segment, Kyle explains how much energy it takes to run the experiments at CERN that led to the discovery of the Higgs boson.

• 30:05Speaker 07

  It's equivalent to a small city, the amount of power that's required. A lot of it is going into accelerating the particles and even more goes into keeping this ring so cold. It's like a huge air conditioner.

• 30:15Speaker 04

  Well, that's, wait, you were saying, so it gets much hotter than the sun, right? Like millions, thousands or millions of times hotter than the sun?

• 30:23Speaker 07

  You know, it's...

• 30:24Speaker 04

  Either way, say twice. That sounds very hot to me. So 1.9 Kelvin is cold enough to keep it from blowing up the earth, is what you're saying? Or melting the earth? Or what's going on?

• 30:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, wait. Let's pick that up.

• 30:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, why aren't we all dead from your dumb experiment asshole?

• 30:41Speaker 05

  Right, Kyle, let's back up, Kyle. Answer me truthfully. Are you making mini black holes at CERN?

• 30:49Speaker 07

  As far as we know, no. But we actually...

• 30:52Speaker 05

  How comforting!

• 30:55Speaker 05

  As far as we know, we don't think we're making earth destroying black holes.

• 30:58Speaker 07

  Right, exactly. If it does happen, we'll all be the first to know. That's right.

• 31:02Speaker 04

  Actually, Europe will. Fools.

• 31:06Speaker 07

  Six hours earlier. No, I mean, we aren't making anything that's like a black hole like you think of it, like something in the center of our galaxy swallowing up stars. That is not happening. That is definitely not happening.

• 31:18Speaker 05

  You're making a different kind of black hole. A more sinister kind of black hole.

• 31:21Speaker 07

  We might make the sort of quantum mechanical version of a black hole, which is very tiny and, you know, is not going to hurt you.

• 31:26Speaker 04

  Can it erase your memories if it's in your brain?

• 31:30Speaker 07

  That is one of the future applications that we're talking about.

• 31:34Speaker 04

  Not scared!

• 31:37Speaker 05

  That's what you talk about in the coffee lounge? We know you're talking stuff in the coffee lounge.

• 31:42Speaker 07

  There's a lot of coffee at CERN.

• 31:43Speaker 05

  You wield more power than any scientist have wielded before. Do you guys just sit around and talk about like, how can we weapon?

• 31:48Speaker 07

  This. Yeah, no, I think for the most part, you've got a pretty pacifist crowd at CERN.

• 31:54Bill Nye?

  But everybody notice what an undertaking this is. They're powering a small city to send a scuba tank of hydrogen in a giant ring to unlock the next secret of the universe. That is pretty cool. I have to say, that is a remarkable use of our intellect and treasure. It's pretty cool.

• 32:11Speaker 04

  So do you guys, when you hit the button on the accelerator, do you like then wait for the moment when they collide, or is it just instantaneous? Or is it like a, here they go. Ah!

• 32:22Bill Nye?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 32:25Speaker 07

  Well, the very first collisions, there are great photos of people when they saw the very first collisions, and it was just, you know, thousands of people throughout the laboratory, just, you know.

• 32:33Bill Nye?

  How long did it take? You throw the switch and then...

• 32:35Speaker 07

  The beams were going, and then at some point, they have to bring the beams, quote, "into collision," you know, so they have to try to steer the beams so they collide with each other.

• 32:42Bill Nye?

  They boost a magnet or something?

• 32:44Speaker 07

  They can steer where the beams go with these magnets, and it's very hard, because the beam of particles is thinner than a human hair, so it's incredibly tiny, and then to get them to collide...

• 32:52Speaker 04

  Because it's a proton.

• 32:54Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 32:54Speaker 04

  So it's a lot thinner, right?

• 32:55Speaker 07

  Well, no, it's a...

• 32:58Speaker 04

  I'm just asking, I don't know.

• 33:01Speaker 07

  No, no, you're right. So there's a whole lot of protons. So one proton is incredibly small, but the beam of protons is...

• 33:07Speaker 04

  Oh, it's a bunch of protons, like eighty, maybe even ninety.

• 33:11Bill Nye?

  Well, a few thousand after a year, right?

• 33:13Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah.

• 33:14Speaker 04

  Does it never stop? Did you guys just flip the switch one day and then just keep collecting?

• 33:18Speaker 07

  It basically runs almost all year long. We have a deal that we don't run during the winter, because that's when Europeans heat their houses, where Americans usually cool their houses in the summer. So the electricity load in Switzerland is mainly during the winter.

• 33:30Speaker 04

  So they're going around that all the time?

• 33:32Speaker 07

  I mean, the numbers are just mind-boggling. So they're running essentially constantly. The particles collide forty million times a second.

• 33:39Speaker 04

  What, and that's every second? Or is it when you choose to flip a switch and say, oh, now we're merged?

• 33:43Speaker 07

  Essentially, constantly for two years, with some shutdowns.

• 33:46Speaker 04

  Forty million times a second for two years?

• 33:48Speaker 07

  That's right.

• 33:49Bill Nye?

  You got a problem with that?

• 33:51Speaker 07

  Yeah, so it's phenomenal. And each one of these collisions, you know, there are thousands of particles produced flying into our detectors. We take sort of a three-dimensional digital photo of what happens. Each one of those is sort of similar to like a really nice digital camera in terms of the file size, except for 40 million of them a second. So it's like if every American got a nice digital camera and took a photo every second and tried to upload it to Flickr. That's what the amount of data that we have to deal with. Is it hard to stay psyched, like after the 20 millionth one? Are you kind of like, yeah? Yeah, well, you know, most of them aren't so exciting, but then you see one that looks like the Higgs.

• 34:26Speaker 04

  And how do you know when you've got something interesting? I mean, there's, you can't go through 20 million photos.

• 34:29Speaker 05

  Before you answer that, I just want to clarify here. You're smashing protons, then the proton disappears. Because the particles become energy, and then the energy becomes particles again.

• 34:41Speaker 07

  That's right. It's you sort of...

• 34:43Speaker 05

  This equals mc squared writ large at the focus of these two colliding beams.

• 34:49Speaker 07

  That's right.

• 34:50Speaker 04

  Neil is taking his pants off right now. You can't see it.

• 34:58Speaker 07

  No, it's, it's fine.

• 34:59Speaker 04

  Writ large.

• 35:01Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's basically E equals mc squared is happening twice.

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• 38:15Speaker 07

  Usually you think about nuclear bombs or nuclear power where you take a little... Love it. Yeah, you take a little, you take a little bit of mass and you turn it into a whole lot of energy. What we do is we take a lot of energy and we make a very little bit of mass. So there's this brief period where the protons collide. There's so much energy that it just sort of vaporizes into this funny quantum mechanical, funny effenescence state that can crystallize into some new kind of particle, some new very massive particle that hasn't existed since right after the Big Bang. And then that thing doesn't last for long and it decays.

• 38:47Bill Nye?

  How long?

• 38:48Speaker 04

  Hour, two hours?

• 38:50Bill Nye?

  No, it's funny.

• 38:51Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, the numbers, there are things like 10 to the minus 23 seconds and things like that. So very, very, very small numbers.

• 38:58Bill Nye?

  And you get excited about this. Look at him.

• 39:01Speaker 04

  You love watching Higgs particles die, you monster.

• 39:06Bill Nye?

  So how exactly do we detect these things?

• 39:09Speaker 07

  Right, so it's there for just a split second, or not even, and then it decays, and it can decay in a lot of different ways. So one way that it can decay is into two particles of light, two photons. And then these particles fly and hit our detector.

• 39:22Bill Nye?

  Which is like a solar cell of some sort.

• 39:24Speaker 07

  It's similar to that, I mean, in the sense that when a photon hits it, it leaves some energy and we measure that energy. You know, we're sort of surround this interaction point with all sorts of sensitive detectors.

• 39:33Bill Nye?

  And these things are huge, like 10 stories high, right?

• 39:35Speaker 07

  Yeah, that's like the size of a six-story building, full of electronics. Yeah, so they're enormous. And they're 300 feet under the ground, so the civil engineering involved in actually making this thing was also just fantastic.

• 39:46Bill Nye?

  Right on. Now, it gets radioactive, right? Like, you can't be around it.

• 39:49Speaker 07

  I mean...

• 39:50Bill Nye?

  Did you have your kid before you started working at CERN? When was your kid born?

• 39:55Speaker 04

  You don't want to make him angry.

• 40:05Speaker 07

  CERN is very careful about the radioactivity. We make some particles, like neutrons, that make things radioactive and so we have to be careful.

• 40:12Bill Nye?

  So when you say be careful, does the detector zone, the six-story-high, concrete tub, become radioactive?

• 40:19Speaker 07

  It does, you know, there's like a half-life associated to it, but to get down there...

• 40:22Speaker 05

  That would be a yes?

• 40:23Speaker 07

  Yes, it does. And there are retinal scanners, you know, normal people can't go down there and even...

• 40:27Speaker 05

  Only radioactive people can go down there.

• 40:28Speaker 07

  Only radioactive people, yeah.

• 40:30Speaker 04

  So people were... Meaning people whose eyes have been pre-approved?

• 40:32Speaker 07

  That's right, that's right.

• 40:33Bill Nye?

  So people wear dosimeters badges to detect radiation?

• 40:36Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's very heavily regulated.

• 40:37Speaker 05

  You have dosimeters?

• 40:39Speaker 07

  Sure.

• 40:39Speaker 04

  What's a dosimeter? Uh, not that I don't know.

• 40:42Bill Nye?

  No, it's not a hard word.

• 40:44Speaker 07

  Not that kind of dose, yeah.

• 40:45Bill Nye?

  It's a dose meter. Measures the dose of radiation.

• 40:48Speaker 04

  Oh, okay.

• 40:49Speaker 05

  I have an issue with dosimeters.

• 40:51Bill Nye?

  Who doesn't?

• 40:52Speaker 05

  You know, no, no, no, it tells you how sterile you have become. Why is that useful? It's after the fact, you turn it in at the end of the day, they measure it...

• 41:04Bill Nye?

  Are you joking?

• 41:05Speaker 05

  No, I'm serious!

• 41:06Bill Nye?

  Well, dude, the world's full of radiation, I mean, I'm not Mr. Nuclear, but...

• 41:10Speaker 05

  It should tell me like while it's happening.

• 41:11Bill Nye?

  Well, it tells you while it's happening in the geologic scheme of things, every day you get some. No, but I mean, compared to the half-life of radon gas, it's pretty good.

• 41:23Speaker 04

  Where do you get...

• 41:24Bill Nye?

  From bricks.

• 41:25Speaker 04

  You're talking about this like it's annoying and it happens at Starbucks.

• 41:28Bill Nye?

  Well, it does.

• 41:30Speaker 04

  Like, we're like, "I just want a latte."

• 41:33Bill Nye?

  Well, it's a little bit.

• 41:34Speaker 04

  And they're telling me I'm sterile.

• 41:35Speaker 05

  All right, let's back up a few months. Why should we believe this news report? When not many months ago, CERN released a news report about faster-than-light neutrinos that was then later retracted.

• 41:52Speaker 07

  Yeah, now that's a good question. I'll say that around the physics department at NYU, there were, you know, lots of discussions about this, and a lot of theorists that are like, "I cannot believe that they published this paper, I cannot believe CERN made any news about this, you know, it's clearly wrong. Einstein told us this, everything we know about the world's this way." But it's not the first time that experimental science has turned everything we think we understand about the world on its head. And that's how science works, you do experiments, you know... It could have been true. If you saw how it was presented at CERN.

• 42:25Bill Nye?

  That was cool.

• 42:26Speaker 07

  It was like, "We are coming to the scientific community to say that we see this thing that we don't understand. We spent six months checking and cross-checking and doing everything that we could, and we can't figure it out, so we're bringing it to you."

• 42:37Speaker 05

  You sent neutrinos to Italy.

• 42:40Speaker 07

  Underground. Through the ground.

• 42:41Speaker 05

  Through the ground. And it got there faster than the speed of light.

• 42:45Speaker 07

  By just a very, very small...

• 42:47Speaker 05

  And what I heard, that they knew it was wrong because nothing arrives early in Italy. Okay? That's what I heard. I don't know?

• 42:57Speaker 07

  So Kyle, does that mean that it arrived before it was sent? No, not before it was sent, yeah.

• 43:02Bill Nye?

  That's a pretty good question, though. That's pretty cool.

• 43:05Speaker 07

  Actually, you know, I should say that that's relative.

• 43:09Bill Nye?

  No, but my understanding, they were using clocks from global positioning satellites, and they didn't take into account there is a difference from one to the other.

• 43:16Speaker 07

  Oh, no, that stuff was taken into account very, very carefully. The very sad part is that after all of this thorough checking, the problem was the dopiest of possible problems. It was a loose cable.

• 43:28Bill Nye?

  All failures are mechanical failures.

• 43:30Speaker 05

  So the engineers messed up?

• 43:31Bill Nye?

  Yeah. I gotta tell ya, in my old business, connectors are troublesome.

• 43:35Speaker 07

  Right. There was a father-son story there. Carlo Rubia, who won a Nobel Prize and was a famous particle physicist.

• 43:41Bill Nye?

  What was his specific discovery?

• 43:43Speaker 07

  He was involved in the discovery of the W and the Z, and he really kinda pushed the idea of having these colliders in the first place.

• 43:49Bill Nye?

  Where was that and when?

• 43:50Speaker 07

  That was at CERN in the 80s. But his son was on the experiment that reported the faster-than-light neutrinos, and he was on the experiment that then followed up and said, "No, they're not going faster than the speed of light, so you can only imagine what their Thanksgiving conversations are like."

• 44:07Speaker 05

  When we come back, we're just gonna talk about where we go from here. What is the future of the Higgs particle? Will it have any application at all? Or is Europe wasting its $10 billion to keep you employed? When we come back to StarTalk Radio.

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