StarTalk Live: The Particle Party (Part 2)

The StarTalk Live “Particle Party” celebrating the discovery of the Higgs boson continues with Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye the Science Guy, CERN physicist Kyle Cranmer, comic co-host Eugene Mirman, Sarah Vowell and Scott Adsit.

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

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:22Eugene Mirman?

  Welcome to another super fun-filled evening of StarTalk.

• 0:32Eugene Mirman?

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

• 0:45Eugene Mirman?

  Sarah Vowell.

• 0:54Eugene Mirman?

  From 30 Rock, Scott Adsit.

• 1:03Eugene Mirman?

  And Neil?

• 1:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to the Particle Party.

• 1:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And...

• 1:10Eugene Mirman?

  Nerds!

• 1:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 1:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 1:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How you doing, man? He is one of the scientists who works at CERN. Okay, so...

• 1:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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!

• 2:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So let's get this particle party started. You may remember, the date was July 4th. I tweeted that morning. I don't know if you saw it. 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."

• 2:50Bill Nye?

  Wow.

• 2:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 2:55Bill Nye?

  What, you mean the US could have done it by building the Superconductor Super Collider, but it was cancelled in 1993?

• 3:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:01Bill Nye?

  3+ times the energy?

• 3:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so what's happened?

• 3:04Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, Kyle.

• 3:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What the hell's wrong with you physicists?

• 3:07Speaker 03

  I was still in high school.

• 3:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 3:10Eugene Mirman?

  Ooh, I'm Doogie Howser of physics.

• 3:15Speaker 03

  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 Hachy and was excited about it until it turned out...

• 3:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's where they were digging the hole for the Super Collider.

• 3:27Speaker 03

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

• 3:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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?

• 3:41Speaker 03

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

• 3:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 3:58Speaker 03

  Right, so there's gravity that we...

• 3:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gravity that we all know and love.

• 4:00Speaker 03

  We all know and love.

• 4:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you guys know and love gravity?

• 4:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, like, see?

• 4:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, good. Okay.

• 4:06Speaker 03

  She's an experimental...

• 4:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is radio, let the record show.

• 4:10Bill Nye?

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

• 4:14Speaker 04

  I dropped it to the floor and it fell there.

• 4:18Bill 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.

• 4:26Eugene Mirman?

  Could you feel it? Could you feel it? We were all... And may I ask, what stopped the papers from going through the stage?

• 4:32Speaker 03

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

• 4:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's another force, electromagnetic.

• 4:40Speaker 03

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

• 4:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I said it's two forces.

• 4:48Speaker 03

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

• 4:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Such as?

• 4:52Speaker 03

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

• 4:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I bet it's strong.

• 4:57Speaker 03

  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.

• 5:09Bill Nye?

  Where'd they get the idea for the name?

• 5:11Speaker 03

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

• 5:15Bill Nye?

  And it's a force.

• 5:16Speaker 03

  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.

• 5:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait. Why the sun gives you a sunburn? Or why the sun itself burns?

• 5:25Speaker 03

  They're sort of related.

• 5:31Bill Nye?

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

• 5:37Speaker 03

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

• 5:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 5:46Speaker 03

  It is, but you know...

• 5:47Bill Nye?

  Wow, we're geeking out.

• 5:48Eugene Mirman?

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

• 5:52Eugene Mirman?

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

• 5:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so now we got 12 particles.

• 6:01Speaker 03

  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 was really 12 fundamental particles.

• 6:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 6:16Speaker 03

  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.

• 6:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so give us the inventory.

• 6:27Speaker 03

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

• 6:31Eugene Mirman?

  Do you not know what they are?

• 6:35Eugene Mirman?

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

• 6:41Speaker 03

  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.

• 6:48Bill Nye?

  Leptons, which include?

• 6:50Speaker 03

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

• 6:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tau doesn't end in an "on", just in case.

• 6:58Speaker 03

  Tau on.

• 7:01Bill Nye?

  But leptons would include positrons.

• 7:04Speaker 03

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

• 7:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So 12 particles have another 12 antimatter counterparts?

• 7:10Speaker 03

  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.

• 7:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 7:19Eugene Mirman?

  It's like Owlman to Batman.

• 7:22Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 7:24Eugene Mirman?

  Sorry. I'm gonna leave now.

• 7:29Speaker 03

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

• 7:33Eugene Mirman?

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

• 7:38Speaker 03

  And that's me.

• 7:41Bill Nye?

  What does Owlman do? What has he got going?

• 7:43Eugene Mirman?

  He's from an alternate evil universe.

• 7:45Speaker 03

  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?

• 8:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 8:08Speaker 03

  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...

• 8:21Bill Nye?

  Where does Z come from?

• 8:23Speaker 03

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

• 8:25Bill Nye?

  Doesn't happen right after W.

• 8:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:29Bill Nye?

  It's coming. I can feel it coming.

• 8:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  W, X, Y, Z.

• 8:32Bill Nye?

  And then right there.

• 8:32Speaker 03

  I'm a scientist, not a...

• 8:34Eugene Mirman?

  Neighbor.

• 8:34Speaker 03

  Person.

• 8:35Bill Nye?

  An alphabetician?

• 8:36Eugene Mirman?

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

• 8:40Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 8:42Speaker 03

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

• 8:46Bill Nye?

  I like gluon.

• 8:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, for obvious reasons.

• 8:49Eugene Mirman?

  Now I get why science is not popular.

• 8:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 8:59Eugene Mirman?

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

• 9:05Speaker 03

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

• 9:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 9:12Bill Nye?

  But that aside, what are the 12?

• 9:13Speaker 03

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

• 9:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Electron neutrino, tau neutrino, muon neutrino.

• 9:22Speaker 03

  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.

• 9:28Bill Nye?

  And which of these 12 is considered the Judas particle?

• 9:35Bill Nye?

  He was framed.

• 9:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 9:40Speaker 03

  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.

• 9:47Bill Nye?

  The keyon.

• 9:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, the keyon.

• 9:51Speaker 03

  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. Well, we couldn't observe it. We wouldn't be here. That's what I'm saying.

• 10:19Eugene Mirman?

  Because there'd be no mass, right?

• 10:21Speaker 03

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

• 10:23Bill Nye?

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

• 10:29Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 10:30Bill 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?

• 10:36Speaker 03

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

• 10:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 10:43Speaker 03

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

• 10:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You could tell us, you could...

• 10:48Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 10:50Bill Nye?

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

• 10:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 10:57Speaker 03

  No, there's no...

• 10:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're among friends.

• 10:58Speaker 03

  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. And this is the most significant discovery in my lifetime. So this is a high watermark for particle physics.

• 11:10Bill Nye?

  A hand for Kyle, people.

• 11:16Speaker 04

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

• 11:23Speaker 03

  Right. 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? And also, the day before the announcement at CERN, Fermilab also made an announcement that they were seeing hints to the Russian- Fermilab outside of Chicago. Exactly, and the data that they had collected prior to having been shut down, which was roughly a year ago. Fermilab's been shut down. Well, the lab is running, but the large accelerator that does this kind of physics is off. Why? Stem cells. I mean, the- The funding was stopped. I mean, I think it was seen that it had sort of reached its-

• 12:03Bill Nye?

  Limit of its power, of its acceleration.

• 12:06Speaker 03

  We were getting too close. Yeah, exactly.

• 12:09Bill Nye?

  If only they'd used their acceleration 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?

• 12:20Speaker 03

  I think it was avoidable coincidence. It was an avoidable coincidence. It was both a coincidence and an avoidable coincidence. The situation was- I have no idea what that sentence means.

• 12:30Bill Nye?

  It means they could have avoided it.

• 12:32Eugene Mirman?

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

• 12:37Speaker 03

  You don't think they were sticking it to America? It's a mystery wrapped in a riddle.

• 12:41Eugene Mirman?

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

• 12:46Speaker 03

  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.

• 13:26Eugene Mirman?

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

• 13:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 13:35Speaker 03

  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 Goddamn 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.

• 14:01Bill Nye?

  That would never happen.

• 14:10Eugene Mirman?

  Science is co-opting god now.

• 14:13Speaker 03

  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. So is this something that tells us why there's something instead of nothing? Some people go that far. I just did. You did. 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.

• 14:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why was it so hard to find?

• 14:40Eugene Mirman?

  Had you looked under the table.

• 14:44Speaker 03

  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...

• 14:58Eugene Mirman?

  You mean of a coin?

• 15:00Speaker 03

  Of a coin.

• 15:01Eugene Mirman?

  Just clarifying.

• 15:06Eugene Mirman?

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

• 15:12Bill 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.

• 15:20Speaker 03

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

• 15:24Bill Nye?

  It is precisely explained by...

• 15:26Speaker 03

  Quantum mechanics predicts what should happen, and it tells you you're gonna have to try really hard.

• 15:30Speaker 04

  So you're doing the experiment. What does that entail? Like, you push the button.

• 15:37Speaker 03

  And the monkey comes out.

• 15:39Speaker 04

  Like, what happens?

• 15:41Speaker 03

  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.

• 15:49Bill Nye?

  Engineering.

• 15:51Speaker 03

  Engineering wizardry.

• 15:55Bill Nye?

  That's alright, Mr. Scientist.

• 15:56Eugene Mirman?

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

• 16:00Speaker 03

  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 moment's 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.

• 16:36Speaker 04

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

• 16:39Speaker 03

  I looked this one up beforehand, so that I'd be prepared, so that... You work there. What do you mean you had to look it up? You're with people who are inventing the thing. 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. That'd be quadrillion. 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.

• 17:07Eugene Mirman?

  And that's particle...

• 17:08Speaker 04

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

• 17:15Eugene Mirman?

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

• 17:21Speaker 04

  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 shovel. And the coroner refuses to make a finding, until he gets back to the lab, even though clearly the guy's head was bashed in with a shovel. There's just something about scientists that you...

• 17:41Speaker 03

  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.

• 17:53Eugene Mirman?

  That sounds harder than the...

• 17:55Speaker 03

  Harder than the puzzle.

• 17:56Eugene Mirman?

  Than the shovel.

• 17:59Eugene Mirman?

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

• 18:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tell me about superconducting wires, and superconductivity in general.

• 18:16Speaker 03

  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...

• 18:23Bill Nye?

  Tell me about it.

• 18:26Bill Nye?

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

• 18:31Speaker 03

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

• 18:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 18:41Speaker 03

  It will curve.

• 18:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You will curve that particle.

• 18:43Speaker 03

  That's right. That's how like the old-fashioned TV sets worked, in the big, you know, CRT-type...

• 18:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 18:51Speaker 03

  Right, exactly.

• 18:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 18:54Eugene Mirman?

  Parents loved that.

• 18:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sometimes it left a permanent impression on the screen.

• 18:59Bill Nye?

  They thought that was cool.

• 19:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But 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...

• 19:08Bill 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.

• 19:18Speaker 03

  Right.

• 19:19Bill Nye?

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

• 19:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  "Of what use is a newborn baby?"

• 19:24Bill Nye?

  Yes. Newborn babes, not that useful.

• 19:29Speaker 03

  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.

• 19:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what is superconductivity? It's a new superhero. I'm superconduct... you know, I mean, I could be that...

• 19:43Speaker 03

  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.

• 19:50Bill Nye?

  And that is a quantum mechanical effect.

• 19:52Speaker 03

  It's a quantum mechanical effect also. To do it, though, you have to be sitting about 2 degrees above absolute zero. So this is colder than deep outer space.

• 20:00Eugene Mirman?

  What, like 1.9 Kelvin?

• 20:02Speaker 03

  Bingo!

• 20:03Bill Nye?

  Wow!

• 20:04Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah!

• 20:06Speaker 03

  Nailed it!

• 20:08Bill Nye?

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

• 20:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 20:17Speaker 03

  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.

• 20:30Bill Nye?

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

• 20:38Speaker 03

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

• 20:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Macy's Day Parade has the rest.

• 20:45Bill Nye?

  Yeah, that's right, yeah.

• 20:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 20:47Bill Nye?

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

• 20:54Speaker 03

  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.

• 21:01Eugene Mirman?

  What does it mean to "seed the beam"?

• 21:04Eugene Mirman?

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

• 21:11Speaker 03

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

• 21:17Bill Nye?

  Scuba tank.

• 21:18Speaker 03

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

• 21:20Eugene Mirman?

  Like Sarah was saying, where you just press a button. It sounds like a valve more.

• 21:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 21:25Eugene Mirman?

  And then it sprays what, hydrogen?

• 21:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, a little hydrogen.

• 21:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's your source of protons.

• 21:29Speaker 03

  That's our source of protons.

• 21:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Themselves comprised of three quarks.

• 21:33Speaker 03

  Three quarks, two ups and a down.

• 21:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Two ups and a down?

• 21:36Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 21:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 21:42Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 21:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so now you got 'em. You got your superconducting coils.

• 21:47Speaker 03

  Right.

• 21:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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?

• 21:57Speaker 03

  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.

• 22:05Bill Nye?

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

• 22:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Current.

• 22:11Bill Nye?

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

• 22:17Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 22:18Bill Nye?

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

• 22:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bill gets ghetto on Kyle.

• 22:27Bill Nye?

  Let me ax you this. I bring you to Brooklyn and now you're like, "Brooklyn in the house." 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?

• 22:48Bill 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?

• 23:00Speaker 03

  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.

• 23:07Bill Nye?

  Microwaves.

• 23:07Speaker 03

  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.

• 23:39Bill Nye?

  Do the beams go around each other like braids? Of Holla spiral? Yeah, but really, like Holla. That's accurate.

• 23:49Speaker 03

  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.

• 24:02Bill Nye?

  By the way, how much electricity does CERN use when it's cranked? Does Geneva dim when they flick the switch?

• 24:09Speaker 03

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

• 24:11Bill Nye?

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

• 24:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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 Adsit, 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.

• 24:51Speaker 03

  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.

• 25:01Eugene Mirman?

  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?

• 25:09Speaker 03

  You know, it's...

• 25:10Eugene Mirman?

  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?

• 25:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 25:22Eugene Mirman?

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

• 25:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 25:35Speaker 03

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

• 25:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How comforting! As far as we know, we don't think we're making Earth destroying black holes.

• 25:44Speaker 03

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

• 25:48Eugene Mirman?

  Actually, Europe will.

• 25:51Eugene Mirman?

  Fools.

• 25:52Speaker 03

  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.

• 26:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 26:07Speaker 03

  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.

• 26:12Eugene Mirman?

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

• 26:16Speaker 03

  That is one of the future applications that we talk about.

• 26:20Speaker 05

  Not scared.

• 26:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 26:28Speaker 03

  There's a lot of coffee, it's her.

• 26:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You wield more power than any scientist that wielded before.

• 26:32Speaker 04

  Can you guys just sit around and talk about like, how can we weaponize this?

• 26:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, I think for the most part, you've got a pretty pacifist crowd, it's her.

• 26:40Bill 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.

• 26:57Speaker 05

  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, ahh!

• 27:08Bill Nye?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 27:10Speaker 03

  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.

• 27:19Bill Nye?

  How long did it take you to throw the switch?

• 27:21Speaker 03

  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.

• 27:28Bill Nye?

  They boost a magnet or something?

• 27:29Speaker 03

  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...

• 27:37Eugene Mirman?

  Because it's a proton.

• 27:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:40Eugene Mirman?

  So it's a lot thinner, right?

• 27:41Speaker 03

  Well, no, it's all...

• 27:43Eugene Mirman?

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

• 27:46Speaker 03

  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...

• 27:52Eugene Mirman?

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

• 27:56Bill Nye?

  Well, a few thousand after a year, right?

• 27:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 28:00Eugene Mirman?

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

• 28:03Speaker 03

  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.

• 28:16Speaker 05

  So they're going around that all the time?

• 28:18Speaker 03

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

• 28:25Speaker 05

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

• 28:29Speaker 03

  Essentially, constantly for two years, with some shutdowns.

• 28:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Forty million times a second for two years?

• 28:34Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 28:35Bill Nye?

  You got a problem with that?

• 28:36Speaker 03

  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.

• 28:51Eugene Mirman?

  Bragger.

• 28:52Speaker 03

  Forty 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.

• 29:03Speaker 04

  Is it hard to say psyched, like after the 20 millionth one? Are you kind of like, "Yeah"?

• 29:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, you know, most of them aren't so exciting, but then you see one that looks like the Higgs.

• 29:12Speaker 05

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

• 29:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 29:27Speaker 03

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

• 29:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This equals mc squared writ large.

• 29:32Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 29:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At the focus of these two colliding beams.

• 29:35Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 29:36Speaker 05

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

• 29:44Speaker 03

  No, it's, it's fine.

• 29:45Speaker 05

  Writ large.

• 29:47Speaker 03

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

• 29:58Speaker 03

  Usually you think about nuclear bombs or nuclear power.

• 30:01Eugene Mirman?

  Love it.

• 30:02Speaker 03

  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, effervescent 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.

• 30:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How long?

• 30:31Eugene Mirman?

  Hour, two hours?

• 30:33Speaker 03

  Yeah. No, it's funny. 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.

• 30:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you get excited about this.

• 30:42Speaker 03

  Look at him.

• 30:44Eugene Mirman?

  You love watching Higgs particles die, you monster.

• 30:49Bill Nye?

  So, how exactly do we detect these things?

• 30:52Speaker 03

  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.

• 31:05Bill Nye?

  Which is like a solar cell of some sort.

• 31:07Speaker 03

  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 sort of surround this interaction point with all sorts of sensitive detectors.

• 31:16Bill Nye?

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

• 31:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, it'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.

• 31:29Bill Nye?

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

• 31:32Speaker 03

  I mean...

• 31:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, did you have your kid before you started working at CERN? When was your kid born?

• 31:38Eugene Mirman?

  You don't want to make him angry.

• 31:48Speaker 03

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

• 31:56Bill Nye?

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

• 32:02Speaker 03

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

• 32:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would be a yes.

• 32:06Speaker 03

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

• 32:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Only radioactive people can go down there.

• 32:11Speaker 03

  Only radioactive people, yeah.

• 32:13Eugene Mirman?

  So, people will... Meaning people whose eyes have been pre-approved.

• 32:15Speaker 03

  That's right, that's right.

• 32:16Bill Nye?

  So, people wear dosimeters, badges to detect radiation?

• 32:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's very heavily regulated.

• 32:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You have dosimeters?

• 32:21Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 32:22Eugene Mirman?

  What's a dosimeter? Not that I don't know.

• 32:25Bill Nye?

  No, it's not a hard word.

• 32:27Speaker 03

  Not that kind of dose, yeah.

• 32:28Bill Nye?

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

• 32:31Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, okay.

• 32:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I have an issue with dosimeters.

• 32:34Bill Nye?

  Because you... Who doesn't?

• 32:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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, and they measure it.

• 32:47Bill Nye?

  Are you joking?

• 32:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I'm serious!

• 32:49Bill Nye?

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

• 32:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It should tell me, like, while it's happening.

• 32:54Bill 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.

• 33:06Eugene Mirman?

  Where do you get?

• 33:08Bill Nye?

  From Brits.

• 33:08Eugene Mirman?

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

• 33:12Bill Nye?

  Well, it does.

• 33:14Eugene Mirman?

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

• 33:16Bill Nye?

  Well, it's a little bit.

• 33:17Eugene Mirman?

  They're telling me I'm sterile.

• 33:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 33:36Speaker 03

  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.

• 34:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It might have been true.

• 34:05Speaker 03

  It could have been true. If you saw how it was presented at CERN.

• 34:08Bill Nye?

  That was cool.

• 34:09Speaker 03

  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.

• 34:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You sent neutrinos to Italy.

• 34:23Speaker 03

  Underground, through the ground.

• 34:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 34:28Speaker 03

  By just a very, very small.

• 34:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 34:40Speaker 05

  So Kyle, does that mean that it arrived before it was sent?

• 34:43Speaker 03

  No, not before it was sent, yeah.

• 34:45Bill Nye?

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

• 34:48Speaker 03

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

• 34:52Bill 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.

• 34:59Speaker 03

  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.

• 35:09Bill Nye?

  Oh, it's... All failures are mechanical failures.

• 35:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the engineers messed up?

• 35:14Bill Nye?

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

• 35:18Speaker 03

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

• 35:25Bill Nye?

  What was his specific discovery?

• 35:26Speaker 03

  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.

• 35:32Bill Nye?

  Where was that and when?

• 35:33Speaker 03

  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."

• 35:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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!

• 36:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  StarTalk Radio is brought to you in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

• 36:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As always, I sign off by bidding you not only farewell, but encouraging you to keep looking up.