Building a Big Bang Machine on the Moon - with James Beacham

the standard model is simultaneously the coolest thing in the world and the most frustrating thing because it works so well and we know for a fact that it is incomplete thank you very much thanks very much I'm extremely honored and humbled to be here and it's a privilege to be able to be here at the Royal Institution home of so many fantastic you know talks and pieces of information that I've heard disseminated public communication of science it's just a you know it is an institution given its name that's appropriate and I am going to take you through a kind of a thought process that I had a few months ago and it all culminated in this title you see up here which is a little bit crazy and audacious I admit right off the bat a Big Bang machine on the moon what in the world does that mean so I hope that some of you at least came came to the came to talk with that in your mind but to set the stage a little bit before we get you know to the Big Bang machine on the moon I grew up in southern Utah and this is the home of Red Rocks and Hot August Nights and very clear skies and these are perfect conditions for stargazing and I remember one time when I was a little kid a friend and I had biked out of town to get away from the lights of the town to you know look at the Stars and we were sitting on some hot flat rock you know probably you know eating gummy worms or something like that and and I remember I would you know I we were too young to have telescopes but I was kind of a library guy so I you know wanted to show off to my friend and I'm like ooh check it out look at that star there Vega and so it's a hundred and forty trillion miles away I'd really read my book 140 trillion miles away the light that's been been traveling from that star to get to us has been traveling for something like 25 years this isn't amazing how big the universe is how large everything is 140 trillion miles and my friend says now it's not that far and I was like I didn't know what really what I meant and I'm like well okay maybe it's not exactly 140 trillion miles but scientists are really good at these estimates so maybe it's like 130 or something like that he's like no well it's about a mile away and I was like scratching my head a mile well what do you mean by money well my dad says it's a mile away and finally I lost them like what are you talking about man think about it if that star was a mile away we biked five miles out of town to get here if that star was one mile away it would be in a totally different place in the sky here then when we were back in town and I drew him a little triangle you know just on the on the rock there was you know with another rock just to show him they're like looking he's like but I don't believe you and I said believe believe has nothing to do with it we can test it and so we did that we kept track of the star as you know as we got on our bikes and went back to the you know back into town and we were back but all the way all the time keeping track for the star go back go back go back in and I would get back into town and I go look it's basically in exactly the same spot it has to be more than a mile away and my friends like but what am I going to tell my dad and I'm like you don't have to tell him anything you can do the same experiment with him and so apparently I never was able to rid myself of the love of you know looking at challenges and problems that are there to be solved and then coming up with some kind of experiment to design them but I'm sorry to to test them but the questions that I asked now as an adult are a little bit more complicated than whether the stars are a mile away or 140 trillion miles away they're questions that I answer now or that I try to address now or things like this what is 95% of the universe made of why is gravity so crazily weak compared to the other forces of nature what really happened just after the moment of the Big Bang do we live in a multiverse and that last one is not entirely crazy it's actually kind of interesting story so and it's not just and so now not that not just the questions have gotten bigger but the the experiments that I do too that I participate in to try to answer them have gotten a lot bigger too so now I work on the Atlas experiment as Simon mentioned Atlas is one of the two big experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and so this is actually a you know I'll show another photo of it later but it's basically a 460 sorry six stories high and 40 meters long and it's a place where we collect debris from proton collisions and for those of you just to remind you of what the LHC is it kind of looks like this if you're in the tunnel it looks more or less like this and the LHC is a 27 kilometer circular tunnel on the border of France and Switzerland buried 100 metres underground and this is what it would look like if we're around London and I was just told in fact that the the 27 kilometers more or less is the what is it the central line or something like that of the yellow line the circle line yeah so basically it's like the circle line but put that in the border of France and Switzerland yeah so you know this is I like this because you could get from Mayfair all the way up to Stoke Newington really quickly yeah so it's a 27 kilometer circular tunnel on the border of France and Switzerland married 100 metres underground and in this tunnel we use superconducting magnets that are colder than outer space to accelerate protons to almost the speed of light so you're gonna be a proton here in a second if you follow this animation great you're a proton and now you can pick which one of the quarks you are you're you're red or you're blue eventually we so we accelerate these almost the speed of light and then we slammed them into each other millions of times a second and we collect the debris of these collisions to look for new undiscovered fundamental particles it's design and construction took decades of work by thousands of people from around though and the around the world and so that's what it looks like when a particle collision happens all of this animation finish here but then the place where the particle collision happens you better put a gigantic detector because quantum field theory magic is gonna happen so by big I mean this this is Atlas this is the hopefully a photo you've seen before six stories high 40 meters long there's some lucky guy that got to stand there you know right as they were bringing the electromagnetic calorimeter in hopefully wasn't standing there when they wouldn't when they brought it all the way in who would be a very sad sad story um but these are the types of experiments that I have to use that I use now to try to answer these much bigger questions excuse me and we're gonna go a little bit into the into the details of what you know what we're actually doing with these types of with these experiments and why we need to go to bigger bigger colliders and why we've always had to do this in the past and if this sounds complicated it's not so bad because really at the heart of it everything we're doing at this gigantic experiment the biggest science experiment ever mounted comes down to an extremely simple question how small can I cut anything how about a bagel so I'm in adopted New Yorker did my PhD I don't want you I take a bagel you guys take it out on a hot cross bun or something like that so cut it in half cut the half in half keep going how far can you go get to a molecule right you can cut a molecule yeah we've got atoms there and they're had they're held together can you cut an atom yes the 20th century has told us very clearly that we can cut an atom there's there's a proton and there's like a nucleus and some electrons going around so can you cut an electron as far as we know the answer now is no an electron is a point particle that has no spatial extent no volume can you cut a proton though the other part of the atom as far as we know yes there's stuff inside a proton there's three quarks and some other things called gluons you know roiland about inside the proton can you cut a cork as far as we can tell no but that's just you know based upon our the precision of our measurements and our measurement device now that tells us that we can't go any farther than that so as it turns out as you can tell when you ask that seemingly very simple question how small can I cut anything you're secretly asking a very deep question what was holding anything together to begin with and once you do that the the history of the 20th century was a phenomenal success for science because this was really just people asking this question over and over and finally getting you know this interesting interplay between theory and experiment throughout the 20th century led to essentially a list of the basic constituents of nature that we know exist and the ways that they interact and this is this is what we we codify this in something we call the standard model capital S capital M it's really it's honestly one of the most impressive intellectual achievements of humankind because it's more or less this kind of mathematical theory that you can write you can you can start with some basic math stuff you crank through the crank through the the math and it makes these precise predictions as what you as to what you should see if you go out and perform an experiment like a particle collision experiment and it's been it's worked so well throughout the 20th century that it's almost like it's a gobsmacking now how amazingly well it works and the some of you may have heard who here has heard of the Higgs boson yeah okay great that's good so I don't have to do too much work on the Higgs boson but I'm gonna give you a little bit of insight as to why the Higgs is kind of it's both a fantastic success for me and my colleague Jay we discovered the Higgs boson hooray and the Higgs boson was the last remaining piece of the standard model this linchpin of the standard model that goes in the middle there and so of course you know it was the the science discovery of the year and in 2012 and the two were you know two white males won the Nobel Prize what else is new and for for this and so the last remaining piece of the standard model be plugged in and it was the last guaranteed discovery that we had because it was the last thing that the standard model predicted the standard model is simultaneously the coolest thing in the world and the most frustrating thing because it works so well and we know for a fact that it is incomplete we know for a fact that as amazingly well as it works as so well as it predicts the mass of the W and Z bosons whatever those are as well as it does this thing we know for a fact that it's incomplete for some gigantically catastrophic ly bad reasons number one it doesn't contain gravity and I just demonstrated that gravity exists so this is a bad thing for particle physics and we know that we know that the standard model as as precisely well as it does for the for the elementary constituents of nature that we know exists we know that it cannot be the full picture of nature we know that there's other things that have to somehow add into that so if we had a theory that had the standard model and the included dark matter and gravity a bunch of other things that I'm a touch upon here in a moment we would have that we would have a better description we would have the the the real answers to all the biggest open questions the ones that I was you know that I was listening on that that second slide there and so the way we go to look for the how do we go to look for an answers to these open questions is that we have to go to different experiments to try to find where these new particles are so we got to the end and this Higgs boson was the last thing we discovered fantastic you know Nobel prize-winning discovery but we you know if we're looking for these new particles that may help us there might be extensions of this standard model we have to go to different experiments and buy different experiments I mean bigger experiments and buy bigger that has why don't you know why do why do I say we have to go to bigger experiments is because it all comes down to a n stein so equals MC squared every knows equals MC squared what does it actually mean at the particle level what this means and there's an equivalence between energy and mass and mass is just a number put there by nature so if I'm a particle I have an individual mass m and it's just that's what it is nature picks that number so this is the part that nature can control however he is the part that we can control as experimentalist if we work hard enough we can design an experiment that has enough we put it up juice into a put enough into it so that we can get an e up high enough to hopefully discover the am particle with a mass M so if nature has a particle with a and that's right up here and we as a species have only ever made an experiment that goes up to here with E we'll never discover it we'll never be able to study it we'll never do and we'll never know that it exists so that's why we have to go to bigger colliders and the bigger the bigger the collider the higher the energy and the more access you have to particles that may exist there will the answer some of the biggest open questions that we that we look for right now and so a couple times in the rest of the talk you'll see this kind of thing that says TeV trillion electron volts don't worry too much about it it's just like a measure that we use for energy and mass for particles and the energy we'll put into this so more is better and more is better in a very kind of key way too because when we go to high energies you might ask the questions like well what you know why is it so why is it so hard to look for these particles why do we have to go to such a gigantically high energies bigger bigger experiments and things like that to look for these particles that may explain these things why can't we do something lower energy it's primarily because the universe as it stands right now is really really boring and it's really really cold so this is the history of the universe going backwards and this is actually the current slice of the universe right now the if you take the average temperature of the universe just right now stick the thermometer out and address outer space it's gonna be very low the average temperature the universe is extremely low right now and so this is this is today 14 billion years after the moment of the Big Bang this must be the 1950s because there's a nuclear family there I'm using the laser laser pointer this must be the 1950s because that's a nuclear family there but if you then just logically we know that when you look out in space you see all the stars in the galaxies moving and fast far apart from each other far farther and farther away so if you just run time backwards at some point they all had to be packed down into some tiny hot dense you know insanely a energetic point and so that's of course you go back run the clock backwards and eventually get back to the moment of the Big Bang and that's the highest energy ever and so what we're doing when we go to high energies is that we're at these Collider experiments so we take these protons you know in this 27 kilometer tunnel we accelerate in almost the speed of light faster and faster and faster higher and higher energies that gets us up to a moment of the universe's history when the average energy was really really high and this was the point at which some of these particles were looking for that could help explain these open questions may have existed in abundance and that's why they do but they don't exist now because they died out and then you know the universe expand are too much and that that wasn't important for them to stay you know stable anymore and so we have to briefly recreate the conditions of the universe as they were a fraction of a second of the Big Bang and the Large Hadron Collider gets us up to about right here so what we do is we go back in time we can you know we can get back to you know the two minutes and one second and eventually go from you know we're not satisfied with just a fraction of a second after the Big Bang we won't know what happened a fraction of a fraction of a second after the Big Bang so this is all that we're doing in particle physics and the Large Hadron Collider gets us to that point but as I said the standard model is incomplete we know there have to be other things out there and I'm going to mention you know there's some of the ones that I mentioned then on that introductory slide but so yeah so we get we can get back to a very very short time period just after the Big Bang but we want to go back farther because that's where the new that's sort of the discovery could be but you know I mean part of you should actually still be saying I don't totally don't understand what you're talking about you just saying they were what we know were to make make particle and what does it mean when you collide two protons together is there and you're looking for dark matter or you're looking for a Higgs boson I mean was the Higgs boson like hidden inside the the proton are you fold filled with Higgs bosons right now you're not there are no Higgs bosons in this room right now so where are we getting these from why you know what how is it possible for us to take two protons and slam them together and hopefully come up with a new particle that will help explain you know these open questions and that may have only existed in abundance just a fraction of a second of the Big Bang it's because we need to talk a little bit about how we actually look for new particles and what we mean by this so there's not just high energy high energy is not the only thing you need to look for to discover a new particle because as some of you may know we say we use the highest energy ever you know using a Collider experiment for these at the LHC at the Large Hadron Collider but there are much more energetic things that happen in a universe all the time so in the upper atmosphere you know at the LHC we use this thing called 13 TeV trillion electron volts in the upper atmosphere you have cosmic ray muons come in and all the time that hit particles in the upper atmosphere there's something like pev but there's only a few of those and they're spread out all over the atmosphere that you know what we need is we need statistics we need a very very large number of collisions to build up enough events enough collision events so that we can determine whether we've seen something new or we've seen something that's not new so one of the so it's a you know even that sounds like a little bit hard you know you get a bunch of you know collisions and you look for a bump it's actually really really simple how do you how you discover a new particle is a simple three-step process you accelerate protons to high energy and collide them millions of times per second no big deal collect lots of data and then you look for a deviation from what you were expecting and so this is more or less a real-time discovery of the Higgs boson so what we did for to make this plot is that we collect a date we collided protons you know millions of times a second for months and months and months and then we and then we took we picked out of the out of those collisions overwhelmingly these collision events are boring we don't we don't care about them and so we toss most of them out because they're all this you know you you saw that earlier that that second slide that I showed was sort of the red fuzz coming out of that thing that red fuzz in the middle there happens all the time and it's boring in the sense that we know it we we we know it very well so we're looking for the events that have these unique features these those yellow things that were sticking out the side and those are the ones we look for and we so for example to discover the Higgs boson we pick through all these events and found the ones tagged the ones that were really interesting looking and then we did this thing where we we make an invariant mass out of them don't worry about it but what eventually what you end up with is this this type of this type of plot where you can see there's a tiny tiny little bump there you can see right around 120 it's going again 125 in this plot on the on the x axis here and you've seen it a couple times now anyway so that's enough that means that we've taken enough data that's enough for us to say this is a new particle rather than just a fluctuation of the background so that's the that's the very very simple way that we look for new particles but again to get back to the real heart of the matter but I'm not going to belabor the point but you really need to get you know to like get you know it's it's important to understand this so that we can you can understand why I want to build a particle collider around the circumference the moon what's really going on inside of a proton collision once again back to that question is there a Higgs boson secretly inside the proton or maybe there's some dark matter in there if we hit it hard enough it'll knock the Dark Matter off that's not what's happening what happens when the proton collision is actually the two protons get close enough so that they can feel each other with a certain force because that question that we asked earlier when you're asking how small can I cut anything you're secretly asking what was holding anything together to begin with and the thing that holds things together at the particle level of forces but the particle level forces are mediated by other types of particles it's like a force exchange so it's it's a little bit strange for us you know humans were big bulky humans that that evolved in this you know on the surface of the earth and this certain energy range and we can't really intuitively understand the quantum world but the quantum world is a bit odd so but one way you can as an analogy you can do it is for example you you can get a sense of it as you imagine you and your friend were on an ice skating rink okay and you're both standing right in front of each other one of you has a gigantic ball like a big rock or something like that and you throw the rock to your friend as you throw the rock it's really heavy so you're gonna slide backwards right and as your friend catches that she's gonna slide backwards as well so in a sense we have just exchanged a force carrying particle that's the way particles interact but particle collisions are weird compared to what we think of as you know collisions in our everyday life because if if you if you were actually particles in the quantum world you and your friend actually have another option for when you throw the rock the rock you cannot just throw the rock to each other the two of you could actually smack together and become the rock perhaps let's use a different analogy particle collisions are not like car collisions we like them to think so we like to think of that in a way but is there not like car collisions they have different rules when two particles collide at almost the speed of light the quantum world takes over and in the quantum world two particles can have actually ceased to exist and a new particle can be created in their place that lives for a tiny fraction of a second before then splitting into other particles that hit our detector imagine a car collision where the two cars vanish upon impact a bicycle appears in their place and then the bicycle explodes into two gate boards that that hit our detector hopefully not literally but you know this is the sort of thing that this is a bit of a weirdness that happens at the quantum level so what that the way that's possible for that to happen is that go back to your high school physics I hope I'm not gonna you know scare anybody off by saying go back to your high school physics go back to your high school physics what does physics really care about this doesn't care about the names of things doesn't care that this is called an you know an electron this is called a positron we care about that for car collisions IOT's Mary okay is is you know Jack okay but but particle collisions they don't care about that but physics cares about conserved quantities I hope I haven't made anybody fall asleep just by saying this price physics cares about conserved quantities because you think about you know what what it is that you know the conservation of energy conservation of momentum conservation of charge and some more arcane ones conservation of spin these are the things that particle physics cares about so as long as I can serve these things before and after a collision I'm all good so if I if here for example on the this is a diagram I hope I haven't scared anybody off for the diagram you know this is a Fineman diagram it may be you know richard fineman but the on the on the left hand side you have two quarks coming out of the proton and one of our collisions to quartz at some point there's far apart in space they get closer and closer together and at some point they annihilate they cease to exist and then a Z boson appears in their place and then the Z boson lives for something like 10 to the minus 12 seconds basically nothing and then it splits into two muons that's crazy you started with two quarks and end up with two muons how is that even possible it would never happen in in in our everyday you know car collision world but it's possible the quantum world because as long as you have conserved all of these concert you you've satisfied all these conservation laws it's totally possible to do that to do that and so this is what we do to look for new particles because the thing we care about is that middle part the Z thing what is that Z the Z is the force carrying particle of something called we called the electro weak force and that's one of the four fundamental forces of nature as so but the middle part doesn't have to be something we've already discovered it can be a new thing I come hot-pot hypothesize something new to put in there and as long as it satisfies all the all of the properties that I need all the conservation I can put whatever I want there and then I can go out and search for evidence of it coming you know of the particles coming out the other side so that's really what we do in in a nutshell and the bread and butter and so but if for example it goes back to the e equals mc-squared thing if the if the thing in the middle something and look I'm looking for has a mass M that is way way high much higher than my experiment can get to to be able to discover it I need to give the introductory particles a lot more energy as I have to go to a bigger machine so this is the point we find ourselves in and this is where I'm finally getting to that was all introductory boring stuff I hope you can get you know you're still with me after the introductory boring stuff because we're now getting to the actual crux of the matter which is that we're kind of at a bizarre weird you know okay kind of a tough point right now in particle physics we're scratching our heads really really hard because you don't really know where to look now for the new particles and that's frustrating because the 20th century was really good it was so many so many so many suggestive hints throughout the 20th century it's like oh you should you know we see this thing in our in our equations in this other this other observation and different experiment you should look in this place whoa there it was amazing oh this suggests this thing whoa you could do that experiment this kept happening over and over and the last thing was this Higgs boson discovery and we discovered it her a Nobel Prize now for me but you know Pat my colleagues you know six thousand people discovered the Higgs boson if if one person ever tells you they discover the Higgs boson they're probably looking for a job so the so we but the point at which we discovered the Higgs boson was at the LHC at a lower energy than what we possibly could get with the 27-kilometer tella was designed to go up to a certain a to help find particles with mass m but we and there was a there was a problem at the the beginning part when it was turned on so we decided to operate at a kind of a lower energy that was enough to discover the Higgs boson hooray but it was not enough it was not as high as we could possibly go so 2015 was a watershed moment for just really for Humanity because we finally achieved thirteen trillion electron volts T V this is the highest you know collision energy that any particle collider had ever used and so June third we were waiting for the first collisions here we're sent you know sitting in the in the the Atlas control room looking like Norse gods or something like that and then what so we finally you know we finally saw the first collisions popping off the detector at 13 TeV and was it really you know is a great moment and we had no idea what we were gonna find in this data we had discovered the Higgs made this jump you know almost like this jump into the unknown almost like a you know shot into the into the dark and into outer space we had no idea what we're gonna find and then three years after three years of analyzing all this data we haven't yet found anything and that is a it's it's both good and bad to be honest it's bad because it's like oh no there's no discovery you know Bolla but it's also good because particle physicists are not really part of we're not really like I get it's a it's let's be can't I'll be candid about it the Higgs boson discovery is great and I love the Higgs and I just you know I we study it to death and it's one of the things that we'll be studying for decades because it's a very very unique particle amongst all the particles that we know of but it's also kind of bad because it's sort of Telegraph's to the rest of the world that our job as particle physicists is to make discoveries that is not our job our job as particle physicists is to map out all the possible territory where new discoveries could be waiting so we're more like cartographers than they were then we are particle you know hunters we're more like more like map makers and so it's absolutely a success anytime you do and you know we would produce hundreds of papers each year analyses of our data different subsets of our data looking for new particles and each one of those I would love you know for them there to be some kind of breathless pops eye article you know and gadget or something that's like yes LHC rules out one more little place for a new particle could be that's great that took that took decades at work and a bunch of dedicated team that that's that's awesome for me but we're not doing so well at messaging it seems but the the the the key though with the fact that we haven't found anything yet is that we we kind of expected to find something in this energy range and that kind of expected is going to be most key here because the kind of expected the suggestive hints the thing that I mentioned we're running out of those we have always throughout the entire 20th century had really good hints as to where to find the new particle we've you know the Higgs boson if prior to this discovery there were a lot of suggestive hints that it should be in that range and there it was that was really nice and you know in the past different particles like oh you've got two different copies of this thing there might be a third one and then there was a third version of you know a type of lepton there this kept happening but we're running out of these suggestive hints but we still have the catastrophic open questions and they're not just small I use the word catastrophic maybe it's dramatic but they're not just small problems they're big problems one of them I'll give you I'll give you a couple of examples and they're related one of them it has to do with dark matter so dark matter as you may have heard is this thing that we we said we we know exists we've never been able to find exactly what it is and it comes from very key observations that are totally repeatable over and over and over so take your favourite Hubble photograph I hope everybody loves Hubble Hubble photographs I do take your favorite spiral galaxies and count up all the stuff you can see okay all the stars and things that you can you know you can see and astronomers are really good at telling you exactly what's inside these stars based upon the lights coming out of them so you can basically get a sense of how much mass how much matter is in this galaxy right you know missing one you can see okay that's great because then you can take that number you just calculate it by Counting up all the stuff you can see this matte matter the the mass of this of this of this galaxy and you can put it into the equation that comes from gravity you know the thing is spinning right the spiral galaxy is spinning due to gravity and we know it we know grat how gravity works really really well so you take this equation out of your favorite textbook you put them at how much mass is in there and it tells you how fast the star should be moving should be spinning as a function of how far away from the center it is it's great you just get that prediction and then you go out and observe it it's totally off from the prediction and it's not just a little bit off it's way off and you think okay maybe this is just a one that one galaxy you know maybe that's the that's a kind of a one-off no it's happening basically all of them this was repeated over and over and demonstrated that this is a big big problem so one of two things is is wrong here either gravity is wrong it's probably not likely or there's more stuff there than what you can see with your eyes and if it's not light if it's not luminous if it doesn't interact with photons the force carrying particle of electromagnetism then it's dark so this is dark matter so this is where there are other there are other empirical observations that demonstrate the Dark Matter exists but we still haven't found what it's particle is we've never been able to find you know exactly what it is and there's different ways that we look for this in different mind based experiments and at the LHC we can look for it as well and typically what we look for at the LHC is the what we're good at the LHC is not so much the dark matter particle itself but the force that might connect the dark dark matter with our world because if you if you have dark matter going through you all the time and you do you have about a billion particles of dark matter coursing through your body every second and you've never felt them they've never interacted with you that means the dark matter doesn't like to interact with regular matter very much at all if at all but if it does interact it would have to interact with some new force we know for forces there could be other ones but maybe their force carrying particle was only important just a fraction of a fraction of a second after the Big Bang the universe expanded too much and that force wasn't important anymore and therefore dark matter was left cold aimless and alone one way we could try to detect this or we could try to demonstrate this is to look for this gigantic you know high mass force carrying particle at particle colliders like the LHC and that's what we do the other thing that I want to mention about these gigantic catastrophes in terms of these like suggestive hints as to where the new particles could be living has to do with the Higgs boson so Higgs boson Nobel Prize all right the Higgs boson is a bizarre-o particle because the standard model predicts its existence it said yes there is should be something that called the Higgs boson it should exist in some particle it does this thing it helps give all these other particles their masses in a certain way with this Higgs field blah blah blah but it's really frustrating because it doesn't tell us exactly what its mass should be and if you go back to this the whole argument that I've been making the e equals mc-squared if we don't know where to go to find its mass what Y would be what why should we assume it's gonna be within the range of one of our particle colliders maybe it's something gigantically high but it wasn't we found it right around the corner I said there were some some other kind of oblique suggestive hints that we should find that Higgs around the corner but those are more or less kind of circumstantial turns out they were they were good they were good hints but there's nothing really in principle to prevent the Higgs boson mass from being something gigantically high and you don't need to know the details about it but just there's I put it graphically here the Higgs boson mass should totally just roll down this hill and be something gigantically huge there's nothing to prevent it from doing that except if you postulate this extra symmetry of nature don't worry too much about it the symmetry of nature called supersymmetry some of you've probably heard about this and we could have an entire you know hours long lecture on super determine why it's a really cool idea but suffice it to say if we had found some supersymmetry particles around the same place as the Higgs mass that is just around the corner there's a little higher energy and you know at 13 TV in 2015 that would have really really helped explain why the higgs mass is the way it is it's more or less what it does is it postulates supersymmetry postulates you have all the no particles that we know exist standard model capital s capital m and do this one and this one spin flip thing and you postulated totally different like a completely other copy of the this of the the particles that have slightly different properties and they might have super high masses or the different masses you know obviously they'd have high masses otherwise we would have found them already but it basically says you know there's this extra particles that in the sense can cancel out the other ones when you calculate what the Higgs boson mass is that's you know don't worry about the details just suffice to say if we had found some that would really really help explain why the higgs mass is the way it is and why we see it where it where it is but we have not found any evidence of these at all and that's weird it's really weird and I hope that some of your particle physicists in the room and you can you can like sympathize or empathize what this is like it's really strange because it would really make a lot of sense because otherwise there's really no reason for the higgs mass to be what it is the mass the higgs mass we don't choose this number nature chooses this we go out and measure it it's like the electron mass or it's like the electron charge we don't we can't change it we just go out and measure it but a lot of these numbers that we see in physics they seem to have you know some of them have some relation to other numbers as I go that makes sense because of XY and Z no this makes sense but this is XY and Z the Higgs boson mass doesn't seem to come from anywhere and it's not what you would choose if you were you know if you were designing a universe from scratch it's like yes this makes sense this is logical I'm gonna totally put this Higgs boson mass right in here and that makes us start to think if there's no supersymmetry for example to keep this mass and in this kind of low range where we see it now it makes us start to think in very strange ways and it's not it's clearly not a proof for a demonstration of the concept but it's makes us start to take more seriously the idea that maybe our higgs boson mass is nothing special because maybe our universe is nothing special maybe our Higgs boson mass is just one of an almost infinite number of possible Higgs boson masses that each one got assigned to a different almost of an almost infinite number of universes sample for some probability distribution so we know that probability distributions we know that nature loves probability distributions like be the average resting heart rate of you know of an adult male will go in some kind of Gaussian right and if you stand on a street corner you're watching you know cars come by the cars come by what will follow a Poisson distribution we know that nature loves statistical distributions so why you know it why would nature behind the scenes not love statistical distributions too and possibly our Higgs boson mass was one that happened to be stable because here we are to talk about it I mean the Higgs boson if you don't know and love it already maybe there's some good books you can read but suffice to say if there was no Higgs boson there would be no indication of the Higgs field and if there was no Higgs field atoms would never have formed and we would never be here in this beautiful auditorium having this conversation and so the Higgs boson mass that we have really indicates that you know it I mean it's a concrete demonstration that we are here to have this discussion our universe is stable but it's possible that there were a almost infinite number of other masses of the Higgs boson that led to the universes the or maybe like they expanded a little bit and the Higgs boson mass is wrong and maybe the electron mass was wrong too and the you know alpha constant was different and so this one never formed atoms and all the particles just whizzed around and nothing ever happened and no structure I've reformed or there could have been different values of different things in the different universes where they expanded a little bit then they collapsed immediately because they weren't they didn't have the right conditions so this is an idea that we take a little bit more seriously after the lack of discovery at the LHC so far it is not in any sense a demonstration or a proof of this idea but it's makes us start to think in new ways and that's exciting so that's why this kind of the lack of a discovery can really spur new ideas but at the end of the day we really really like hints we really like really like places you know where you know people for ideas to say oh yeah you should definitely look for the new discovery it's gonna be totally in this this experiment over here or oh it's definitely gonna be just around the corner in this energy range we're kind of out of those because the Dark Matter we've been looking for it in different ways in different experiments but it's kind of you know it's it's the the suggestive hints as to where where it should be or you know are not playing out the way one of them we expected them to and the the question of course is that we now need to think in different ways all right so the idea is that we now need to think in different ways to you know about particle physics about physics in general like where's the new Discoverer gonna be we don't have any more guarantees and that is somewhat you know scary but it's also a bit of freedom but are we really out of hints I mean I keep saying this you know is it is it really just completely out of hints to you know we have no idea where dark matter could be do we have no idea where supersymmetry supersymmetry supersymmetry could be do we have no idea where you know how why why the universe our universe is made out of matter and not antimatter which is a totally different discussion you know but that this is another big open question of science right now I mean because the real question is what the thing that I'm really you know I'm getting to the end here but the thing that I came here to motivate to you is that we have to bigger colliders and why would we build a bigger Collider if there's no concrete specific prediction as to what we'll find it's because in the past every time we both have a collider it's always worked so go back to JJ Thompson in Cambridge University Kevin Cavendish laboratory you know this is back in the days when a lone white male could completely change the world by himself on a tabletop those days are gone luckily but this is this is you know he could actually completely discover the electron by himself in 1897 and then we went big we went bigger so I'm skipping through several decades but in in 1959 for example we got up to decide there was this proton to design a proton synchrotron of about 628 meters around and just by contrast so this is Thompson on a table and Cambridge he discovered the electron at when we went to this alternating gradient synchrotron at about 800 meters in Brookhaven in the 1960s discovered something called the charm cork which is a totally revolutionary discovery made everybody take seriously this notion that quarks those things inside the proton were actually real and not just like an interesting bookkeeping thing then we went bigger the super proton synchrotron 7-7 kilometers around in the 1970s the W and Z bosons was one of the reference many times I love the wnz awesome particles and they were discovered by going to a bigger Collider because they were not within the discovery range of any of our other colliders and the similar sized ring at the Tevatron at Fermilab was discovered the top quark and then we go forward the Large Hadron Collider in 2010 it was turned on and eventually discovered the Higgs boson but that's the last remaining guaranteed discovery remember that the Higgs were the last thing that we were guaranteed to find but we still have all these open questions and we have no idea where they're gonna be we have no clue we have a suggestive hints but the hints are running out and they're not so well motivated anymore so then the next generation and the next to next generation of particle physics colliders have to go big we have to cast a wide net and we have to do it in some way so that we can split the difference between something that is possible within a reasonable amount of time with an unreasonable budgets things like this and something that would really get us to large enough energy to be able to answer the questions definitively because the thing you know just just to use one example that supersymmetry thing it doesn't have to be within 13 TeV it's always like a there's always a bit of a rough you know there's always a little bit of wiggle room with the supersymmetry thing you'll talk to the theorists and like oh yeah it's definitely gonna be here oh it's definitely be here it's definitely gonna be here and so it's an amorphous beast but it should be within the range of the TeV range but to answer the TeV range definitively we should go really high let's go above the TeV range and then that would answer the question completely so the next planned the next generation of particle physics colliders are going to be something like the CEP C that might be 50 to 70 kilometers around in China and this maybe this would get us to the discovery and you know just right right around the corner and the next another one that's being discussed right now is the future circular Collider a hundred to about a hundred kilometers around at CERN and both of these will maybe to start taking data in the 2040s and but the particles but once again the discovery does there's no guarantee that it's gonna be right around the corner it could be anywhere in this range so to really answer the question definitively we should go big we should we should build a Collider around the circumference of a great circle of the moon and this would be eleven thousand kilometers around and it would look something like this this is an artist's rendition and it would get us up to a high enough range in energy there would more or less be able to definitively answer the question you know is supersymmetry right around the corner or is it very unnatural and once again this natural thing in terms of physics it's a little bit hard to motivate these days because naturalness as a concept is my colleague my one of my colleagues often refers says you know simplicity is not a simplicity is not a principle of nature at the end of the day you actually cuz our world is actually not so simple in certain ways I mean it's very baroque if you were you know if you were some deity designer in a universe we'd totally not design this one it's really bizarre this the the standard model is nice but it fits together and really strange ways and there's different values of things that are chosen you wouldn't design this at all and so the that this kind of naturalness argument is kind of going out the window but getting it to tens of thousands of TeV would really allow us to complete definitively answer this question with respect to you know is supersymmetry and natural symmetry of nature and it would more or less make us really it would spur us to think in completely new ways about how to answer this biggest open questions because we're kind of running out of ideas we're kind of running out of ways you know that the the best ideas as to what dark matter is you know why gravity is so weak these these things but you know so I can say these things and I can put the funny you know I put the funny images up and like look I put I drew a line on the moon it's kind of interesting right but we're also adults you know so we should hooves us to talk a little bit about the concrete details about you know designing such a thing a Hadron Collider around the circumference of a great circle of the moon so the estimated budget that I came up with I have no idea and of course the timeline let's talk about when it's actually gonna happen you tell me no but what I mean by this is that this is something that is almost impossible to say and well it's possible to say at the moment if we wanted to do this right now basically impossible like insane impossible right and insane impossible is no it's not gonna happen right but if I were to and I'll give you an example of you know a more concrete disk estimate not just a question mark so the zeroth order moon Collider budget estimate only for the construction of a tunnel similar to the LHC this is you know 100 kilometers I'm sorry 100 meters underground and the magnet installation so for the LHC construction the the tunnel was already there but so I factor that in as well as it's a that was about 4.6 billion dollars sorry for you know pounds and dollars after the conversions on your on the but this is four point six billion dollars and just so simply scale that up to eleven thousand kilometers around the circumference of the moon this is one point nine trillion dollars we're going to need some innovation to get these costs down so this is why this is the place where I you know I want to really kind of like remind you that this is not a concrete proposal for a particle collider around the circumference of the moon but it is instead a means to spur ideas as to what we would get if we did something like this and in fact it's not such a crazy idea because there's a lot of threads kind of going in this direction that within ya you know I don't want to say a couple of years but maybe a couple of decades it might be possible to do such a thing and that's the with the last few I guess I'm run out how about the last few minutes I'm going to motivate those those things and really what I'm doing is I'm kind of hoping that there might be some you know tech people in the audience or maybe some you know startup company people and maybe some you know innovators because there are some huge innovation opportunities for a moon Collider so I'm gonna I'm gonna put a little chart here what I need from you and what you could use this for its innovation for an industry because I'm a I'm a I'm a particle physics experimentalist not a product developmentalist I have no clue what you do with these things as you know with particle physics experiments like this any time you do something huge any time you go something big there's always transferable technologies you have to invent stuff this happens all the time that's that's like that's guaranteed this is like open-ended humanity R&D there's always stuff that you end up transferring to it always always end up transferring to to industry so I'm gonna go through a few things that I need from you I need magnets about ten to a hundred times stronger than the LHC magnets that are about eight Tesla and I need a eleven thousand kilometers worth of them okay so I think I've seen a few smiles in the audience and not completely insane ones somebody I think is saying oh I can do that you know so I need reliable space transport schemes for equipment and rotating personnel and actually NASA's a little bit ahead of the game on this right they've thought about there's Orion thing you know there's there's the idea of personal space transport things I need tunnel scouting engineering and digging okay well scratch that maybe I need self-directed than self learning robots for tunnel scouting digging installation and maintenance of the magnets but then you think to yourself okay digging is slow and takes an extremely large amount of money so maybe we don't need to go on underground maybe we just need to do it on the surface maybe maybe just maybe we can you know maybe we need what we needs to be done is the calculation is to can we get away with some a surface level Collider around the circumference of the circumstance till be able to withstand the constant barrage from small meteoroids coming all the time this calculation needs to be done so somebody in the audience needs to do this for me as well we need LHC style detectors but more finely grained in general purpose to ensure sensitivity to a wide range of new particle discoveries and automate because you know we don't want to have personnel up on the moon all the time at least not you know thousands of people like we do at CERN automated this is for the data scientists in the in the room we need automated data analysis and anomaly detection methods designed by physicists but optimized using the cutting-edge machine learning techniques that are customized for our uniquely structured big data from particle physics collisions we need some speedy robust moon to earth data transfer system so something like Network people you know totally this is your innovation right here we need advancements in power combination nuclear but also solar because solar is abundant on the moon there's no atmosphere so you you know you can get solar power and it's much more efficient than it would be on the on the earth and everything else I haven't thought of yet these are innovation opportunities and then so I've got the list here on the on the the left what I need from you and here's some examples of what you might be able to use this for these innovations for an industry like I said I don't know you tell me these every single one of these things would have transferrable technical technology to to be used in private industry and to be used for commercialization and it's like I mean sorry I'm putting these things down you know a little bit I'm being a little bit playful clearly I mean I'm not I'm not kind of saying that we're going to concretely build this thing next year or even five years from now well what I am observing is that there are threads so every single one of the things that I listen and things that I need from you people have been thinking about this with respect to space travel and with the moon for a while now and it's things have kind of are starting to get up get some momentum and get some steam and so the history is sort of like we're destined to keep doing this type of thing Apollo 11 you know man walks on the moon and that once again there's kind of like a tabletop experiment that he's doing there you know on the moon and then flash-forward to things like the ISS ISS in 2006 you know and people ask themselves what is that what are the what are we gonna do with the ISS wants this decommission could it be used for commercialization could the technology be used for some kind of space transfer system spacex of course everyone knows spacex it's been making great strides with with private space travel and then even nasa had back in 1977 was thinking about moon bases obviously a moon base has been the idea both in science fact and science fiction for a very long time but in the current day there are people that are really interested in doing this and going back to the moon to stay and I don't know this guy Bob Richards but he and I were both itself myself where he was supposed to be herself by Southwest last week but I didn't get a chance to see him cuz he wasn't there but he says he has a company called moon Express and he's like return to the moon this time to stay and one of the expressed things about like building another moon base is like what are they gonna do there what are the what you know if you build a moon base what are they gonna do well one thing they could do is they could be in charge of a gigantic particle glider and it's not just it's not just this Bob Richard guy as you know there's this Google Lunar XPrize and you if you notice down at the bottom here this was a Google Lunar XPrize there were like nine teams that got all that invested a lot of time and effort in to try to make a moonshot to land on the moon from prior you know a private private companies to land on the moon none of them ended up getting this prize it was supposed to happen by this year and they just determined that no one's gonna make it to the finish line but he's one of these these teams really thought deeply about it and there's a lot of innovation already going in that direction let's take these threads and push them into one into one place and really make this happen and so you know if you think that the the the idea of like having a moon base and maybe you know did like I said the the the people that are there the the the moon base people sorry the the astronauts that are there could be you know partially particle physicist they could keep track of a gigantic particle collide around this comes to the moon that could help us determine what dark matter is and why gravity is so weak but it doesn't have to be just that if you had a moon base imagine what else you could do so very Ruben if you don't know how very Ruben is I hope urge you to look her up she's one of my heroes she the Vera Rubin lunar Science Center a particle collider at a 30,000 TeV on a great circle around the circumference the moon you could also have a base that is devoted to optical Astronomy that you know astronomers have loved to have wanted to put you know have dreamed about putting observatories on the moon for a long time you could have gravitational wave astronomy you could have direct and indirect detection Dark Matter experiments you could have precision measurements and low gravity conditions you have a quantum computing center and you can have organization that is based upon the CERN and the ISS models which we know work quite well for it for international or non national collaborations and so you know at the end of it I know that right now many of you in this room right now are thinking the following very valid question isn't this absurd I mean why in the world would we do this when there's so much poverty and hardship and so many social problems here on earth the truth is that the resources exist to both solve all social problems and to devote a relatively small portion toward boundaries stretching scientific exploration like a particle collider around the circumference of the moon but the current prevalent socio-economic system has engendered a world and an attitude that makes us think we have to choose among things like this look at the current system and the let's be honest relatively small number of extremely wealthy power holders who more or less exploit every single one over the rest of us has a vested interest in convincing us there's no alternative the current system but if but if I as but politics makes me frustrated it makes us think that we have to choose between things like this and they and you know it makes us want you know it tries to convince there's no alternative to this system I mean that's really how hegemonies persist they aggressively and unrelentingly convinced you that there's no that they're inevitable but if I as a scientist can embrace new ideas new paradigms and not feel threatened but celebrate when new ideas force us to change our thinking about the nature of the universe and trust me I guarantee you if you come up with a new theory one that incorporates all of our observations of elementary particles and includes dark matter and gravity and supersymmetry and all of these observations I guarantee you I will celebrate if I can do that then we as a society me need to me remain open to the possibility that alternate more equitable systems do exist ones where everyone wins where we can eradicate poverty and we can build a particle collider around the circumference of the moon these do exist and that we can create them if we simply recognize their objective superiority and even in the largest even in the current moment don't let anyone ever tell you that they projects like this are some kind of drain on society consider it in the context is very much in the u.s. context but I looked at the percentages and they're not you know a factor two or three it's not just not too different for the UK so the LHC construction was about you know eight billion dollars and it costs less than a billion per year to operate the US Department of Energy budget is about thirty billion and the NSF National Science Foundation is about seven point five billion dollars per year by contrast they contribution to the LHC that they give is about 170 million paltry and the NEA and the neh this is the arts and the humanities associations or the endowments are miniscule and proposed to be zero by the current ministration by contrast the US military budget is seven hundred billion dollars and for some private sector examples uber is currently valuated whatever valuated means at sixty eight billion dollars and Palantir technologies is evaluated at something like twenty billion dollars and if you add up all of the unicorns these these private companies that are worth over a billion dollars each then this is about six hundred and fifty billion dollars of that of valuation excuse me if we as a society valued scientific curiosity as much as we valued allowing private companies to facilitate governmental intrusion and surveillance of their citizens around the world undermining you know aggressively deporting and targeting marginalized communities in the United States for example you know the Palantir is one of the companies that has given this you know the machinery of deportation to ice the and if we valued scientific curiosity as much as we evolved allowed valued private companies to undermine strong service sector unions such as those covering you know taxi drivers if we valued scientific curiosity as much as we value these things we could build a particle particle collider around the circumference of the moon and definitively explore these concepts of you know a dark matter what happened just a fraction of a second after the Big Bang and you know why is gravity so weak all these things that have been keeping me up since I was a little kid at night so this you know that and end the political screen for it um but what I really want okay this and we're getting to the very end here and I have to tell you the entire talk here is more or less been a lie I don't I don't really want a particle collider around this to come to the moon I want something more so I said that this said about you know 30,000 TeV would be pretty great that would allow us to really answer some questions that's still not exactly what I want I want 10 to the power 16 TV because that's something called the Planck scale and I urge you to look up the Planck scale but basically it's the place at which gravity and quantum mechanics quantum world governs all the particles that we know exist in the ways they interact and it works really really well the standard model and gravity this thing that doesn't play well with it at all but this is the point at which they have to have something to do with each other it's impossible for them not to and this would be 10 to the power 16 TV and it's not such a big deal because to get to there all we need to do is build an L H Steve style Collider around the orbit of Neptune so maybe that's not gonna happen anytime soon but it's also probably not gonna happen with our civilization so this is the sort of thing that I would call insane impossible because it's clearly not gonna happen but that the concept of a moon Collider a particle collider around the sir comes to the moon I would classify that currently as just you know kind of regular impossible impossible and impossible impossible is getting to the point where it's getting you know it gives of these threads I was saying people interested in going back to the moon advances in robotics interested in you know the boring company these types of things people interested in and you know going back to space and really maybe put in a moon base and really doing some science science you know in thinking in new ways these threads are all going in the direction where the regular impossible could you know this actually could be a regular impossible concept and regular impossible we can do I mean impossible is just impossible just up until the moment when it becomes possible and you know it's almost it almost seems inevitable in a sense because for a kind of you know curious sort of primate species like we are you know either staring up at the the sky from a hot flat rock in southern Utah wondering you know stargazing wondering about the vastness of space or you know gathering together the best you know best most curious you know most inventive parts of humanity from all you know across all racial and national religious you know barriers to come together in places like CERN or for example to build a particle collider around the circumference of the moon this is what we do this is what our species does we're curious about about the universe we want to know more we're not satisfied with you know with with you know it particle physics you get into particle physics if you're the sort of person as a kid you were never satisfied with the answer because I said so when someone says you know when you ask why it's like you want to know the answer you keep going forward and this is really what we end up doing it so you might you know even if we were to build a particle collider around the circumference of the moon this would you know it let's say we were able to find all these particles we find a Dark Matter particle we find extra forces of nature we find supersymmetry raaah everything is explaining the way we kind of expected it to even if we didn't find anything at a moon Collider that would teach us a lot that would that would more or less definitively you know demonstrate that that what that our universe is a bit strange not definitively would it would it would it would definitely point us in the direction that our universe seems a little bit odd and it would make us start to think more seriously about this concept of the multiverse and at that point somebody may come up with a way to really test that idea because the multiverse theory is just an idea until somebody comes up with a way to definitively test it so a null result the lack of it of a discovery can be just as instructive as a discovery because in particle physics there's no such thing as failure the only failure is to stop searching thank you [Applause] you you

Channel: The Royal Institution

Views: 165,309

Rating: 4.1342354 out of 5

Keywords: big bang, physics, particle physics, CERN, LHC, James Beacham, mutliverse, universe, collider, lecture, ri, royal institution

Id: 8_zzw4tSOe8

Length: 60min 53sec (3653 seconds)

Published: Wed May 23 2018