okay we're about ready here I think you know everything so I get introduced Sean tonight so who is Sean Carroll basically I want to characterize him as a public intellectual he happens to be a physicist a theoretical physicist at Caltech but if you if you haven't seen him on something then you haven't been looking he's got a great blog which I have listed in your program he does another blog there's one there he does another one that Discover Magazine hosts called cosmic variance he's been on The Colbert Report and as a matter of fact the vibes are here he was on Colbert last night I don't think they see it we won't see it here until next week I don't think but anyway he was they just he had to fly in today from New York as it was on Colbert last night so I mean anybody who's been on Colbert Report has to be important right so let's go so so he's also been those of you watch this series through the wormhole with Morgan hosted by Morgan Freeman there's a whole series of that so Sean's in that a lot talking about theoretical physics and cosmology and so forth oh the Teaching Company if you guys don't know about the teaching company there's called the great courses series okay why people some fans there I'm a big fan of this - I've done like 25 of their of their courses you get them for I don't know they say they're set to hundred ninety five bucks on sale for thirty-five so I don't know some psychology that they're very good they find the top professors the best presenters who've got who have published and respected their colleagues and then they really they they give them a framework you know like here's your best idea here's the argument you know they make them put together the lectures in a very formal way so you get a series of lectures or like 30 to 45 minutes each about 30 or 40 lectures on a particular topic they're really great anyway Sean did one already on dark matter and energy and he's another ones in production on the nature of time I also mentioned I didn't mention before my the reason I had my eye on Sean last year and we didn't get him in and I was looking at for him for this year and then the Higgs thing came off he's got a new book out but his previous book called from eternity to here looking at the nature of time is one of my favorite popular physics books right now and I just say I'm not I didn't really agree with his solution to the problem of time but his critique his analysis is in my opinion one of the most my expression was the most honest and high integrity presentations at the physics and everything goes with it and I assume he's going to give us that tonight but the Higgs boson there's a lot of there's a lot of fluff out there in physics brought by ten to the hundred and twentieth on the some factors here anyway I really recommend that book and I recommend Sean Carroll and thank you to Sean for taking the time to do all this presentation to the public and so with that Sean Carroll can you guys hear me from this microphone is that okay yell if you cannot hear me I know it's a it's a difficult thing so it's great to be here in Portland great to be talking about this topic it's only after my book appeared that I realized that all of my book titles come from disturbing somebody else's book title obviously this is you know borrowed from Douglas Adams the restaurant at the end of the universe I have to explain to people that the Higgs boson is not literally at the you don't like go to the end of the universe and see the Higgs boson there it's a metaphor that's okay we'll try to explain what that's all about and the best place to start is Independence Day this year July 4th I spent my July 4th weekend in Geneva Switzerland these guys here are camping out overnight it's very much like you would see people camping out for the new iPhone or a rock concert or something like that except there's a lot more laptop computers and what were they camping out for it was not for the Led Zeppelin reunion it was for some PowerPoint presentations that happened the next day here's the lecture hall when these guys are gonna give their PowerPoint presentations about a new particle called the Higgs boson and for that for the last six months we particle physicists have been trying to explain what is the big deal with this Higgs boson why was it something that caused so much excitement people camping out overnight just to see some technical talks it's very hard to explain in 30 seconds what the Higgs boson is so I'm very glad that I have more than 30 seconds to do it a typical way to explain particle physics is to go back to this guy does anyone know who this is recognize this well if you look up in the catalogue this is called Democritus Democritus is the Greek philosopher 2,500 years ago who is in some sense the first particle physicist he was the one and his teacher laetus who's all his works are lost but he was the one who first said in a very popular way that everything we see around us is made of individual particles it's just arrangements of the different particles give rise to all the different kinds of stuff that we see around us he didn't call them particles he called them atoms we got a little overeager in the 19th century and we gave the name atoms to things that in fact are not elementary particles we now know that what we call atoms have sub particles but what Democritus was really talking about was the very idea that water and air and Earth are not fundamentally different things they're just different arrangements of the same kinds of things in different combinations and in that he was completely right and the 19th and 20th century have given us this triumphant vindication of that idea he also because it was a long time ago in the modern University had not been invented yet philosophers were allowed to talk about more than one thing so in addition to talking about natural philosophy he talked about ethics and morality and so forth and he was very optimistic guy and he was given the name the Laughing philosopher so he lived 2,500 years ago no one has any idea what he looked like but his nickname was the Laughing philosopher so in the Renaissance he was a very popular subject for portraits because this one is by Rembrandt you would just paint a portrait of yourself laughing and then you would call it Democritus and people would buy it but in fact despite all the good ideas that Democritus had I do not want to begin with that particular slant on what we've learned because the reason why the Higgs boson in particular is so difficult to explain is that the particle that we think we found which we which we have a new particle of nature but it's not the particle that is that important what it's important that the Higgs boson is that it is a manifestation of something called the Higgs field an invisible energy field that fills this room and every room and every part of the universe that we can see empty space the middle of the earth the Sun the Moon the stars they're all swimming true this invisible field called the Higgs field so it's really field theory that we need to understand in fact quantum field theory that we need to understand so I'm very glad that Terry invited me to give this 20 hour long talk so that you can really get some of the basic flavor of quantum field theory but well let's start with rather than starting with Democritus which is a little pretentious let's start with these philosophers of the modern era this is uh these guys are called the insane clown posse this is Shaggy 2 dope and that's violent Jay not the names that their mothers gave them but they are a popular hip-hop group and they caused some controversy a couple years ago with a new song and video called miracles and their song it was it was controversial for more than one reason for one thing it was not nearly as you know violent and party centered as their previous ones it was about you know the awe and love that they have for the universe but it also tended to rub scientists the wrong way a little bit so there was this verse I see miracles all around me stop and look it's all astounding water air fire and dirt frickin magnets how do they work frickin was not the word that they used there you can look it up on the Internet what the word was but uh so this rubbed people the wrong way for a couple reasons for one thing dirt and work just don't rhyme for another one magnets we totally know how magnets work ok you know you you're a recording artist your songs appear on media with little magnets in them it's very important that you recognize that magnets are within our wheelhouse in terms of stuff that we understand but having said that I want to point out that even though we do know how magnets work it's it is nevertheless astounding they were right about that magnets even though we understand how they work should not be taken for granted think of what happens with a magnet you can stick it on your refrigerator that's a typical thing you would do with the magnet well you can sniff a stick a piece of tape on your refrigerator as well but there's difference the difference is that the tape you need to touch to the refrigerator to make it stick but the magnet if you hold it very close it you can feel it pulling on the metal in the refrigerator even before it touches it the magnet reaches out across the distance between the magnet and the refrigerator to somehow exert a force how does that happen that is actually a very good question and it's not just these modern-day intellects that were astounded here is a predecessor of the Insane Clown Posse Isaac - Newton Sir Isaac and he invented something called gravity of course he didn't invent gravity we knew about gravity all along but Newton invented a theory for how gravity works a theory that unified the operation of gravity here on earth with the performance of gravity out in the sky as well and according to Newtonian gravity there was a simple rule that the further away you get from an object here's a big object like the earth and it's pulling on something small like a baseball or something like that with the force of gravity and Newton says that the further away the thing is the less gravitational field less gravitational pull it feels from this massive object the earth in fact it goes as one over the distance squared the famous inverse square law the gravitational force is one-quarter the size when you get twice away so this big arrow means that the force is strong a little arrow means the force is relatively small and the wonderful thing about Newton's theory is it fits an enormous amount of data today we can do better Einstein came up with an even better theory that's how science works but Newton's theory is awfully good you can get to the moon with Einstein with a Newton's theory and in fact we did on the other hand people did not immediately accept it it was controversial and not because it didn't fit the data but because people thought it didn't make sense you should have theories that not only explain the data but also theories that make sense as a perfectly respectable thing to demand and the problem with Newton's theory is that it involved what is called action at a distance just like that magnet pulling on the refrigerator Newton's theory imagine that this the earth pulls on distant objects with a certain force even though there's nothing in between the objects over a distance this force is acting and people were very confused by that how could that be possible Newton himself didn't like it very much in fact he said it was sort of intellectually disreputable but it fit the data so you know you tell me what's going on so this guy told us what's going on Pierce ammonal applause a 18th and 19th century mathematical physicist came up with an idea now he doesn't get credit for inventing a new theory of gravity because the theory he invented is exactly the same as Newton's theory what he came up with is a better way of thinking about Newton's theory of gravity Laplace ed imagine that the space in between the earth and the distant objects is not empty imagine that there is some thing in the empty space that you don't see called the gravitational field the gravitational potential field in particular and so what this graph is supposed to show is that the field is very low here and that it rises up here but it rises sharply if you're near the earth and then it fades away to a more flat behavior further away and what Laplace pointed out was that this field obeys an equation that is equivalent to Newton's equation that the gravitational pull on something is just the slope of this field how fast it's tilting downward here where it's tilting downward quite fast you feel a strong gravitational force and there you feel a weaker gravitational force it's exactly the same predictions as Newton's theory but a better way of thinking about it that there is not action at a distance because the earth is not pulling directly on this object far away the earth is affecting the field in its vicinity and that's affecting the field in its vicinity and then that's affecting the field there and there and there and you work your way out through space there is no action at a distance everything is local and that's how the universe works according to Laplace it turns out that Laplace was on to something very big that in fact everything in the universe is made of fields that is the modern way of thinking about the universe at a fundamental level in some sense the field is the opposite of a particle these these pictures look almost reminiscent of each other but this picture is a picture of tracks of individual particles passing through a bubble chamber a cloud chamber leaving little wakes so you see some particles just go left and right in some curl around so a particle has a location a particle and what we would think of as an elementary particle has zero size but it has a location in space a field is everywhere it has every location in space but at every location it has a value that value might have a direction also so this is these are the lines of force around a magnet tracing out the magnetic field that is everywhere around the magnet the that's the easy part particles over here like you know electrons or protons fields over here like gravity electromagnetism you think that makes sense but there's this puzzle that physics students learn about when they're young the electron the photon these particles that we talk about sometimes sometimes they have wave-like behavior is light Newton once wondered about this is like really particles or waves so the answer in the modern perspective comes from quantum mechanics quantum mechanics is our best theory of how the world works at very very small scales and all you need to remember about quantum mechanics for the purposes of the next hour is this little motto when you think about what really exists it's fields when you look at the fields closely they look like particles that's what quantum mechanics says so quantum mechanics says that you have these waves passing through reality whether it's the electric field the magnetic field the gravitational field but when you look at it closely you see individual particles this is the xkcd cartoon they're looking at the amber waves of grain but they say well when we observe them they become amber particles of grain and that is right if you're able to observe them quite closely enough here's another illustration from David Deutsch a quantum physicist who wrote a wonderful book called the fabric of reality and he points out that if you were a frog you could see individual particles of light not because frogs are excellent at doing quantum mechanics just because frogs have slightly more sensitive vision than we human beings do so you imagine someone with a candle or a torch or a flashlight walking away from you you see this light getting dimmer and dimmer and dimmer right because they're getting further away but if you had perfect vision or even vision as good as a frog you would see that eventually the light doesn't get dimmer anymore instead it just starts flickering on and off as the person gets further and further away until it's almost always off with an occasional small flash of light that's because that frog is seeing individual photons light can be thought of as a wave and the electromagnetic field but if you look at it closely enough when you see is individual particles called photons so that's the answer to this question is light a particle in a wave it's a wave that's what it is but when you look at it carefully enough you see individual particles called photons and the same thing is true for what you think of as regular old particles electrons quarks protons these are all waves that when you look at them closely enough they look like particles and this subject is quantum field theory it is the central way of thinking about the world according to modern physics it's easy to Google books on quantum field theory and there's a bajillion of them and yet we don't talk about quantum field theory in popularisation z-- we talk about quantum mechanics we talk about particle physics we talk about relativity for that matter we talk about string theory in the multiverse and so forth we talk about time travel and extra dimensions but quantum field theory we say well that's too complicated they don't need to know it that was true until July 4th of this year you didn't need to know it but now you need to know it because to understand what the Higgs particle the Higgs boson is all about to understand why it's so important you need to understand that what the Higgs boson is is a little vibration in something called the Higgs field that fills empty space so let's think about where particle physics had gotten to and you know I will use the sloppy language that every person in the universe uses which is I will call the electron a particle but you now are a sophisticated audience and you know that when I say the electron is a particle what I mean is it's a wave and the individual vibrations in the wave show up as particles right you got that good here was particle physics circa 1935 you could forgive physicists of the 1930s for thinking that they almost were done that they almost had it all there was a few eyes to be dotted a few T's to be crossed we discovered these three particles the proton the neutron and the electron and together they made atoms this is a hydrogen atom with an extra Neutron there so what's called a deuteron or deuterium atom so one proton one Neutron and one electron and there were three forces that acted on these three particles there's an electromagnetic force that's what holds the electron to the proton there's a nuclear force that holds the neutron to the proton and there's the gravitational force that just pulls everything together so it pulls the whole atom down to the earth for example and there's just a few little things we didn't quite understand like radioactivity that we won't understand a little bit better and of course whenever there's one little thing you don't understand it blows up in your face but we have a slightly more complicated picture of the world now but it's still pretty manageable for one thing there are four forces not just three we divided the nuclear force into the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force and there's one more particle called the neutrino so the strong nuclear force is what holds the nucleus together and inside that nucleus it's not protons and neutrons it's quarks there are up quarks and down quarks that make up protons and neutrons in different combinations but sometimes a proton turns into a neutron like in the Sun you know that nuclear power that powers the Sun and makes it warm outside that's what happens in Los Angeles so much for about Portland up here but there's this thing that shines in the sky and makes it warm during the day that's the weak nuclear force at work and it spits off a new particle called the neutrino so that's not so bad instead of three particles and three forces there are four particles and four forces the weird part is that these four particles electron down quark up quark and neutrino make a family of four particles and there are three families in total so there's two duplicates of this simple system of just four particles there's twelve particles overall and that makes no sense to anybody at all so this is a great theory it fits the data but it leads to bizarre terrible flowcharts like this one so if someone tells you that you're an elementary particle you can figure out which one you are by asking well are you a boson or Fermi on what do you feel in the Oh blah blah blah and this whole picture is called the standard model of particle physics I guess because the marketing director of particle physics didn't want people to think it was very interesting but it is very interesting the standard model it is the best theory ever devised by physicists the particles that we have or the fields to use sophisticates come in two different kinds if they if you take up space an electron cannot land right on top of another electron with exactly the same properties that means the electron is a Fermi on it takes up space a photon can sit right on top of another photon with exactly the same property so photons are bosons they can pile on top of each other so bosons give rises to forces of nature because the gravitational force that is pulling me down to the earth right now is caused by many many many gravitons piled on top of each other the reason why I don't fall through the stage into the center of the earth is because I have electrons in me and the stage as electrons in and they take up space because they are fermions so fermions are the matter particles that make up stuff bosons are the force particles that hold things together and there are weak interactions strong interactions electromagnetism gravity and then there's these simple particles that we know electron it's neutrino the up and down quarks and there's another generation another family and another family on top of that again bizarre and unexplained as of right now and then way up there in the corner there's yet another thing called the Higgs boson field that we need to understand so where did that Higgs boson field come from it was back in the 1950s we had the particles we had a couple of forces that we think we understood we had gravity Newton and Einstein gave us that we had electromagnetism that was figured out at the classical level in the 1900s sorry the 1800s and then in the 20th century we learned to quantize it people like Fineman and Schwinger won Nobel prizes for understanding quantum electromagnetism so Yang and Mills this is C n yang and this is Robert Mills this is long after 1954 1954 they were about 30 years old they were young guys and they tried to say well we're gonna try to explain the nuclear forces the forces that are going on inside the nucleus maybe they're just like electromagnetism only a bit more complicated that's a very natural thing it's a very physicist kind of thing let's start with the thing we understand complicated up a little bit and maybe that will give a better theory than we have yet the problem is the problem is with the magnets pulling on the refrigerators that the electromagnetic force just like gravity extends across macroscopic distances but the nuclear force is short range so if nuclear forces were just like electromagnetism you would naively predict that they would extend over very large distances that's the field centered way of saying it the particle centered way of saying it is the bosons that carry the nuclear forces if they were Restless like the photon in the graviton that carry electromagnetism and gravity then the forces would extend over a strong over a long range so if you give them a mass you could explain why they're very long while they're stuck in very short distances but that is not like electromagnetism so let me take away all these scary words and just show you a picture the long-range forces that we understood gravity electromagnetism you have some object that gives rise to forces and the lines of force extend out forever they dilute away as you get further away which is why the force gets less and less strong but they don't ever end these lines of force whereas for the nuclear forces the lines of force extend out a little way and then they end they dilute away and they just stop going this is what the forces seem to do experimentally but not what Yang and Mills would have predicted so they were not taken very seriously within the physics community they were right however so they had the last laugh yang and Mills were absolutely right both the strong force and the weak force are just more complicated versions of electromagnetism but they're complicated enough that they behave very very differently and just to give full employment to physicists the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force behave differently in utterly different ways the strong nuclear force the bosons that carry the force are massless but the force is so strong that they don't ever leak out side the proton or the neutron this is a phenomenon called confinement here is a proton you have all these little quarks inside they're held together by gluons and those gluons just keep attracting each other the reason why the strong nuclear force doesn't extend for a very large distance is because the strong nuclear force itself won't let it it binds itself inside these particles and we never see them this was figured out by these guys in the early 1970s and they won the Nobel Prize in 2004 the weak nuclear force required more effort to get it right and the answer for why the weak nuclear force does not extend over an infinite range something called the Higgs mechanism why because Higgs was one of the eight people who invented it and he has the coolest last name so he gets his name on the mechanism so Philip Anderson is a guy who already is won the Nobel Prize he's a condensed matter physicist on glare and Brout were friends who wrote a paper saying how to make the weak interactions make sense here's Peter Higgs visiting the Large Hadron Collider kimball Guralnik and Hagen some Americans and Brits that work together glasha Weinberg and Salam already won the Nobel Prize here they are ready to receive their prizes from the king of Sweden for putting the Higgs mechanism to work in the weak interactions and it was Gerard a tough who also won the Nobel Prize already for showing that the weak interactions with the Higgs mechanism make mathematical sense so I didn't meant to explain anything I just want to show the pictures of the people doing it because this advance in physics was not like Einstein the lone genius coming up with general relativity this was something that was put together over a series of years by many different people each one of them get a little bit closer to the perfect answer none of them got all the way there all by themselves it was very much a team effort which is good that's how science usually works it's bad when you come to giving out Nobel prizes and we will get back to that the upshot is that the W and Z bosons which carry the weak nuclear force are massive unlike the photon the graviton the gluon all unlike all the other bosons that carry forces the W and Z bosons are massive and the reason why is this thing called the Higgs mechanism so what is the Higgs mechanism what these guys said is that well maybe empty space is filled with an invisible energy field that you can't see it sounds like an attractive idea but remember everything is a field the difference is that the Higgs field is not zero even when space is as empty as it can possibly be so if you go out there to interstellar space and you make of completely empty little region of space you imagine there's no gravitational field no electromagnetic field no matter no dark matter no nothing it's empty what that means is that all of the fields of nature are sitting quietly at zero or maybe oscillating just very slowly around zero because of quantum mechanical uncertainties except for the Higgs field the Higgs field is stuck very very far away from zero even in empty space so here's my best attempt at showing you what that means here is the value of a field and here's where you are in space and most of the fields in the universe the electromagnetic field the gluons the quarks etc they're all just jiggling because of quantum mechanics very very close to zero the Higgs field jiggles because of quantum mechanics but not near zero near another value somewhere way out here and a Higgs boson particle is a big vibration in the Higgs field so what all those guides in the previous slide were saying is maybe there's a field that suffuses all of space that affects how the weak nuclear force propagates from place to place so in other words the reason why I don't know if you can see this must be like a shaded thing representing the Higgs field filling space the reason why the weak nuclear force doesn't extend that far is because it's eaten up it's absorbed by the Higgs field all around it so that was an idea and I would it this is just like it's it's easy to let this slide by so I want to emphasize it here's an idea that a bunch of guys came up with in the early 1960s why because they had this other idea that maybe the weak nuclear forces like electromagnetism and they couldn't get it to work and they were grasping at straws and they said maybe all of space is filled with this field okay and other people said well how would we ever know that and they said well if you poked at the field and make it vibrate there'll be a new particle you should go look for that particle and almost 50 years later nine billion dollars thousands of people working over the course of decades we found it we found exactly what I predicted they turned out to be right and it's just their human brain was able to reach across the possibilities and figure out how nature really worked as a bonus not even planned by the original thinkers but this also explains how the particles that make up you and me get their mass so not only the W and Z bosons which carry the weak nuclear force but the electrons and the quarks that make up your atoms they also get mass because they move through a Higgs field you can think about waving your hand in empty space and there's no resistance to it whatsoever if you wave your hand through molasses you feel a force it takes more effort to move your hand right so that's like an electron moving through the universe if it weren't for the Higgs field electrons would have no mass they would always move the speed of light with the Higgs field the electron keeps pushing against the Higgs it becomes massive and it moves more slowly and you might say well I'm not that interested in how fast electrons move but you are because your atoms that make up you are these little nuclei that don't do that much and then these electrons around them and if it weren't for the Higgs field the electron would have no mass and you wouldn't be able to make an atom because the electron would always be moving at the speed of light it would never settle down and sit inside an atom and if there weren't atoms there wouldn't be molecules and if there weren't molecules there wouldn't be you or me or any of your best friends or worst enemies there wouldn't be anything interesting in the universe if it weren't for the Higgs field where you just had these electrons zooming around to the speed of light there could be no complex structures no life as we know it so this Higgs field is doing a lot of work or at least that was the idea so let's go look for it so we built this thing called the Large Hadron Collider it's the world's largest particle accelerator it's also the world's largest machine the most complicated machine ever built it sits outside Geneva Switzerland is part of CERN a European particle physics laboratory and it's underground it's off it's a hundred meters underground if you were walking on top of the around there be cows and farms and quaint French villages and there be the Alps in the background but it goes around for 17 miles around underground and you can see there's you know it's going underneath houses and things like that it cost about nine billion dollars there's approximately 10,000 people associated with either building it or doing the experiments what the Large Hadron Collider does is take protons the little particles that are inside your nuclei takes individual protons and it accelerates them to close to the speed of light to 99.999999% the speed of light why to give them a lot of energy and then it smashes them together with this enormous energy and out of that energy you can make new particles like the Higgs boson so just to give you some of the crazy numbers there's 6,000 tons of magnets cooled to a temperature colder than the temperature of outer space it is also a better vacuum than outer space is and the amount of cable inside would wrap around the equator of the earth almost seven times it's a complicated messy thing took a long time to build here are the two people who probably deserve the most credit Carlo Rubbia who's already a Nobel Prize winner himself for he was the guy who discovered the W and Z bosons and he was the one sort of he's a outsized personality and he pushed Europe to get together to donate their money to build this enormous machine to look for the Higgs boson and other particles here in the United States we had a machine the superconducting supercollider but we didn't have Carlo rubia and we lost we turned off our machine halfway through building it we said it's not worth the money and we closed it down so the Europeans went forward and they nominated this guy Lynn Evans was a Welsh physicist to Shepherd the project and he's been the project leader of the Large Hadron Collider from when it started to today so he's the one who really made it happen in various ways and at this point in the talk I want to stop talking about physics to give you a small editorial comment because I love showing the pictures of the human beings who did this because the science itself is universal but it doesn't just happen it's work done by actual human beings but when you're talking about the history of a science like physics those human beings are almost all guys they're almost all men and there's a reason why they are almost all men and the reason why is because women have been subjected to systematic discrimination in science for hundreds of years now and so I just want to make the point thank you I want to make the point that this has been going on it still is going on and also that it is changing so that the so let me show you since I'm a scientist I like showing graphs so here's a study that people did they gave a job application to scientists and they said rate how good this job applicant is and it was exactly the same application except on some of them the person's name was John and on some of them the person's name was Jennifer and when the person's name was Jennifer they were always ranked lower in competence higher ability and mentoring and how much you would pay their salary and number one this was by both men and women and number two this is a 2012 study this is not you know the 1950s Don Draper Mad Men sexism this is what people who are in charge of the scientific establishment now believe that if your name is Jennifer you're not as competent even if you have exactly the same set of skills as if your name is John the good news is that it is changing it is changing dramatically this is the percentage of women getting bachelor's doctorates and post doctorate degrees in physics and it's going up from 5% bachelors in 1968 to over 20% in the most recent years and it's not because the genetic makeup of girls got smarter by a factor of four over the course of these decades it's because and it doesn't happen by itself it happens because people fight against the entrenched biases and they point them out and so even though when I show you pictures of the greats from the history of physics they're all guys the future history of physics is going to look a lot more diverse okay so now we know that now all the guys and gals who built the Large Hadron Collider faced challenges it is not something that they teach you in graduate school when you're learning your quantum field theory how to build the world's largest machine here is a picture of a relatively small part of the Large Hadron Collider wending its way to the streets of a tiny medieval village in France many of the pieces of the LHC are the size they are because that's how big the streets were that they knew they would have to go through then they dug these these tubes and so they could lower down these giant magnets and when you dig these tubes remember you're in France and Switzerland when you're doing it so the first thing they do is they hit a Roman ruin so the physicists are kicked out and the archaeologists are brought in and for six months we're not allowed to do anything but dig up coins and pottery and then you can say all right keep going now so you keep going and then they they kept going and then they hit a river an underground river they didn't know about so bless their hearts they were physicists they flooded it with liquid nitrogen to freeze the river dug it out put the tube down and let the river flow around them once again nine billion dollars this is why I cost money and then they put the whole thing together they turned it on and it exploded this is is an event that happened in September of 2008 it was the press release that went out said that we had a leak it was actually an explosion there's nobody down in the tunnel at the time if there had been they would have died six tons of liquid helium flooded because there's a superconducting magnet and it heated up and it was bad but in a sense it was good because that it gave the people making the collider a respite they went in they figured out what the problem was they fixed every darn magnet down there all 6,000 of them and when it came back a year later it was better than advertised and it's been going great guns ever since around that ring that 17 miles there are several experiments two of them are looking for the Higgs boson and other particles to huge experiments one called atlas and one called CMS they both look like spaceships and they're both very big to show you how big they are I've circled the people there's a person there's a person these are not things that you build in your high school physics class these are different pieces put together there's over a hundred countries involved in each of these collaborations both of them involve over 3,000 physicists so when a paper is written by CMS or Atlas it has over 3,000 authors because they all you know they painted that thing red and they're now an author on CMS you collide protons together over a hundred million collisions every second if you actually took all the data created by the LHC and wrote it to a disk your disk would be the largest database in the universe within a second so or at least on earth I shouldn't say the universe I shouldn't shouldn't exaggerate who knows with largest database in the universe is what you do is you throw away almost all the data you have incredibly sophisticated computers looking at the events that you get when smashing particles together and almost all of them are boring and predictable you throw those away you keep the ones that might be telling you something new so we it's the result of these experiments that we heard from on July 4th Fabiola Gianotti is the boss these days of Atlas Joe and Candela is the boss of CMS but they're really democracies they vote and the term of a what's called a spokesperson is two years so these are not you know the kings and queens of the experiments they are the leaders the spokespeople for the two years and they were the leaders when the Higgs boson was discovered just to show you that not everything is Jai humongous this little thing that looks like a fire extinguisher is where the protons come from so hundreds of trillions of protons are zooming around the LHC at any one time but in that canister there's way more protons than that this is a canister of hydrogen there's enough protons in that canister of hydrogen to power the LHC for over ten billion years so protons are not the limiting resource when it comes to the LHC what do we do we take these protons we zap them with electricity we separate them from their electrons we accelerate them to this amazing speed we smash them together and we see what comes out so this is data this is not a simulation this is what it looks like you know many many things come out and you pick out the events that look promising here two electrons came out back-to-back and two muons came out back-to-back that is exactly the kind of thing you might expect if in that little central region your collision made a Higgs boson and the Higgs boson decayed into these electrons and muons the problem is there are other ways to make electrons and muons at the Large Hadron Collider so here is what you often say you often say we understand what the Higgs can do so you smash protons together you make a Higgs boson and then it decays and it can decay into different things quarks w bosons gluons photons quantum mechanics says you never know for sure what will happen you only predict the probability that something happens and every one of these things that can happen if you make a Higgs boson can also happen even without making a Higgs boson so people say it's like looking for a needle in a haystack but that's not actually the right way to think about it it's like looking for hay in a haystack we are looking for events inside the detector that could be from the Higgs boson or could be from something else it's like going through that haystack and finding there's slightly anomalously more stalks of hay at a certain length than you would otherwise expect that's what you're looking for that there's slightly more events with two electrons and two muons than you would otherwise look for so here are the money plots that came out of the two experiments here's Atlas here's CMS and what you're plotting here are events where two photons come out with enormously large energy here's the number of events that you saw also you know a few thousand at every energy and that's decreasing as the energy gets larger and there's a bump right there and you can see yet because someone drew a red line through it without that you wouldn't see it I put a big blue arrow over it just to make it even clearer there's a bump in both these experiments at the same place that means that you've found the extra hay in the haystack you found more events of this form where two photons come out with this energy then you would otherwise expect why would that happen because there's a particle with exactly that mass that is decaying into these photons so these bumps have been statistically analyzed within a whisker of their lives they are real they are not just random fluctuations there's two experiments that don't talk to each other that both get the same result so there's no question at this point we have discovered a new particle of nature this is so to get the mass right 1 GeV is about the mass of a proton these plots look a little you know scary and technical so when I wrote the book the particle the end of the universe my publisher said we really shouldn't put those in there too scary and technical and I said 9 billion dollars we paid for these plots we need to put them in the book so they're in there well you see a bump you see that bump means you there's a new particle messing with you but is it the Higgs boson is it the right particles of the particle that we've been hoping for so you don't only look at photons coming out you look at all sorts of things and these plots are too complicated to be in the book but you guys are now sophisticated so I can show them to you this dashed line where it says plus 1 and this green line right here this is what you would expect if the particle you're looking at truly is the Higgs boson and these horizontal lines are the rate at which different things are happening so here's bottom quarks being created tau leptons W bosons photons Z bosons and what do you see is that everything centers you know there's a little bit of uncertainty in every measurement but all the different measurements line up on average right where you would expect if this particle you are creating that was making that bump for you is really the higgs-boson that those guys thought of 48 years ago so we think that there are Nobel prizes coming very soon we found a particle of nature it looks like the Higgs boson by the way we don't want it to be the higgs boson that was predicted 48 years ago because it's always more exciting to be a little bit wrong that's what drives the science forward is if we learn something by doing the experiments so far it looks like the experiment is just telling us that our theory is right that is certainly worthy of a Nobel Prize in fact it's worth worthy of several Nobel Prizes the problem is that there's a tradition within the science Nobel Prizes that they are given to individuals not to groups and that the individuals have to be three of them or fewer you cannot give the Nobel Prize to six people but it was six people who really get credit for inventing the Higgs mechanism so it's very unclear what will happen with that for those of us the many thousands of physicists who have no chance of winning the Nobel Prize for discovering this the rest of us are trying to do work with it the Higgs boson is the end of an era it is the completion of the standard model of particle physics it is also the beginning of an era when you compare the Higgs boson to other particles it is more sociable it interacts more readily well we're hoping is that we will use the Higgs that we've discovered as a tool to look into the parts of the universe metaphorically speaking that we have never yet seen before we know that the standard model even though it's right is not the final answer here I give you a short version of the theory called supersymmetry it is the most popular theory on the market for going beyond the standard model of particle physics and in a word it says that there are twice as many particles as you thought there were for every boson in the standard model the gluons etc there is a Fermi on superpartner and for every Fermi on in the standard model the quarks the leptons there is a boson superpartner this will be a wonderful idea if it is true so far there's ear no evidence that it is true but it's still an awesome idea so we're hoping that the LA well we know that the LHC is going to shut off in January it's gonna be quiet for two years while the technicians go down and upgrade everything about it it's going to come back in 2015 at a higher energy so we're hoping that at that higher energy we begin to see some of the glimpses of this new world that the theorists have predicted notice also that in supersymmetry there's not one Higgs boson there are five of them so it might be that we haven't just discovered the Higgs boson we've discovered one fifth of the higgs family which would be awesome the other thing we know of course is that there is dark matter in the universe the universe that we see around us is not the whole thing the astronomers have told us that there is much more matter than can possibly be accounted for within the standard model of particle physics so ideally we'll make that dark matter at the LHC or if not we might be able to detect its influence once we measure the Higgs boson properties more carefully all of those little horizontal lines lining up near the Higgs prediction if one of them is off a little bit that could be a sign that there's another particle getting in the way or enhancing the rate and that might be related to the dark matter this is an actual map based on data of dark matter in a particular region of the universe we know it's there we just don't know what it is but back here on earth let's not you know be so quick to race out there and celebrate what we don't know let's you know take a little bit of time to celebrate what we have done what the standard model of particle physics is is a theory of physics that completely accounts for every particle that you are made of or I am made of you can imagine other particles but you know that they do not play an important role in you or me because if they did they would have to interact with the particles we are made of and we would have noticed that at the LHC and in other physics experiments when it comes to the stuff that makes up tables and the earth and viruses and puppy dogs and stars and planets and moons and people we are done we have the description of that it's standard model particle physics quarks and leptons with mass from the higgs field interacting with these four forces in the 2500 year old project to understand the world we experience everyday the easy part is now over the hard part is staring us in the face what is the dark matter what happens inside a black hole why is there more matter than antimatter what about you know subsets of physics like chemistry in biology and economics what about all that stuff we have a long way to go there's plenty of science that is ahead of us the easy part is now over so that's the point of this discovery that was made it was something that it took almost 50 years to get it right but it is the culmination of really hundreds of years of thinking about this stuff it is the end of a very very tiny subset of the kinds of questions that scientists like to ask but an important subset understanding the particles that you and I are made of from now on a million years from now people will talk about particle physics pre Higgs boson discovery and post Higgs boson discovery that has been the big deal thank you okay you there go ahead maybe write down a little bit so you said that the electron wave / particle moving through the Higgs field is what gives the electron mass but photons also move through the Higgs field because they move through space why don't proton why don't phone ins rather get mass why can they travel at the speed of light at all times that's right so this is a good question it's a great question some of the particles in the standard model but that's what I'm doing some of the particles in the standard model of particle physics have mass some of them don't electrons have mass photons don't but they all move through the Higgs boson field question is why do some particles get a mass by moving through that field and why do some not and the answer is because just listing the particles is not the end of telling you the standard model all those particles have different particles they do and do not interact with photons for example carriers of the electromagnetic force interact with charged particles but not neutral particles so they interact with electrons but not neutrinos the particles that get mass are the particles that interact with the Higgs boson field the photon does not interact with the Higgs boson it goes through uninterrupted does not get any mass lengthwise for the glue on the graviton etc the W boson the Z boson the electrons the quarks they all interact directly with the Higgs and the stronger they interact the more mass they get thank you nobody else just view it there's been a lot of press over the last decade or so about grand unification theories you mentioned string theory Lee Smolin came out with a book several years ago I think he's now on this the senior leadership staff at CERN challenging some of that how does this affect if at all were we're headed with in that regard with with some of the grand unification theories sure there's another great question when you know that what the what one does as a working physicist everyday is try to move beyond what we already understand some of that movement is very very close well we already understand some of it is an attempt to wildly speculative Airy far beyond so the question is what about these grand unification theories and other very very sweeping ambitious attempts to fit all the particles and forces of nature into a single framework well the the thing is that we've known about the standard model for years now you know the standard model was more or less set in stone in the mid 1970s the Higgs field was part of the standard model it was the part that we didn't know for sure was there right so it's very very important that we found it that we had evidence for it but it was people were trying to come up with alternatives to it and none of those alternatives were very convincing and therefore for decades now anyone who has tried to come up with a theory of grand unification already has built into it the Higgs boson or something much like it so the new data we have has not told us anything at all about grand unification or string theory or whatever because if you if you had a theory grand unification that didn't have the Higgs in it you wouldn't publish that you would move on to something else now we're hoping that changes as we get more data as we get more precision data some many theories will be ruled out hopefully we'll find more than one particle hopefully we'll find new properties of the one particle we have and hopefully that will push us in the direction of a better grand unification but we have to wait for the data to say well what it will say well it's in my understanding that energy cannot be created only transformed and if the Higgs can the Higgs particle gives all others mass or certain particles then what might this mean for the trying the search for the Big Bang and where the mass and energy might have come from and how is the Higgs fit into that search yeah that's a difficult question which means it's an even better question than the good who they're really good questions the ones I know the answer to and this one I don't you know the question is what do we learn about things like the Big Bang in the creation of the universe from studying the Higgs field I mean it might the answer might be nothing the answer might be that there's nothing directly that we learn about this very difficult problem where did it all come from just by studying the Higgs field we're hoping that we get more than that you know we're hoping that the Large Hadron Collider might teach us something about supersymmetry is one thing I mentioned but also extra dimensions of space is something that many more ambitious theories predict and could be detected by the Large Hadron Collider if we get lucky and even better we could just be totally surprised by something when we look at even higher energies but that would be the optimistic take you know the pessimistic take is it teaches us something about an energy scale higher than we've ever seen before but still nowhere near as high as what happened at the Big Bang all of them go first I'll go to you yes so I actually viewed the Colbert Report last night so I saw you on there excellent I was just wondering did you receive the bump the Colbert bump ah yes so the Colbert bump is much bigger than the bump that you saw here in the data the Colbert bump is if you plot your book sales versus time and yeah totally I do you know it was like 1,200 on Amazon yesterday and it's like 200 today so thank you my pleasure yes so you just touched on this point but I wanted to ask is there anything we can gain in terms of Technology from the Higgs field yeah I mean that's a it's a really good question because nine billion dollars we spent doing this and the answer is no but to me there's two things there's two little footnotes to that both of which are very important one is that again wait let me do it in the opposite order the search for the Higgs boson has led to amazing technological progress we had to build the LHC people have done the studies which say when you try to do basic research with absolutely no application in mind for every dollar you spend you get way more than a dollar backed into the economy because you needed to build better superconductors better information technology better all sorts of things and that spreads out everywhere the most obvious example is a little invention that came from CERN a few years ago called the world wide web the world wide web was invented by particle physicists find it share data back and forth so it does pay for itself more than once over the other footnote is that's not why we do it that's nice but the reason we do is we want to understand how the universe works thank you sure now that you found the evidence that you went for the Higgs boson what other questions are you hoping to be answered by the LHC well that's great so the question is what else can we get from the LHC and the Higgs boson was the one thing that was almost a no-lose proposition either we would find it or we wouldn't find it and that would mean that all of our theories were wrong we had to tear things up and and start from scratch after that we have a huge number of speculations any one of which might come true at the LHC and we're just going to have to wait and see supersymmetry is one example finding a particular dark matter particle is another example finding extra dimensions of space is another example finding an imbalance something that tells us why there's more matter than antimatter in the universe that would be very nice finding new forces of nature over and above the four that we know and love that would be nice there's other puzzles that are lying around the biggest puzzle that is directly applicable to the LHC is why is the Higgs boson so much lighter than it should be according to certain back-of-the-envelope calculations so the Higgs is the one thing we would know we knew we were looking for now we're stuck with many many questions and a shiny new particle accelerator and we're gonna hope that it helps us out sure so the famous young strict experiment which one the Yanks two-slit experiment which creates which demonstrates the duality of matter and wave particle duality is demonstrated by the two slit experiment young's experiment yes well it creates interference patterns or not depending on somebody was observing it or not right how does this channel model explain that oh that well that is a pre standard model question the question is the double slit experiment you pass something let's say photons through two slits and they go on the other side you detect them and they're waves right it's photons so you get an interference pattern if the waves cancel each other out you get nothing if there's if they're superimposing and gain you get a lot but then somebody sneaky comes along and watches the slits and they watch which slit the photon went through because if you see which slit the photon went through then it's not a wave anymore it's a particle it went through one of the slits not both and when you do that even if you do it very very gently the interference pattern completely disappears there is no more interference once you've turn that wave into a particle so that is just quantum mechanics that's not the standard model at all so the question is can you make sense of quantum mechanics and we're trying yeah we're trying to do that quantum mechanics is in this weird situation quantum mechanics is like Newtonian gravity before Laplace it fits all of the data it's certainly right in some way but it's not quite satisfying we think that there's something missing at a fundamental level if that is in fact something that I'm working on myself I don't any deep barrier I would say that you know we're gonna keep thinking about and we're gonna understand it but as far as predicting the data we we already have that set yes so about the LHC the you it's already going at 99.999999% of the speed of light yes so how much farther can you push it there's an infinite number of more nines that you could add you know it you can't get to the speed of light is the thing so that's just you know when you when you say that the protons are going ninety-nine point nine and I represent to be like you're just trying to impress the people in the audience what matters is how much energy the collisions has and the energy right now in the collisions is 8,000 GeV the remember that the energy and what single proton is about 1 GeV the energy in a single Higgs boson is about 125 GeV so we have 8,000 GeV but when you do that it's not very efficient you don't just make an 8,000 GeV new particle so you most of it just gets lost it's not a Prius it's a gas guzzler the LHC so we're gonna ramp it up to 15,000 GeV which is quite a bit more and hopefully what we will see is a whole bunch of new particles and then maybe someone will build a better particle accelerator if you know let's be honest if the LHC doesn't find any new particles beyond the Higgs boson nobody might build another particle accelerator and we may never discover new particles and that would be bad thank you my question is pretty much twofold and one and bosons all have integer spins correct and most of them have around one or negative one or what are the limits to those numbers I mean I've not seen one above I think one or maybe two but do they go higher is the limit it like 10 and then how does that play into trying to learn more about gravitons and their properties so you've been reading outside of school young lady I think you did not just think of that question here today yeah so one thing that I didn't mention but is true is when you talk about bosons and fermions I define them as fermions take up space bosons pile on top of each other but every little elementary particle has spin it's like a top but it doesn't spin up or spin down as a fixed amount of spin that it never goes away and for fermions the spin is either one-half or three-halves or five halves or seven halves etc it's an integer plus a half for bosons that's either 0 or 1 or 2 or 3 or below blah in principle in practice as you point out though all the bosons that I listed have a spin of either 0 or 1 or 2 the graviton is to the Higgs boson to 0 everything else is 1 all the fermions I'd lists have a spin of 1/2 now so can you get bigger numbers what we currently think and I can't guarantee this because experiments always decide well we currently think is that it's easy to get more spin just by taking collections of more than one Fermi on so the nucleus of an atom can have a much higher spin than an individual proton or neutron but the fundamental particles out of which nature is made never have spins higher than two that is a theoretical belief we have little arguments that you can give that if you tried to write down a quantum field theory for spins higher than two it would not work it would not make sense the universe would just not give you any sensible answers for the questions you're asking so we both observe and believe that two is the upper limit to the spins but if we find something new we would have to change our minds yes I was wondering with things like electromagnetic fields and electric fields we can control those and mass potentially if you put two plants together actually kind of create more mass more gravity is the Higgs field something that you could potentially control or manipulate in anyway yeah so that's this is related to the question of the possible technological applications and I said no there aren't any and the reason why I said there aren't any is because it is very very difficult to imagine controlling the higgs field in any way the Higgs boson itself decays away in about a Zepto second which you don't need to know the number it's really short you know that's why when you see these pictures you're not seeing the tracks of Higgs bosons the Higgs boson has a track that is unimaginably small in this picture and will never get any bigger as soon as we make it it goes away the Higgs field an empty space you might say well if you could move the Higgs field you know from its value in empty space down to zero remember this value that we had up here you could decrease that maybe something interesting would happen but it takes energy to do that and energy means mass so if you had a ping-pong ball region of space and inside you set the Higgs field down to zero that ping-pong ball would have the mass of the Earth and we don't have the energy to do that and then it would collapse into a black hole and you would regret having asked the question do you think we're ever going to run out of news to discoveries to make and if so what happens to all the physicists you know that's a very important question will we run out of discoveries to make and there's this sort of famous bad thing that physicists do which is occasionally to get ahead of themselves and they say any minute now we're gonna have the final answers to all of physics so I tried to be very very clear that that was not at all what I was saying there is a certain well-defined subset of physics that we now understand it happens to be a subset that includes you and me but it does not include the origin of the universe the asymmetry between matter and matter the nature of the dark matter what a black hole is a million other things there's no shortage of interesting questions that physicists have yet to answer and also of course there's no shortage of good science questions that are not particle physics even within physics you know what about quantum mechanics what happens when a wavefunction collapses in quantum mechanics why are there high-temperature superconductors what can we learn about bose-einstein condensates in macroscopic laboratory experiments what about everything else in science how does the brain work you know there's AB every a friend of mine David gross won the Nobel Prize this picture was up here describes scientific knowledge as a the interior of a sphere so as you know things the sphere gets bigger but the boundary between what you know and what you don't know which is the boundary of the sphere also gets bigger as we discover more things there are more and more frontiers on which we will be working I was curious if you could tell us a little bit about the detection process and specifically the detector like what it's made of how it works and then kind of a side note I was also curious as to how you deal with the data specifically the data analysis and write that these are very good questions I will yes saying read my book but that's the right answer so it's a very good question so because the you smash protons together particles come out none of them have labels these particles that come out but you know that if you're going to detect them in your detector the particles that come out are particles in the standard model of particle physics okay so that's what you're set up to detect it's only a finite number of them and many of them you know the top parts the bottom parts the W and Z bosons just decay very very quickly so the good news is that when you build your detector you need to optimize your detector to detect and characterize only a small set of particles basically electrons had ron's which are like the protons and neutrons and so forth and muons that's basically what you're gonna get so here the electrons and so what you do is you build your detector in a series of concentric shells and the innermost detector is called the electromagnetic calorimeter it detects the photons and the electrons outside that you have the hydronic calorimeter it detects the protons neutrons pi mesons outside of that you have the muon detector because the muons just punched through very very carefully so you are able to separate out all the different particles you made and from that you can figure out what probably happened there at the center that's a hopelessly pitifully and weak answer to your very good question but that's the basic strategy all of these all the structure in these pictures make sense this is why you get these rings like that go ahead okay so like when the Large Hadron Collider was created there was some rumors about it like creating black holes and and all that that's right so I was curious as to well why that happened why that didn't happen why it you know some say could have happened and um how that could even have happened right good so the black hole's destroying the world the reason why you heard about it is because in you know let's say the year 2007 before the LHC turned on and you're a physicist and you're trying to explain to your friend the journalist why they should be interested in the Large Hadron Collider and you say well there's this invisible energy field pervading space that gives mass to electrons and quarks in the journalists like uh-huh and then you're like oh and maybe there'll be a black hole it will destroy the earth guess what the headline is going to be you know the next day and in fact there is one guy slightly loopy guy who went to court in Hawaii because he happened to live in Hawaii to stop the Large Hadron Collider from turning on because he thought that they did not with sufficient care file an environmental impact statement destroying the world is the environmental impact that was eventually thrown out of court but the idea would be so in order to make this scenario happen it can't happen why can't it happen because there's nothing we do at the LHC that nature doesn't do all the time the LHC is the highest energy collisions we can make but they're much lower energy than cosmic ray collisions hitting the atmosphere of the earth all the time so the the idea was that at very high energies in the standard model in the ordinary way of thinking about gravity gravity is very weak you're not gonna make any black holes you just don't have enough stuff there to make a black hole but it's possible it's conceivable there are theoretical models that say that gravity could be stronger than you think in these high-energy particle collisions and then could make a blackhole and if you made it it would decay away really really quickly and now be interesting and you would learn something but if you let yourself believe that you could make it but also don't believe that it would decay away well then you would have a black hole sitting there and maybe would settle to the bottom of the earth then you can calculate how long would it take for it to eat up and destroy the earth and it's much much longer than the age of the universe well but maybe you dropped a zero or something like that and you go to court because you're a lawyer you're not a physicist and none of the physicists took this very seriously because they would die along with everybody else we don't have we like our secret underground undisclosed location where the physicists will hang out once the black hole's destroying the earth but everything that we did showed there was no feasible way to reconcile what we knew with the fact that you know the earth and the moon are still here with the idea that the LHC would destroy them before I asked my question I want to thank you about bringing out up that gender study though I do have a very personal concern about that my daughter's name is Jennifer okay studying her PhD working for LIGO at Caltech your school so I now have to call her and find out for sure CV that was used in this study okay all right my question is the Higgs field is oscillating at a non-zero value if you sum that across the universe does that value the equivalent roughly equivalent to the mass and energy we see in the universe ah this is so this is a good question before I answer it everyone who's standing up besides the microphone right now you will get a question answered but then we're gonna call it a day so the answer is so the question is you know you'd have this Higgs field out there an empty space it has energy how could we compare that to the energy of stuff in the universe back-of-the-envelope the energy that you would expect is in the Higgs field is larger than the energy that we observe in the universe by a factor of about a quadrillion so no this is something called the cosmological constant problem the vacuum energy the energy of empty space itself is much much much smaller than it should be sorry I got the number wrong because I was estimating badly it's a quadrillion quadrillion is bigger than play so the energy in empty space is enormous li smaller than it should be nobody knows why it's one of the big outstanding questions in physics yet another reason why physics is not gonna be done anytime soon yes yeah so hope isn't too far off topic but on the subject of black holes it's my understanding that essentially no type of particle can escape the gravitational grasp of black hole uh-huh but clearly gravitons can because obviously we feel the gravitational field outside the black hole my brief question is would it be possible to send some sort of theoretical spacecraft in that transmits out gravitational fields and code a signal you could learn about the interior of a black hole from within the event horizon which as I understand it's supposed to be impossible due to entropy so yeah no this is an excellent question actually and you know the the weaselly answer I'll try to do better in a second but the weaselly answer is that when you say things like particles cannot escape black holes but wait a minute gravitons seem to be there's a gravitational field you you've run up to the barrier that you're speaking English you're not speaking equations right and it's just that the the language that we use inherited from ordinary language communication is not up to the task of getting it precisely right the gravitons that make up the gravitational field outside the black hole are not escaping they're there in a static configuration around the black hole now having said that when you throw somebody in you could imagine you know this former friend of yours falling into the black hole doing things you know saying hey look it's a black hole I'm pulling in and somehow the shape of what they do sends out a gravitational wave to the outside but in fact you can go through the math and it won't work the and this is explained a little bit in my previous book from the Eternity here but the secret is that the singularity where the black hole has an infinite density is not a place at the middle of the black hole is a moment in time in the future so your friend and everything else just smashes into the singularity including every message they will try to send you thank you yes hi how is quantum gravity different than regular gravity what do you know about quantum gravity that's a very good question so I I tried to pull the wool over your eyes and you didn't let me so we have quantum mechanics gravity is clearly one of the four forces of nature and I just included gravity in the set of forces of nature that you know carried by gravitons and so forth but you're right that gravity is not something that we understand at the quantum level and whenever we have a set of fields we just sort of first analyze what they would be like if quantum mechanics wasn't right so when we understood light and electromagnetism back in the 1800s we didn't even know about quantum mechanics and yet we did very well Benjamin Franklin with his kite and so forth no one knew about quantum mechanics we were doing classical electricity and magnetism Newton and Laplace and Einstein were doing classical gravity and the 20th century we figured out how to do quantum electricity and magnetism we tried to do quantum gravity and we failed so we think that there must be something called quantum gravity but we don't know what it is yet we don't quite know how to reconcile the postulates of quantum mechanics with the behavior of gravity so I don't know is the answer to your question I don't know what quantum gravity is really like darn you I was doing so well all right if I to live up to that you got a tough act to follow here I was just curious if it would ever be possible to detect the Higgs field outside of a vertical accelerator ah so the question is yet could we detect the Higgs field without using a particle accelerator let's say with using something else that would be awesome because 9 billion dollars is not coming around the pike anytime soon you know so I can't say it's impossible because if I say that you know some clever person maybe in this room is going to invent a way to do it tomorrow and make me look bad but if we could do something like that you know we that would be an amazing advance because right now after decades of thinking about it the only way that we have to create new heavy particles here on earth is to build gargantuan particle accelerators if you you know nine billion dollars got you the Higgs boson if you paid half of that four and a half billion dollars you don't get half the Higgs boson you get nothing right so if there was some way to do tabletop or more clever experiments that could somehow reach things like the Higgs field and the other particles of nature that would be enormous ly useful to physicists so there's a small we've thought of it and we haven't succeeded yet there's a small number of people who are still thinking the answer might be no the answer might be yes one way or the other we wouldn't have to be clever moving forward thank you thank you
