What's outside the universe? James Beacham, Milan 2020 (full video)

what's outside the universe my friend melody asked me this question when I was eight years old I usually had good answers for science questions I was sort of a library guy but this time I had no idea what to say the question was scary I grew up in southern Utah in the western part of the United States and this is the home of Red Rocks hot dry summer nights and clear skies and these are perfect conditions for stargazing and as a kid melody and I would often bicycle out of town to get away from the lights of the city and we would stare up at the night sky and we would ask each other questions about the universe how big is the earth what is the Sun made of how far away is that galaxy there why can't I see a black hole what's at the edge of the universe when she asked me this one I stopped and I thought about it and finally I said I don't know and melody said my ancestors thought that the earth was a big flat rock with a solid dome of sky a few kilometers above and the stars were painted on it and everything was held in the hand of a big creature who would occasionally shake it and we stared up at this dome of stars and I said well I guess they didn't have telescopes back then so I think that's a good first guess but now that we know that the universe is huge I don't know what's at the edge of the universe melody was an indigenous Native American a local tribe I don't remember if she was Paiute or Navajo and the other kids at school would sometimes make fun of melody calling her nasty names she did not like tests she did not like homework assignments but she ran circles around the other kids in classroom discussions with the teacher and there was a reason why melody and I were friends because melody was never afraid to ask the big questions and when she finally asked what's outside of the universe the question caught me off guard well nothing the universe is everything so it doesn't make any sense to ask what's outside of everything everything is everything yeah but if the universe has an edge then there must be something beyond that edge she reasoned and we thought about it for a very long time drinking root beer and eating candy and eventually I said maybe there is no edge and no outside and melody said yeah maybe the universe just goes on forever and that's all there is and after a very long pause sweat dripping down my forehead I said everything is terrifying and as you can see I was a very serious child but maybe not so completely serious because to me terrifying doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing but before we go too far we need to answer one very important question what is the universe picture the last time you were out in the wilderness and you looked up at the night sky thousands of pinpoints of light photons from stars and galaxies thousands of light-years away the ones that we can see with our eyes this light has been coming here for thousands of light years away a light year being the distance that light travels in one year to finally reach earth and smack into your eyeballs when you look up at the night sky you're looking backward in time but look closer in between those two points of light what do you see it looks like empty space but it's not your eyes are pretty good photon detectors for one particular type of photon but on cosmic scales your eyes are terrible experimental apparatus --is because they can only see a very narrow range of photon wavelengths and there's so much more hitting the earth than what we can see with our eyes if you were to use humanity's best photon detectors like satellite telescopes you'd see hidden light photons from stars and galaxies millions and billions of light-years away and eventually you'd see something absolutely remarkable the cosmic microwave background radiation light from when the universe was only a few hundred thousand years old this this is the closest we can get to a baby picture of our universe but wait a minute baby picture a few hundred thousand years old that's a pretty old baby where's the you where's the light from before then most of that light hasn't had time to reach us yet and never will all of those galaxies we see up in the sky they're not staying put they're all moving apart from each other in all directions the universe is expanding but expanding into what is our universe like a limp balloon put into a box and then it's being blown up into the box no space itself is expanding to galaxies in our universe are like two pins stuck into a rubber sheet that is being pulled from all directions from the perspective of an ant on the sheet nothing happened to make the pins move space itself the background spatial metric grid upon which everything is defined is being stretched and the different distance between the pins is increasing and if everything is moving apart from everything else we can simply run the clock backwards like dragging the slider backwards on YouTube and at some point far far back in the past everything in the universe had to have been packed into a tiny dense little point that then started expanding and this as you know is the concept of the Big Bang but it's not just the fact that the universe is expanding that is important but the particular way that it did so throughout its history there's so much that we cannot explain that we see right now if the universe was always expanding at some constant rate why do we see big things in the universe at all like galaxies and cosmic structures why does all the stuff in that part of the sky more or less look like all the stuff in that part of the sky why is that cosmic microwave background radiation the baby picture of the universe essentially uniform in temperature don't let the colors fool you my astrophysics colleagues put those in there to show the small gradations but this is essentially uniform in temperature everywhere none of this makes any sense unless right at the moment of the universe's first expansion 13.8 billion years ago it didn't just expand at a constant rate but instead first insanely inflated before then slowing down to expand at a much slower rate and this inflation is not some minor thing imagine if we took a horse and we magically inflated it to the size of the current observable universe in 10 to the power 2/3 - 32 seconds that's what inflation was like at the moment of the Big Bang this inflation of the fabric of space was much faster than the speed of light and as you know the only way that we here on earth stuck here on earth will ever know that anything exists in the universe is if we receive a light signal from it but if space expanded faster than the speed of light most of the stuff in the universe was completely separated from us forever and we'll never be able to verify that it exists thus were left with a new concept the observable universe which is a that which is defined of volume is defined by all of the stuff that could ever possibly send us a signal that we could receive which must be a tiny subset of the entire universe within which there must be a huge number of other observable universes for other observers and we'll never be able to contact them ever and it gets worse if you look closely at the mathematics behind this insane inflation of the fabric of space it should go on forever forever but in our universe it didn't it slowed down and has been going at a much slower rate for billions of years this must mean that our universe and the fabric of space upon which it sits can be thought of as two distinct things because inflation goes on forever but in our universe it didn't our universe is almost a little tiny pocket or bubble that was snapped into existence by the insane inflation of the fabric of space and this inflation again goes on infinitely forever and as you know with infinity if something happens once it happens again and again and again an almost infinite number of other universes popped into existence by this absurd inflation of the fabric of space in most of these other universes inflation probably never slowed down and they're very boring places and you'd never want to hold an open night there but in our universe everything was right for you and I to finally be here and with infinity there must be other universes like ours in one of them one of you wore different color shoes here today in another coffee is pink and in another an earth-like planet was obliterated by an asteroid just as protozoans started to evolve if our understanding of the inflation of the fabric of space is correct then this is some science fiction thing or an episode of Rick and Morty but this is true real science but I see the looks on some of your faces and you're absolutely right to be skeptical you should be screaming at me right now it's like this is crazy man you're a scientist where is the evidence this is all circumstantial and you'd be absolutely right but it turns out that this is not the only piece of circumstantial evidence that we have that we may live in a multiverse for example our universe seems to be filled with magic numbers constants of nature that we measure but we have no particular explanation for why their values are what they are and if these values though were something slightly different our universe would be a comb lately different place for example in 2012 my colleagues and I announced the discovery of something called the Higgs boson particle and the Higgs boson particle is a very weird and important particle a reminder the Large Hadron Collider is a 27 kilometer circular tunnel on the border of France and Switzerland about a hundred metres underground and in this tunnel oh and to give you some like a local flavour this is what it would look like if it were around Milano I think it takes about 45 minutes with traffic to get from lanata Airport over to over to the the soccer stadium in San Siro but in if if you were a proton in the Large Hadron Collider it would take a few microseconds so the perhaps that's a good proposal for an underground system for you at some point and in this tunnel we use superconducting magnets that are colder than outer space and we use them to accelerate protons you're made of protons to almost the speed of light and when they get to almost the speed of light we slammed them into each other millions of times a second and when we do this we're briefly recreating the conditions of the universe as they were just a fraction of a second after the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago and when the two protons collide you put a gigantic detector there because quantum field theory magic is going to happen and you as all the particles come out from the collision you take a snapshot a record of all of their trajectories the energy that they leave behind and this allows you to then store all of this data and eventually afterward you can sift through this data to see if you found evidence of new undiscovered particles they may help us answer some of these biggest open questions in science and by big detector I mean extremely big so the one that I work on is called Atlas and if you look closely there's a very lucky or unlucky gentlemen here they're bringing this gigantic thing in he better get out of the way but he's very lucky because he gets to stand here Atlas is six stories high it's 46 meters long and it's sitting up in a cavern 100 meters underground and this is essentially a 100 megapixel camera that takes three-dimensional photos 40 million times a second so when we do this again we build up this gigantic dataset the largest unique data set in human history and we sift through this to see if we found evidence of new undiscovered particles and when we finally announced the discovery of this particle the Higgs boson particle in 2012 it was fantastic there was applause and celebration and two white men won the Nobel Prize what else is new and it was a fantastic event for everyone but it was also very strange because when we thought about it a little more deeply we probably shouldn't have discovered this particle at all the largeness of machines like the Large Hadron Collider is important because larger machines allow us to make the particles to go to very high kinetic energies and if you remember your physics kinetic energy is the energy of movement and if we and but it so the part and due to Einstein's equation e equals mc-squared if we as a species have only ever built a Collider that goes up to energy here but nature has a particle with the mass M that's all the way up here we'll never be able to discover it and measure its properties because the mass of a particle is not the same thing that you and I used the word mass when we say well look at that massive building or something like that mass for a particle is just a number put there by Nature it's a number that we can just measure we can't control it we can only go out and measure it and again if there's a particle with the mass up here that would just explain everything we want to know and we've only ever built a Collider that goes up here we'll never be able to measure measure its properties and discover it and the other part of this that's fantastic is that you may have referred you may have heard this part these types of colliders being referred to as the Big Bang machine which as I mentioned is actually true if I take a thermometer and I put it out in outer space I'm not saying that I have done this I would like to do this but I've never gone to outer space myself if I take a thermometer and put it in outer space the average energy of the universe is extremely cold and the universe is huge that means that the entire average energy or temperature of the universe is extremely low right now but it was not always this way as I said everything is spread apart and 13.8 billion years ago everything was packed into a dense little point that started expanding when you do that particles don't like that at all and they start to vibrate and they start to object to being scrunched together like this and they start to vibrate and radiate and overall the temperature of the universe universe goes extremely high therefore when we actually collide protons at such extremely high energies we are really briefly recreating the conditions of the universe as they were a fraction of a second after the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago in a very controlled laboratory conditions don't worry about that and so if you go farther and farther back in time so when you go to extremely high energies at your collider experiment you're actually looking farther and farther back in time and the Large Hadron Collider can get us about here we understand what the universe was doing what it was like everything that was going on when the universe was about 10 to the minus 15 10 to the minus 20 seconds old which means that all the interesting stuff is down here so that's why we have to build bigger machines to go to higher energies to go farther back in time and because farther back in time that's when these particles that are that could explain all of the biggest open questions of science they may have been hanging around just for tiny fraction of a second and then as the universe expanded and cooled down they were not so important anymore and they just kind of died out and the particular way that they died out that leaves an imprint on everything that we see now so a lot of the observations we make right now in the sky in the laboratory they have a hint to us that there should be other particles out there that we haven't yet discovered but again when you go to extremely high energies to find this these particles you don't actually know what you're gonna find and this is in fact was the biggest weirdest thing about this Higgs boson particle again you probably have heard this heard of this particle before and you saw probably the Nobel Prize and the that was in the news and sometimes it's referred to as the god particle physicists we don't use that term because it kind of does a disservice to how awesome this particle is but the particle itself is something that was the the reason it was so difficult to find people have been looking for this particle for almost 40 years 50 years the reason it was so difficult to find is that the theory that we had that predicted the existence of this particle it didn't tell us where it should be in mass remember e equals MC squared it didn't say anything about it some of the other particles it did it's like yeah you should find the Z boson right here you should find the W boson right here for the Higgs boson it's like so we had to just go to higher and higher energies until we could finally find it and it turned out that the Large Hadron Collider was big enough to discover this particle but it gets even worse than that think about that our theory didn't say where we should find this particle and in fact if you look closely at the mathematics behind it and you should always look closely at the mathematics behind any physics thing there's nothing to prevent this Higgs boson mass from being something gigantic lehigh far far outside of the range of the Large Hadron Collider but we found it down here this is weird it's almost as though there's some kind of shelf that's holding the Higgs boson particle right up here in science terms what this shelf would refer to it would would correspond to would be a bunch of extra particles that we would discover right around the same place in mass as the the Higgs boson this would be fantastic because through some complicated interactions that you get to study in graduate school if you want to go and be a particle physicist through complicated interactions they help regulate the Higgs boson mass and keep it right where it is so if we discovered these particles that would be great it would help explain why the Higgs boson mass is what it is and will be so satisfying physicists we hate it when there's a number without an explanation it would be so good to find these particles my god it would be wonderful we do not see these particles at the Large Hadron Collider so it makes us think why is the Higgs boson sitting right where it is did we just get lucky let me be very clear the Higgs boson particle I don't know if any of my colleagues at CERN or in the audience but the Higgs boson particle is not the most important part of that discovery the particle part is great because for experimentalist like us we can create it in the laboratory and see how it dies and we can study its properties but the particle is not the most important thing the discovery of the particle is proof positive that something called the Higgs field exists and the Higgs field is essentially an invisible jelly that permeates all of space-time everywhere and it's the thing that allows your particles to have that property of mass if I'm a particle you say you don't feel this Higgs field but your individual particles deep down inside you do for example if I'm an electron and I'm zipping through this invisible jelly a little bit of my energy is stuck into a point that we measure as this property of mass and the number is just selected by nature for some reason so if I'm an electron I'm dragged a little bit by this Higgs field jelly if I'm something called the top quark I'm dragged a lot and I have a very very fat mass and if I'm a photon I'm not dragged at all and I zipped through at light speed unimpeded so think about what I said an invisible jelly that permeates all of space and it you can't feel it but your particles do how are we ever going to test this idea I might as well tell you there's ghosts over in that corner I can't even verify that I can't even define what that is how am I gonna ever even test that idea imagine that you had an extremely popular Instagram account that was about muddy rivers that may sound crazy but you know there are much weirder very popular intagram Instagram accounts out there so your jet you've to go to muddy rivers and you like to go to bridges and go down and take a photo and you post that on your extremely popular Muddy River Instagram account so your friend says hey you like muddy rivers I have a fantastic muddy river for you and you like yes tell me he says go over to this bridge at night and look over the side and you'll see a fantastic muddy river and you're like okay so you go to the bridge it's very dark you look over you can't see anything you brought a flashlight you look down in the flashlight but nothing's moving it looks like dirt did your friend lie to you you're like I can't I don't know what's down there I've got a flashlight here how are you going to demonstrate or test whether there's actually a river down there you could drop a rock so you drop a rock and if there's actually water down there it's gonna splash for a small amount of time and then the splash will happen and then eventually die and go back to smooth again you have demonstrated very briefly that that muddy river really exists in this case the river is the Higgs field this invisible jelly that permeates all the space everywhere and the little splash this little vortex that's the Higgs boson particle that we see for a tiny amount of time in are detected before it then dies and the rock the rock is the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and it's so it's very important that this Higgs field exists because think about what I said electrons as they zip through this Higgs field they get a little bit of mass if the Higgs field was not there the electron would have a zero mass and if electrons had a zero mass atoms would never have formed in the early universe and you and I would not be here to have this discussion right now so it's good that the Higgs field exists it's good that the Higgs boson exists but what is keeping the Higgs boson mass right where it is again did we just get lucky maybe we did but perhaps it's a very special kind of luck nature loves statistical distributions I doubt you will hear an earlier statement said all night the average resting heart rate of everyone in this room will be distributed as some kind of Gaussian or normal distribution a kind of bell curve if you go outside and stand on the street corner the frequency with which cars will pass you will be distributed as a Poisson distribution in a sense statistics and math seem to transcend our universe so what if our Higgs boson mass is just one of an almost infinite number of possible Higgs boson masses in a multiverse most of these other masses were something totally different and in those in those universes no atoms ever formed and there again they're very dull lifeless places and you'd never want to hold an open night there but in our universe the value was just right so that you and I were able to be here to have this conversation today again this is not direct the lack of these extra particles at the Large Hadron Collider is not direct evidence that we live in a multiverse but it's another piece of circumstantial evidence that we should take this idea more seriously but again I see the looks on some of your faces and you're absolutely right this is still just circumstantial we need evidence how are we going to test this idea we're at the Musee Essenza we need science it turns out there are a few possible ways to test this multiverse idea but some of them are perhaps a bit difficult to do at the moment for example some people think that black holes could in fact be portal portals other universes you might think this is a science fiction crazy idea but honestly it's as good of an explanation as any other as to what goes inside on science what goes on inside of a black hole because we have no idea what goes on inside of a black hole as you know a black hole is an extreme puncture in the fabric of space-time it's the place where this fabric of space-time because of so much gravity is warped to such an extent that all the laws of physics once you get into the black hole itself become blurry our understanding of physics breaks down inside of a black hole so perhaps this wonderful image of the gas outside of a black hole that was released last year could be the first step toward us eventually traveling to a black hole and going inside and figuring out what's going on in there and then somehow sending the information out of the black hole to the rest of us so that we could figure out whether or not it's a portal to another universe I admit that's perhaps a bit far-fetched another way remember that almost infinite number of other universes that were popped into existence by the insert absurd inflation of the fabric of space what if two of them expanded right next to each other and bumped into each other perhaps we could look for a bruise or a bump on our universe like when you fall off your bike and you bump your leg could it be that that's what this little blue spot is here in the Cosmic Microwave Background this baby picture of the universe the jury is still out as to whether this explanation fits the data better than some other but it's an active area of investigation another way you could look for these extra particles at higher mass machines aka my day job it turns out that if we found these extra particles just outside of the range of the Large Hadron Collider it would be okay it'd just be a little bit weird but it would be okay we would have an explanation as to why our Higgs boson mass is right where it is and everything would be wonderful last year my colleagues and I at CERN announced the proposal of a 100 kilometer tunnel that go around the celeb mountains and for the record I live about right here right in the middle of all the action there would be a hundred kilometers around and it will allow us to get to energies that are almost seven times what the Large Hadron Collider can do for us this will allow us to this will open up completely unprecedented experimental possibilities but would that be enough if we turn on this machine and there's lots of other things we can look for this for this machine in the next you know whenever decades whenever it turns on if we turn on this machine and we don't find these other particles that would help us explain the Higgs boson would that finally be enough could I come back to you and say yes we now know for a fact that we live in a multiverse because we can't explain or Higgs boson mass no we would have to go bigger so why don't we go even bigger why don't we build a particle collider that stretches around the moon this seems like a crazy idea but think about how many people are interested in going back to the moon for various reasons crazy but guys like Elon Musk other people that want to go up there and do some science stuff why don't we build a Collider around the circumference of the moon it's an idea that just a few decades ago would have been insane impossible but now it's just regular impossible and regular impossible we can do regular impossible is only impossible right up until the moment someone makes it possible and of course to do this I can't do it by myself so we're at a wonderful place full of inventive people so here's a list of some things than I need someone in the audience to innovate so that we can make this happen I need lots of extremely strong magnets that don't currently exist and they need 11,000 kilometers worth of them I need a space transport system that's robust and more or less like a bus that can go back and forth between the earth and the moon I need I need to dig some tunnels underneath the surface of the Moon but wait a minute maybe I don't need to build tunnels maybe I can do it on the surface and we put shielding up on top maybe we need robots to do this for us I need some kind of next generation of particle physics detectors I need some kind of data science and AI machine learning techniques that don't work they don't even exist right now to help analyze all this data I need a robust earth to moon data transfer system that's robust against solar flares or other kind of interruptions I need next generation of power is a nuclear power perhaps solar power I need everything else that I haven't thought of yet but would that be enough if we build a moon Collider would I finally be able to come back to you and say 200 years and say yes we have finally proven to ourselves that we live in a multiverse now let's get to work contacting them no no no no to do it right we would have to go big and I'm the kind of guy that I don't like to do things only half way I want to go all the way to the big so Large Hadron Collider it's great future circular Collider it's awesome moon Collider sure but to do it right we need to reach an energy that is so high that beyond that energy our current understanding of physics breaks down it's called the Planck energy and this is an energy scale and a distance scale and a time scale that's so it stream that are our understanding of nature and physics breaks down but it's the point at which if we were to reach this in a particle physics experiment everything would be revealed we would understand everything about dark matter about dark energy about quantum black holes about how gravity and quantum mechanics go together about the nature of time but to reach this energy in a particle physics collider by some very crude estimates we would probably need to build a Large Hadron Collider style Collider around the outer edge of the solar system clearly we're going to need some major innovation to make this happen but luckily we're at you know open night filled with wonderful curious brilliant people so catch me afterwards and we'll brainstorm ways to make this happen but so this would be the ultimate Hadron Collider but when we build the ultimate Hadron Collider and we will what will we do with the answers that we get from it as I mentioned with going into a black hole for example and sending information back even if we have overwhelming circumstantial evidence that you and I live in a multiverse there's currently no way for me to even define what it means to contact another universe such a concept currently makes no sense so does that mean that such questions are meaningless you may say yes and in fact some of scientists would actually agree with you and some scientists attack our attempts to learn more about such questions by building bigger machines saying that such questions are non scientific but is that true we started from known science the observations of the world around us and we followed the chain of logic to arrive at the conclusion that we may live in a multiverse such a question is startling and scary a conclusion is startling and scary but it's clearly scientific just because we can't answer the question now doesn't mean that we never will why do some people object to questions like this could it be that they're afraid of the answer and is this the same fear that caused people to object to similar questions in the past like is the earth really at the center of the solar system and are the stars painted onto a solid dome a few kilometers above our heads the fear that you and I are not as special as we think we are perhaps more accurately the fear that what you know right now it's not all there is to know does this same fear affect you does this same fear affect all of us what if I were to tell you that there is a parallel universe out there somewhere where you already quit you're safe day job you're doing right now and finally worked on that big thing that you've been thinking about for years like starting a humanitarian organization or your brand-new startup that you've wanted to do for a while what if I were to tell you that there was a parallel universe out there somewhere where we were good at making sure that there were as many women in science as there are men what if I were to tell you that there was a universe out there some parallel universe where a large of our fellow citizens were not fooled into voting for white nationalist racist misogynistic political parties what if I were to tell you that there was a universe out there where my colleagues and I had thought of a different way to accelerate protons to higher speeds in a smaller distance all of that stuff I said about the moon Collider and something stretching around the solar system all of that is based upon existing current technology studies are ongoing right now for something called plasma wakefield technology and this promises to revolutionize our ability to speed up particles to higher and higher energies in smaller spaces it's not ready for primetime now but what if what if you and the audience decided to stop what you're doing and come and work with my colleagues at CERN that work on this so we could understand sir these questions you know not maybe in 500 years but in 50 years instead going through these proposals these ideas of extra other parallel universes out there where things are different it's a fun exercise but again it's all just circumstantial to be completely clear we have absolutely no evidence that we live in a multiverse it's a very very very interesting idea but we currently have no way to verify this and to my mind that makes it all the more important that we work hard every single day to make sure that this universe is the best one that we can construct the when when we ask questions about the universe around us you and I humans are the method by which the universe asks questions about itself we don't need to be afraid of an almost infinite number of universes because we know for a fact at least one thing there is at least one universe that contains all of us and to be frank when I see the government of the United States putting children into cages on the us-mexico border and when again I see all of I see a lot of people that are somehow fooled into voting for racist misogynistic Islamophobic parties and when I see that that that we have been dumping carbon into the atmosphere for decades and we're not acting fast enough to solve it and when I think about my friend melody and how the other kids would mock and bully her and how that made it difficult for her to go to class and how she never went to high school I feel anger it's not just regular anger I feel regular anger too but as a physicist I feel an extra layer of anger because I realize that when we allow such things to happen we'd be trained this cosmic truth that you and I are all parts of the same universe and we are all in this universe together and so back on the red rocks when I was a kid I said to melody everything is terrifying and she said yeah it's scary but it would be scarier if I were out here by myself and I looked at melody and I said yeah and we both looked up at the night sky the stars and galaxies watching us from very far away thanks thank you thank you

Channel: IBSA Foundation for scientific research

Views: 5,562

Keywords: universe, james beacham, outside of the universe, cern, CERN, particle physicist, science, space, astronaut, physicist, museo nazionale scienza e tecnologia milano, einstein, open night

Id: QcciFIkrvCE

Length: 46min 32sec (2792 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 18 2020