"This programme contains some strong language" "CHATTER AND LAUGHTER" "No, I don't know, a few people." "It was terrible, tomorrow's will be better." "I don't think I can say it." "Say it." "I need..." "I need evidence." "It's big, no?" "Ever since I entered physics, people have been talking about this machine." "The Large Hadron Collider, the biggest machine ever built by human beings, is finally going to turn on." "And after many, many years of waiting and theorizing, about how matter got created and about what the deep fundamental theory of nature is, all those theories are finally going to be tested, and we're going to know something, and we don't know what" "it's going to be now but we will know, and it's going to change everything." "And if the LHC sees new particles, we're on the right track." "And if it doesn't, not only have we missed something but we may not ever know how to proceed." "We are at a fork in the road, and it's either going to be a golden era, or it's going to be quite stark." "And I've never heard of a moment like this in history, where an entire field is hinging on a single event." "Hi I'm David." "Fabiola." "Fabiola, nice to meet you." "So, look, I have suggested to be on this side because this big wheel is quite spectacular." "Yeah, yeah." "More than ever, this will require the collaboration between a theory and experimentalist so it would be a very nice period where we work together and, uh..." "Well, it's fun to finally interact with experimentalists," "I mean, I used to be just in my office coming up with, you know, crazy ideas." "It's a big thing." "'There is a general sense waiting for 'this machine to start,' this massive machine that has taken so many years to build, we're all in great anticipation of what it might find." "And every time there is even a rumour that a new particle was discovered, even before it turns on, uh, the entire field goes into a fever pitch." "The experiment was designed initially in the mid-80s and has taken this long to construct." "There are 10,000 people of over 100 nationalities." "That includes countries which are mortal enemies of each other, like India and Pakistan, and Georgia and Russia, and Iran and Israel." "All have physicists working on this machine." "These big blue things are seven-tonne super-conducting magnets, which have to be cooled with liquid helium to the coldest temperatures on Earth, colder than empty space." "There are 100,000 computers connected all over the world to deal with the data." "In fact, the World Wide Web was invented at CERN so that physicists all over the planet could share the data." "The United States was building a machine just like this, in fact a bigger machine, in Texas." "But they ran into a small technical difficulty." "I doubt that anyone believes that the most pressing issues facing the nation include an insufficient understanding of the origins of the universe." "Unfortunately, the Superconducting Supercollider was cancelled by Congress in 1993." "And finally he's saying, "If we don't do it, the Europeans will do it." "Let them do it!" "We'll steal their technology like they steal our technology."" "It got very political." "Uh, it was very expensive, very complicated." "It's hard for physicists to explain why we do these kinds of experiments." "The purpose of the machine is not military application, it's not commercial application." "It's to understand something about the basic laws of physics." "'There are two kinds of particle physicists." "'There are the experimentalists, 'they built the big machines, run the experiments, 'analyse the data and try to discover things like new particles." "'And then there are the theorists, 'like me." "'We construct the theories that try to explain 'everything we see in nature." "'Without us, the experimentalists are in the dark, 'but without them, 'we'll never know the truth.'" "'When I was at Stanford I had a mentor." "'Savas Dimopoulos." "'Savas only likes to work on the biggest puzzles.'" "Now, uh, just for fun I wanted to tell you that, uh, the enabling technologies..." "He has some of the most famous theories that will be tested at the LHC, but he doesn't know if any of them are true, so there's an intensity with which he approaches physics." "If he works on a paper that could result in a Nobel Prize, he doesn't allow more than three people on the paper because you can only share the Nobel Prize with three people." "That's the level at which he's operating and the impact he's trying to have." "It takes us beyond the confines of atomic physics." "'In particle physics you have to have a threshold amount of intelligence, 'whatever that means." "'But the thing that differentiates scientists is purely an artistic ability to discern what is a good idea, what is a beautiful idea, what is worth spending time on and, most importantly, what is a problem that is sufficiently interesting," "yet sufficiently difficult that it hasn't yet been solved but the time for solving it has come now." "So people have been waiting for this experiment, the LHC, for a very long time." "Nothing like it has ever happened, all the superlatives are justified." "This is a case where the hype is approximately accurate." "To get, you know, 3,000 people to work on an experiment together, whose goal is to understand what's going on at distances a thousand times smaller than a proton." "This is a really extraordinary testament to what, uh, to some of the highest ideals we can have as human beings." "'Nima and I got our PhDs around the same time." "'He's a couple of years ahead of me." "'And Nima is the star of our generation 'and he's the guy we all followed and looked up to 'and tried to keep up with and tried to outpace if we could.'" "Since the mid'70s we've had an amazingly successful theory of nature that we call the Standard Model of particle physics." "But sitting in the heart of the theory is a sickness." "Very, very glaring conceptual problems that infected this fantastic understanding." "Why is the universe big?" "Why is gravity so much weaker than all the other forces?" "The kinds of answers that this theory gives to these questions seem so patently absurd that we think that we're missing something very, very big." "And on top of all of that there is one prediction of this theory, absolutely crucial for it to even make internal theoretical sense, and this is the famous Higgs particle." "The Higgs or something like it must show up." "If it doesn't show up there is something truly deeply wrong, very, very deeply wrong with the way we think about physics." "There is strong reasons to think that at least some of these questions will find answers at the LHC." "There has been no shortage of ideas for what they might be." "But this is really, um, this generation of people's, my generation of people's, only shot." "EVERYONE SPEAKS AT ONCE IN DIFFERENT LANGUAGES" "Ah, so the boss comes." "'I first came to CERN in 1987." "'I was a very young undergraduate student and I remember 'the first time I entered the site I was a bit scared by 'the corridors in the CERN main site 'so I was almost lost in those corridors.'" "For me it has been a wonderful experience because I had the chance of being involved right from the beginning and to see really an experiment from, uh, starting and from zero essentially." "I don't think I can describe right now the excitement about first beam." "I mean, the entire control room is like a group of six-year-olds, whose birthday is next week, you know, and there's going to be cake and there's going to be presents and all their friends are going to be" "there and they just, you know, they just know it's going to be great." "They're kind of scattered and I can't imagine cos they're not that big, right?" "'I've been a post-doc here for a year so I'm a relative newcomer." "'But my timing is sort of perfect." "I mean, to be on the ground floor 'when the data first comes, it's awesome!" "'" "..means I have 5,000 e-mails." "'There is a huge 'difference between theorists and experimentalists." "'I mean, when I started college," "'I absolutely did not want to do physics." "'Physics meant to me everything that was boring." "'Textbooks, theories, proofs..." "'But then I discovered the experimental side." "'And the experimental side is the hands-on aspect." "'It's about taking a theory, which is abstract, 'and making it real." "'How do you build an experiment 'to discover something that the theory predicts?" "'And that aspect is what I love.'" "'Of course, when constructing the whole thing, 'we several times thought,'" ""What if the whole thing just does not work?"" "I really believe now that this will work but the next thing is will we ever find something?" "So maybe we will just find nothing new." "It would be a catastrophe for physics, we would somehow..." "None of the open questions which we have at the moment would've been answered." "So the LHC is basically the most fundamental of experiments." "It's like what any child would design as an experiment, you take two things and you smash them together." "And you get a lot of stuff that comes out of that collision and you try to understand that stuff." "Now, in this case what we are smashing together is tiny protons, which are inside the centre of every atom." "And in order to get them going as fast as possible, we have to build this huge 17-mile ring." "And we run those protons around the ring multiple times to build up speed, almost to the speed of light." "And then we collide two beams going in opposite directions, at four points." "And at those four points are four different experiments " "ATLAS, LHCb, CMS and ALICE." "Now, I work on the ATLAS experiment." "And ATLAS is like a huge seven-storey camera that takes a snapshot of every single collision." "And that's billions of collisions, and the hope is that we'll see the very famous Higgs particle." "But every time we've turned on the new accelerator at a higher energy, we've always been surprised." "So the real hope is that we'll see the Higgs but that there's also something amazingly new." "You can liken it to when we put a man on the Moon." "It's that level of collaborative effort, I would say, and even bigger than that." "This is closer to something like human beings building the Pyramids." "Why did they do it?" "Why are we doing it?" "We actually have two answers." "One answer is what we tell people and the other answer is the truth." "I'll tell you both and there's nothing incorrect about the first answer." "It's just it doesn't..." "It's not the thing that drives us, it's not how we think about it, but it's something you can say quickly and the person you're talking to won't, you know, get diverted, or pass out," "or pick up the SkyMall catalogue if you happen to be next to them on an airplane." "Answer number one - we are reproducing the physics, the conditions just after the Big Bang." "We're doing it in this collider and we're reproducing that so we can see what it was like when the universe just started." "This is what we tell people." "OK, answer two - we're trying to understand the basic laws of nature." "Um, it sounds slightly more mild but this is really where we are, and what we're trying to do." "We study particles because just after the Big Bang, all there was was particles." "And they carry the information about how our universe started and how it got to be the way it is and its future." "At the beginning of the 1900s, it became clear that all known matter, everything that we know about, is made of atoms." "And that atoms are made of just three particles - the electron, the proton and the neutron." "In the '30s, other particles were discovered, and by the 1960s there were hundreds of new particles with a new particle discovered every week." "And there was mass confusion." "Until a number of theorists realised that there was a simple mathematical structure that explained all of this." "That most of these particles were made of the same three little bits we call quarks." "And that there are only a handful of truly fundamental particles, which all fit together in a nice neat pattern." "And there was born the Standard Model." "Eventually, all the particles in the theory were discovered except one, the Higgs." "The Higgs is unlike any other particle." "It's the lynchpin of the Standard Model." "Its theory was written down in the 1960s by Peter Higgs and a number of other theorists." "We believe it is the crucial piece responsible for holding matter together." "It is connected to a field which fills all of space and which gives particles like the electron mass and allowed them to get caught in atoms." "And thus is responsible for the creation of atoms, molecules, planets and people." "Without the Higgs, life as we know it wouldn't exist." "But to prove that it's true, we have to smash particles together at high enough energy to disturb the field and create a Higgs particle." "If the Higgs exists, the LHC is the machine that will discover it." "Let's assume you're successful, and everything comes out OK." "Sure." "What do we gain from it?" "What's the economic return?" "How do you justify all this?" "By the way, I am an economist." "I don't hold it against you." "The question by an economist, uh, was" ""What is the financial gain of running an experiment like this" ""and the discoveries that we will make in this experiment?"" "And it's a very, very simple answer." "I have no idea." "We have no idea." "When radio waves were discovered they weren't called radio waves because there were no radios." "They were discovered as some sort of radiation." "Basic science for big breakthroughs needs to occur at a level where you're not asking what is the economic gain, you're asking what do we not know and where can we make progress." "So what is the LHC good for?" "Could be nothing other than just understanding everything." "APPLAUSE" "The first time I ever saw ATLAS was in 2005." "I had come out just to see what ATLAS would look like because there was a possibility that I could be working on it as a post-doc." "I can remember walking in and just being like, you know, just stunned." "I mean, me, stunned, you know, just already kind of having an idea of the magnitude." "People tell you, "Oh, it's five storeys tall."" "And you go, "Oh, OK, five storeys tall," and then you see." "Five storeys completely filled with microelectronics," "All custom designed, all hand soldered." "You know, it's like as if it's a five-storey Swiss watch." "There was this issue about the BCIDs." "We had our extended barrel out earlier but it should be back in and we should be..." "Everything running normal." "OK." "So one more announcement." "We have to, uh, be extremely careful what we do to the system." "I mean, we know that anybody who's even updating a number somewhere might stop our system for more than an hour quite easily." "So please be absolutely sure that yourself and everybody in your system is not touching the system unless it's been agreed by the shift leader." "Nothing should be touched." "And that includes all things that you're absolutely dead certain that will not do anything wrong." "Especially those things." "It's been called the largest scientific experiment in history and some say one that could cause Armageddon." "It's the strangest experiment ever." "Mankind's most ambitious attempt to understand how we all got here." "Thousands of scientists from around the world spent 20 years designing an extraordinary machine." "It cost £5 billion and is switching on very soon." "This is a genesis machine, a window on creation." "THEY SPEAK MANY DIFFERENT LANGUAGES" "They're looking for something called the God particle." "But sceptics are saying nobody knows what will happen when they turn on the switch." "A group of fringe scientists believe the collider might create a black hole that could swallow up the earth." "And they filed suit to stop the project from going forward." "Hello?" "No, absolutely not." "Well, no, there's no scientific ground to what they say." "It's not possible that the LHC is going to destroy the world." "It's absolutely ridiculous." "OK, it is 9.15." "We are 15 minutes away from beam." "We've been sitting here, about 7 o'clock and absolutely nobody brought food." "Again 15 minutes to beam." "Ciao, ciao." "Stress levels are high." "Ciao." "But since I'm in a room full of Italians the stress level's pretty cool here." "But we have no coffee either." "No coffee." "Who didn't bring coffee?" "What we're going to see today is the launch of the first beam of protons around this enormous ring." "Very shortly Lyn Evans, the project director, is going to be addressing CERN staff, who are gathered at different points around this massive complex." "It's just the first glimpse at the fact the machine can run." "I mean, so what you need really is two beams colliding together." "For quite a few..." "Quite a long period of time before you calculate, get enough..." "Sufficient statistics in which to actually be able to look for the new physics." "But a single beam." "The first beam isn't that." "You're not even getting any collisions." "It's just one beam going around in a circle not even at the high energies." "Just one beam going around in the low energy circle, that sort of says, "OK, we made it around the ring once for the first time," and it's a huge event." "Right, after 19 years you've been waiting for this first step." "Let's get started everybody." "Now comes the day of reckoning." "Five, four, three, two, one." "Now." "No beam." "So where are we with the injection kicker?" "They're out, OK, never mind." "Let's go." "Five, four, three, two, one, zero." "We get a beam on this pulse?" "I hope so..." "Yes!" "CHEERING AND APPLAUSE" "Well, last night I was like waking up constantly." "Like, "Did we set that right?"," ""What about?", "Did we disable?", "Oh, my gosh!"" "Marzio." "I have a plot for you." "OK, check this out." "This is Z." "This is timing, in nanoseconds, which we knew from the cosmic data." "That is very nice." "Yes." "Upstairs, I think people were more excited about this." "If you're in Google that means..." "That's the world." "This is the most important thing today." "This is the first and this tells us a lot of things, it tells us that the magnetic properties of the machine are good." "That the aperture is clear." "There's nothing sticking into the beam pipe anywhere." "So a very, very encouraging sign and remarkable progress." "Did you guys see our beautiful plot?" "What?" "OK, I want to show you this." "Come on show them the plot!" "You can take..." "You can see a picture of..." "Here you go." "Well, see if you can get it." "I don't think there's anyone else I can show my plot to, so..." "It worked!" "It just worked and there are so few times in life where it just works." "And there are so, even fewer times in life where it just works great." "We rocked." "I mean, tile, first beam." "We destroyed that shit." "'They got a beam circulating." "'They've had beams circulating for a full 30 seconds.'" "So let me understand." "This is one beam, going one way?" "'They have one beam going one way, 'and then they went to the other beam going the other way.'" "'Does it work, the second beam, did it go fully around?" "'" "'Everything." "They both went around." "'I think they had the beam go around about a million times." "'Something like that." "Yeah, their Twitter feed said 10 million." "Now we'll become, you know, CERN Twitter junkies." "I guess this is exciting." "My logical self wants to be excited." "My psychological self is very cautious." "My parents are both Iranian, and both physicists and my father in particular had, uh.." "real political difficulties with the regime and we had to go underground for a number of years and we ended up escaping from Iran through the border of Turkey." "But then through a number of wonderful, uh, accidents we ended up in Canada." "I got interested in physics when I was 13 or 14 years old." "It just offered the way to combine the two things I really loved, mathematics and things in the natural world." "You almost done?" "Yeah." "You're just saying what if?" "It's, uh, yeah." "You're preparing a broader audience for this." "OK, now I'm going to just, uh, just do something fun." "Just do something fun." "What would be fun?" "No, don't write "hell", it's a public..." "All right, I'm sorry!" "How about that?" "There we go!" "Thinking about the LHC has been the centre of my intellectual life for about 15-16 years now." "Depending on what happens, with the LHC, you know, these are 15 years I could come to see as the best possible thing I could've been doing with this time or it could just be that the entire 15 years might as well have" "not happened, no impact and then that's just 15 years that are gone." "It's not the sort of thing where there's, uh, consolation prizes." "It's a fairly binary situation." "I definitely won't feel," ""Oh, Well, I gave it a good old college try." "It's all fine, anyway." ""It's just trying that counts." I don't believe that." "I don't believe it's just trying that counts." "I believe getting it right is what counts." "OK, please take your seats." "Now it's time for the entertainment part." "So, as with every great physics event, we're going to start with a big bang." "The ATLAS big bang event and that's going to follow with music all evening." "People from ATLAS are going to be performing for you." "So let's get started." "Take 2,000 intelligent, ambitious, Type A personalities and make them work 16 hour days, high pressure situation, lots of stress." "You know, that's the recipe for disaster." "Or at least it's a recipe for a reality television programme." "But all that physics," "Higgs, extra dimensions, supersymmetry, microscopic black holes, macroscopic black holes, Z primes, you name it." "The physics that the theorists only dream of is ours to discover." "APPLAUSE" "Thank you." "Thank you, ATLAS!" "'I grew up in Turkey from Greek parents 'and a middle class family and then in the '60s' we became refugees." "We had to leave Turkey because of ethnic tensions between Greeks and Turks over the island of Cyprus, and there were a lot of political cross currents, left, right and, uh," "I was a young, impressionable 13-year-old hearing the pro-left and pro-right arguments, so one day I could be convinced that one side was right, the other day I would be convinced the other side was right and then I was getting confused." "How could both of these things be true if they were contrary to each other?" "So I decided to focus on a field where the truth didn't depend on the eloquence of the speaker." "The truth was absolute." "Of course when I started out I thought that within maybe five years the theories that I was working on were going to be tested and I was going to know the experimental truth and move on to the next round of ideas after that." "Little did I know that the experiments would take far longer and here I am 30 years after, still not knowing the truth." "Peter?" "Hi." "I can show you here a nice event." "Did you see this from, uh..." "Ah, no!" "Andreas showed me this." "I haven't seen it." "This is from yesterday night." "This is now a real, uh, beam gas event." "So you see the tracks also bent..." "Bent by the field, very nice." "'In some sense I started from the wrong 'perspective and in the wrong way' because I've been studying a lot of literature when I was at high school level." "So literature, art, philosophy, history, and very little physics and mathematics." "I've also been studying music, piano, and so was very much attracted by art." "There are many similarities between music and physics." "Classical music follows rules of harmony which are really rules of physics and mathematics." "But also I was fascinated by big questions." "That is the possibility of addressing and answering big questions about nature, the universe, why, when, how, and when I finished high school," "I thought that physics allowed us to address this big question in a more practical way than for instance philosophy." "That's why I decided to study physics." "WHIRRING" "BEEPING" "Yes, we lost these two there..." "SEVERAL ALARMS" "I managed to go through like the four gallons of milk that I had in the fridge." "TELEPHONE RINGS" "We were just waiting for collisions, waiting for collisions, and finally then this helium leak, which really, uh..." "It's really frustrating." "'We cannot even go there and investigate what happened." "'You have to warm up the magnets' and warming up the magnets needs to be done on a very slow pace and in order not to break them then you can investigate and cool them down again." "'The world's largest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider, is 'to be shut down for at least two months." "'CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research...'" "'Scientists at CERN are trying to put on a brave face." "'A faulty electrical connection between two magnets led to 'a tonne of liquid helium being leaked into the 27km tunnel." "'The first high speed particle collisions 'were due to take place later this month." "'The goal now is simply to get this vastly complex machine working.'" "Fucking hell, look at that." "This is just unbelievable." "You've got magnets just sheared off their jacks." "We've actually put in enough energy to melt it and to vaporize a whole tube of..." "And the stuff's all covered in a sort of black metallic dust." "Completely catastrophic, eh?" "Completely catastrophic." "There's no more vacuum in the beam vacuum so can as well open it up and see whether there's any dust because if there's dust it means we have to clean all the way until it's, uh..." "I hope in the worst case we have not to take out more than 20 or so magnets." "Both my family and my students detect a definite level of, let's say, pessimism and disappointment." "They built expectation that now we were going to know the truth." "It fizzled and delayed and is just, uh..." "I thought I was stronger than this." "It surprised me." "I did say that I thought it was a mistake for CERN to have this gigantic celebration for things just when it just had a few protons wandering around in one direction around the ring, that it was just a bad idea to have" "so much hoopla before anything was actually happening." "At the time, when people were asking if I was going to CERN to celebrate, I said, "I'm going to go to CERN when there's a reason to" ""celebrate, you know, when things are colliding into each other, when" ""something is starting to happen." Not for some crappy PR reason." "And that backfired." "That, I think, really that backfired and I think that was a PR disaster." "It was a PR disaster largely of CERN's own making." "You don't go around, you know, having gigantic parties before anything has happened." "So the magnets that come out are being refurbished and so they're sort of trundling through about six magnets a week now." "So that's no longer the bottleneck." "Now, they're kind of getting into the state where they're ready to start redoing the interconnects in the tunnel and they're already about a week or two behind on that." "Given the complexity..." "The other thing's that they're drilling these bloody holes in the magnets." "Because they, like..." "When I heard this last time, they were saying that all their tools are breaking and that sort of business." "But it begs the question, of course, you know," ""What are the risks?"" "I mean, you're basically going..." "I don't know." "We didn't actually think so much about the collateral effects of the helium." "Nobody has." "Yeah, nobody." "Nobody." "There's been a lot of investigations into the causes of the original problem and the general agreement is that we run at half design energy." "Experimentalists aren't going to be happy." "So, yeah, the latest schedule is..." "We just put out is D-Day, beams back on the 21st of September." "Isn't that a bit optimistic?" "Isn't that a bit optimistic for, uh...?" "When you're dealing with something that is a long-term project, and the LHC is a long-term project, it's a 20-year project," "You can't think about the end." "Ever." "If you start out a marathon thinking," ""I can't wait to get to the finish line." ""I'm going to have my Gatorade at the finish line." ""I'm going to have my greasy French fries at the finish line,"" "or whatever motivates you, if you start thinking that at mile one and it's like ten minutes into the race and you're thinking to yourself," ""Wow!" "I'm only at mile one." "I've got 25.2 miles to go."" "And if you're thinking that at the start, then you're done." "Mentally you are done." "This is what doing discovery physics means." "This is what doing discovery means." "'Why do people have curiosity, you know?" "'Why do we care about how distant parts of the universe,' things that happened billion years ago like the big bang, why do we find them that interesting?" "It doesn't affect what we do day-to-day." "But nevertheless, once you have curiosity you can't control it." "It'll ask questions about the universe." "It will ask questions about harmonic patterns that create art, music..." "That's a sculpture?" "That's a sculpture." "Doesn't it look like a bunch of broken tiles?" "That's what it's supposed to look like!" "And, um, when I saw it I thought it was just rubble left over from the construction." "You can in principle move it." "So people go up and move pieces?" "No, people don't." "But people could." "Why would they have it so you can move it around if you weren't going to move it around?" "No, I think you're right." "I think you're allowed to move it around." "It's certainly a different experience of it." "I agree." "See I thought that belongs here." "It's just it's the perfect spot." "It certainly changes everything." "It does!" "Slate and granite." "I guess that's the granite and that's the slate." "Hm." "It's interesting." "There's something philosophically about this piece of art that bothers me." "It's taking a lot of sort of random things and making some order out of it." "Yes." "It's trying to make order out of something where there isn't any." "Instead of taking things that don't seem ordered and figuring out that there is order." "'The way we try to reduce the complexity of the world is 'by looking for patterns." "'What we call symmetries." "'We take all the particles we know today 'and we attempt to fit them into some kind of underlying structure." "'Are they the remnants of some more beautiful 'and complete picture of the laws of nature?" "'" "It's like, you go to Egypt and you see ruins." "If you look at it the right way, I could draw a pyramid and see that these chunks of stone are actually the remains of something very clean and very symmetric." "Very beautiful." "We know that the Standard Model is incomplete." "We know that there's other stuff out there, that there are other particles that we haven't seen yet." "Dark matter is a speculated particle, which we think actually dominates the universe, and yet we've never seen it directly and it's not part of the Standard Model." "That's one of those rocks." "We think, possibly, that that and many other particles are still out there and are all part of a much bigger symmetry, a much bigger theory that includes the Standard Model but much more." "'The most popular theory is called Supersymmetry, or SUSY for short." "'Supersymmetry was a theory that sort of started to 'develop in the late '70s." "'Savas was one of the first authors of the first 'theories of supersymmetry.'" "The unfathomable depths of..." "'Supersymmetry is our best 'guess of what else is out there.'" "The bigger theory that incorporates our current theories, the Standard Model." "But for it to be true, we have to discover those other particles." "If I could choose a dream of any theory that the LHC could find, actually I'd love for them to see Supersymmetry." "Supersymmetry says for every type of particle, say the electron, there's a heavy superpartner." "So you have the..." "And they have really stupid names unfortunately called the selectron, um..." "You just add an S to the name - the squark." "Uh." "The sup, the sdown." "Supersymmetry, or SUSY, is extremely important for the theoretical community because it solves many mathematical problems with the Standard Model." "Now experimentally, it would be the experimentalists' dream, you know, tonnes of particles that are just coming out and you just don't even know what to do with, you know, can't even write the data fast enough in order to discover them." "So that'd be my dream." "It used to be that the control room life was kind of a luxury, you know, you could kind of style your hair for the day because you didn't have to wear a hard helmet all day." "You could wear nice shoes, you know, because you were in the control room environment." "Now, it's all back to, you know, bring the dirtiest clothes that you own to work because you're going to be crawling around in like, you know, hard helmets, steel-toed boots." "Not the most attractive shoes but, you know, I kind of like them." "We're pulling out the electronics, we're fixing things that we didn't actually have time to get to during the last shutdown." "The goal of this is that it'll be in even better shape for next beam." "OK, so that is..." "I think all that I have to say." "Hope, uh, hope the theorists aren't driving you crazy." "Don't listen to them, by the way, because theorists, they can sometimes..." "Just telling you." "You got to come back to the experimental world so that you can touch bases with reality." "All right, I'll talk to you soon." "One of the most basic facts about the universe is that it's big." "So you might wonder, "Why is the universe big?"" "There's actually a single number called the cosmological constant, that plays a crucial role in determining what the universe looks like." "In fact, around ten years ago astronomers discovered a really remarkable fact." "The universe is getting bigger and bigger at a faster and faster rate." "But this rate is a million billion billion billion billion billion billion times slower than what we'd actually predict." "When you're off by a factor of a million billion billion billion billion billion billion there's something very wrong with your understanding of basic physics." "Even worse, this one number, the cosmological constant, needs to have this extremely precise value." "And if the value is different even by a tiny bit, we would radically change what the world looks like around us." "If you saw a situation where the parameter has a very dangerous value and you change it a little bit, the world would change radically and we'd be dead, we couldn't possibly live." "You would wonder where that came from, you know, how is that possible?" "So, just on the face of it, you would look at the situation and say, "Wow, someone really cared to put this parameter at just" ""the right value so that we get to be here" ""and that it's a pleasant universe and really cares a lot."" "This is the sort of thing that really keeps you up at night." "It really makes you wonder." "Maybe we've got something about the whole picture, the big picture, totally, totally, totally wrong." "Before I went to elementary school, my mother started telling me biblical stories." "She told me that if we are good we'll go to paradise and we will stay there forever." "And when she said forever I started panicking." "I kept asking, "Forever?" "Forever?" "You mean it never ends?"" "Like, you wake up and you know that then, you go back to sleep and this never ends, never ends, never ends..." "I started crying." "She told me, "What's wrong with you?" ""This is paradise." ""It will be a lot of fun, you will be very happy there."" "But this idea of eternity, something infinite, scared me." "There is a scientific alternative to believing there's someone out there who loves us, twiddling the dials very finely for things to work out." "And this alternative, said briefly, is that everything we see in our observed universe is actually a very small part of a much, much vaster multiverse." "You might literally imagine that from some bird's eye point of view, if you went to enormous distances, you'd see that our universe is actually a little pocket inside a vastly bigger space." "In this picture, these mysterious numbers, like the cosmological constant, are actually basically random." "And out there in the multiverse, next to us somewhere, is another region where these numbers take on some other random value, and then another region where they take on some other random value still." "Only in a tiny sliver, a minuscule part of this gigantic multiverse, for completely accidental reasons, do these numbers take on the very, very special values which allows structures to grow, stars to form, galaxies to form..." "..ultimately things like us to form." "This is the really opposite extreme interpretation of the presence of fine-tuning as intelligent designers would want to give." "If you believe that someone out there cares and twiddles the parameters so that you can exist, that puts our existence at the very core of reality." "If you believe that our entire universe is a tiny little minuscule spec in a gigantic multiverse which is mostly lethal, that's a polar opposite philosophy for what the universe looks like." "In fact, it's an idea that many physicists loathe, because certain questions then become things that we will not hope to be able to understand." "Nima is now an advocate for this idea that the laws of physics are different in different parts of this multiverse, that what we measure in experiments are not deep mysteries of nature but they're just random accidents in our universe," "that maybe even the Higgs itself is a random accident that has occurred in our universe and lets life exist but has no explanation." "In a sense, it's the end of physics." "On the one hand we have the direction that we've been on for the last 400 years, towards increasing beauty, simplicity, symmetry, and a path that has time and time again paid off with deeper and deeper insights about the way the world works." "On the other hand, we have the idea of the multiverse, which would move us to a real picture not of symmetry and beauty and order, but fundamentally of chaos on enormous distances." "This is the really very, very big scale question which the LHC is going to push us in one way or the other." "What happens, for example, if..." "Oh, blimey." "Yeah." "Hi, Katja." "Oh, you're not recording this, huh?" "Yes, we are all on..." "Yeah, don't worry about all the other crap." "'We've got the beams going around again." "'The magnet repairs are holding up well, and our next challenge 'is to take these beams up to high energy and collide them.'" "OK!" "'We're very, very aware of the damage we can do.'" "Here we go!" "'That's what worries me stiff at the moment.'" "The original proposal for ATLAS was in 1989." "And you're kind of riding this idea." "You've got this dream of physics." "This dream of physics is what pulled everyone along for those 19 years." "And so here, now, today, finally, with high-energy collisions, we can start to look for that dream of new physics." "Uh, uh..." "Blue." "The control room, yes." "The control room." "This is the control room." "The pressure of it being an event, of course, is there." "And, of course, anything can go wrong, and it has." "Last weekend was a complete disaster." "We were discussing the possibility that we do collisions during the night, rather than the plan - nine o'clock in the morning." "Of course, this has caused major, sort of knock-ons, for one, the experiments, and two, for the media service." "Good morning, everybody." "I propose we start." "I will take you briefly over the whole summary of the weekend, just to get you up to date what happened." "During the night we tried to set up again for high intensities, for 450 GeV collisions but then, uh, we were cut short because we encountered a vacuum." "What everybody wants, from a physics point of view and from being sure is doing it secretly before and showing it to the media during the day." "And I think this was also the wish of Fabiola's, the wish of everybody, because this is of course, then you're much more certain." "But this does not work nowadays." "The media wants to see this little risk." "I understand, so that means, we have to adapt to that." "Let's see, this." "This is not it." "It doesn't seem like..." "Hit the reload." "I'm reloading it." "Yeah, I wonder if, if we should stop?" "Everyone is reloading it." "Maybe we should stop?" "There you go!" "Hey!" "All right." "OK, now!" "'And indeed welcome to CERN, 'the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, in Geneva, 'welcome to the CERN control centre.'" "'And here on the screen we can 'see the four different experiments" " ATLAS, CMS, LHCb, and ALICE." "'And the programme for today is to first send one beam in one 'direction, a second beam in the opposite direction." "'They will circulate in parallel for a while, 'and when everything is ready, 'and under control the separation is going to be removed, and the beams 'are going to be made to collide 'in the four points around the LHC machine.'" "I just think to myself, if you imagine Thomas Edison inventing the light bulb, if he had tried to invent the light bulb with, like," "100 camera crews in his workshop, and they would've been like, "Oh, my God!" ""You can't even turn it on?" "Come on!" "Turn it on now!" "Come on!" ""Agh, we're still waiting?" ""Come on!" "What's wrong with this guy?"" "There's always one vertical, horizontal beam." "One beam." "Sh!" "Please." "A few minutes." "OK." "Thank you." "Thank you." "Wow." "A few minutes away." "So we should watch that one, this one, the separation bumps, and the event displays." "OK, these are the three screens to watch." "If you have three eyes, one there, one here, and one over there." "So, OK, both beams are at 3.5 TeV, and we've just collapsed the separation bumps, and brought the beams into collision inside the four experiments." "They're starting." "OK." "They're starting." "Two beams." "One in blue one in red." "Each circulating in opposite directions." "They have to get closer and closer." "When the numbers on the four readers say zero it means that the beams are finally aligned." "This is the historical moment we were all expecting." "It can be any time now." "Fantastic!" "CHEERING AND APPLAUSE" "MUSIC:" "Ode To Joy by Ludwig van Beethoven" "Wow, wow!" "Fantastic!" "Beautiful." "Wow." "We are ready." "First things first," "I just have to say, data." "It's unbelievable how fantastic data is." "You have this invariant mass." "This is for the Z to mu-mu channel." "And you have this mass peak of the Zin order to estimate your backgrounds." "It's like the world at ATLAS and LHC and CMS and all these places has suddenly changed." "I mean, it's like, all of a sudden there's data." "And after so many years of not having data and new data, new physics, there's just so much possibility, and even though you're rediscovering the Standard Model, that is more exciting." "But the most exciting thing about the data is not the first collision." "Because the first collision, OK, great, first collision, everyone loves a first." "But the most exciting thing about the data is the, you know, one millionth collision, or the two millionth collision, or the fact that collisions just keep coming and coming and coming and the more and more collisions we have, the more" "and more chance we have to look at the interesting physics." "Because it just means more and more and more data for us." "The running is pretty good." "Right now it's running amazingly." "Yeah, right now, but the day of reckoning is in several months." "We hear rumours on that." "Well, we should be hearing rumours now." "We really should be hearing rumours now." "I'm a little worried actually." "Yeah." "Well, we're hearing murmurs." "What, what's murmurs?" "We're hearing murmurs." "They either there isn't much there or they're doing a very good job keeping a poker face." "Or they're still at a point where half of, where they're still trying to figure out what's a murmur and what's a rumour, internally." "And I think that's probably actually true." "Right." "Right." "The problem is that, also, I take completely innocent remarks, and vastly over-interpret them." "Obviously we're going to learn about the first discovery on Twitter and Facebook." "That's so sad but I think it's true." "It is." "You mean I shouldn't check the arXiv first thing in the morning," "I need to check my Facebook?" "The arXiv is the last thing." "First thing, check Nima's Twitter feed." "Then check the arXiv." "If Nima has a Twitter feed, then there's something has been discovered." "It is August 7th, 2011, and, um, this is a significant time for the LHC." "The first big set of data was presented at the end of July." "The data has little extra bits in it which, um, could be interpreted as a Higgs." "Even though the LHC is running at half power, it actually has gotten data much, much faster than anybody expected." "And that allowed them to be sensitive to the Higgs boson." "It's fucking cool right now." "There was a huge excitement because the Higgs results of the two main detectors, CMS and ATLAS, were first shown, together, in the same meeting." "For me, as Run Coordinator, I discussed every little problem where we lost here a little bit of data and there a little bit of data, so somehow I really feel attached, to this data set." "So, somehow it makes me proud if the Higgs is found or not with this data set." "The mass of the Higgs, namely the weight of the Higgs, can actually tell us, or give us a hint, about what comes next." "If the mass is on the lighter side, then that's consistent with some of the standard things we've been looking for - supersymmetry generally favours that the Higgs is as light as possible, about 115 times the mass of the proton." "It's 115 GeV" " Giga electron volts." "If, on the other hand, the Higgs is 140 GeV, 140 times the mass of the proton, it's a terrible mass because 140 GeV is associated with theories that rely on the multiverse." "ATLAS has a little bump here." "A small excess visible near 140." "'And now, holy crap!" "It's 140!" "'It's starting to look like nature has made its choice.'" "What do we learn if the LHC does discover a Higgs at 140 and nothing else?" "Chaos..." "'The problem with the multiverse 'is that it says the Higgs might be the last particle we ever see.'" "So, what we should do, I think the Higgs mass issue..." "'If we don't see any new particles besides the Higgs, 'we don't get any explanation 'for dark matter, we don't know how the Higgs itself got a mass, 'we never get access to the deeper theory.'" "'All that information could be in the other universes." "'We may be at the end of the road." "'That's it.'" "Uh..." "I guess..." "Um..." "Well, if it's right at that number then it would be so fucking astounding." "Where the F is SUSY, right?" "I mean, there's nothing!" "I mean, where's all the other stuff?" "Where are the other particles?" "What happened to dark matter?" "I mean..." "I've heard of many theories saying that new particles might be at even higher energies, so..." "Right." "Who knows, I mean, it always comes differently." "Who knows if there are other interesting things, you know?" "Somehow it always comes differently than you expect." "I know that the theorists are all up in arms, because, you know, it could be a heavy Higgs, but I've always said that the worst-case scenario would be Higgs and Higgs only." "Who knows?" "Come on it's just a little excess." "I know, I know." "If this doesn't show up by the end of next year, then we can change subject, I think." "If you don't see any supersymmetric signal..." "Well, but if it's 140, that would be serious." "Yeah." "Don't tell me, this is my nightmare." "It's only 30 for me." "At the moment it's scary." "At the moment it's scary." "It's scary." "Yes, then we have to wait another couple of years for the next round." "No, another two years I'm saying." "But, still it doesn't matter, you'll be working harder." "No, but independent of that, I think you, you'll know the truth." "And that's the important thing." "Coffee is a very serious business in the life of a theorist." "It's not like physics research, where you can wait for 30 years, before you know if you are right, within a few minutes it pays off." "If you succeed, it's great, if you fail, you get to try another one in another minute." "In particle physics, you construct a theory 20 years ago, and it may take that long before you know if you're on the right track." "Jumping from failure to failure, with undiminished enthusiasm, is the big secret to success." "Well, the hint that the Higgs was 140 GeV has disappeared." "All of the new data that just came in, didn't make the peak bigger, it sort of filled in the gaps." "And now the peak doesn't look very good." "In fact, the belief is that it's gone away, and that the Higgs can't be 140 GeV." "In order for us to believe that we've discovered it, that peak needs to be big, and basically keep growing as the data comes in." "It's a statistical thing." "We call it the Greek letter "sigma"." "If you reach a height of five sigma, that's when you know that you've seen something." "And the probability that that just happens by accident, is one in 3.5 million." "But, the Higgs, it's not at 140, which is a bit of a relief, because there's still hope it might be down around 115." "We like 115 because, if the Higgs is that light, the theory says there has to be new particles, like supersymmetry." "Otherwise the universe is unstable." "It wouldn't have survived this long." "This is one of the few, truly perfect academic institutions in the world." "I mean, there's no excuse, no excuse at all, not to... not to think and work and get things done." "That's its only problem." "There's no excuse at all not to think and work and get things done." "You can't blame it on anything if it doesn't work." "OK, supersymmetry versus multiverse." "Oh, boy!" "All right." "That's er..." "If we're going to start doing that, this is going to be interesting." "'We have been anticipating that whatever happens 'is going to throw the field in one direction or another.'" "Oh..." "'Now that we're really on the doorstep of knowing the actual number," "'I really care intensely about what that number is.'" "Well, faster than we thought, there's news that there's going to be another announcement about the Higgs." "I've heard tons of rumours and I've heard that they're things on blogs and there's stuff in the newspaper." "18 hours or so until the announcements, so I'm really looking forward to what they're going to say and I want to be there." "Actually, I'm thinking of going early in the morning, or I'll send my young colleagues, who have more stamina to sit and occupy a chair for me." "It is July 3rd, the night of July 3rd 2012, and I am driving to Princeton, to the Institute, to hang out with Nima and a big crowd who are all staying up until 3 o'clock in the morning" "because, they're going to present the Higgs data at CERN at nine o'clock in the morning, Geneva time." "Certainly the biggest thing that's happened, the discovery of new fundamental particles in my lifetime." "And the Higgs is a particle like no other." "Like nothing we've ever seen before, and it is weird and we do not understand it, but..." "But, er... ..and I missed my exit." "INAUDIBLE VOICES" "Hi." "Hi." "CROWD CHANTS" "..cinq, dix-sept, huit, neuf..." "It needs quite some skills to sit on it, it's possible." "OK." "You know there's one wheel missing." "No, there's one wheel missing, so you always think you fall down." "OK." "Look at some of these people, like totally asleep." "Yeah." "No, those are the sleeping bags." "INAUDIBLE VOICES" "My volume is up, I don't know why I'm not getting sound." "There isn't like a thing on here with sound, is there?" "Who reads lips here?" "Can anyone see if they get sound?" "Try streaming it in their offices, or something?" "Many apologies, guys, I don't know what's going on." "Ah, Peter Higgs." "Ah, there he is." "Here he is, very good." "Someone with an iPad..." "APPLAUSE AND CHEERING" "Not as well seated as my summer student." "No!" "Right." "Peter Higgs doesn't even get a good seat!" "Good morning everybody, here in Geneva." "Today is a special day." "We hear two presentations from the two experiments ATLAS and CMS." "We are starting in a non-alphabetical order and I ask Joe Incandela from CMS to take the floor." "APPLAUSE" "OK..." "So, I will give the status of the CMS Higgs search." "I want to really dedicate this to the CMS collaboration." "This is a picture we took last week." "We had a party, this is only 400 or 500 people." "Remember there are 4,000 people in the experiment." "This is not the real CMS detector." "That's down underground." "This is the spare that we keep upstairs." "LAUGHTER" "So one page for the theorists, that's all they deserve." "No, I'm kidding." "The Standard Model is here, is shown here." "This is what we know." "But one of the big stories of this year was, as you know, those of you in the field, is pile-up." "We had to deal with very intense beams, like never before seen in the field with many, many interactions, and this slide shows you one event." "The colours correspond to tracks from different particles." "and it was in these kind of events that we're looking for one of the rarest particles ever made and that's what we call the Higgs." "'And so this is where things stood last week." "'As you know, if you look at the radiative corrections to the W, 'there's a connection to the top, it goes like the top squared, 'for the Higgs it goes like the log, so if you know the W" "'and top mass very well, you can predict a long band." "'There were two major developments last year, one at the Tevatron, 'they really had a tour-de-force measurement...'" "Sorry, yeah." "Here it is." "'And we end up with four event classes.' Ah, there it is!" "'OK, to wrap up, in summary." "'We conclude, by saying that we have observed a new boson with 'a mass of 125.3, plus/minus 0.6 GeV 'at 4.9 standard deviations." "Thank you.'" "APPLAUSE" "125.3." "OK, so now..." "Wow!" "125?" "Do you know ATLAS's result?" "This is..." "OK." "I think I can only say "congratulations" to everybody." "I will say a few words more, later." "Now we go immediately to ATLAS, Fabiola Gianotti." "Please..." "Thank you." "APPLAUSE" "Good morning." "ATLAS is very pleased to present here today, updated results on Standard Model Higgs searches based on up to 10.7 inverse femptobarn of data recorded in 2011 and 2012 and it's a big honour and a big emotion for me" "to represent this fantastic collaboration at this occasion." "So, let's go to the results for this channel." "You can see here the results for the 2011 to 2012 and the combination of the two." "The gamma-jet and jet-jet background with one or both jet requirement that the energy in a cone around the photon is below a structure which reproduces very well the LHC bunch rate, with a field bunch, small gaps." "So then, of course, we correct..." "CONTINUES INAUDIBLY" "'We know the linearity between a few GeV and a few hundred GeV 'at the level of a few per mil is fit in the nine different categories 'with an exponential function to model the background 'so, no theoretical prediction, no Monte Carlo, the background" ";is determined from the side bands of the possible signal." "'From this spectrum, the background fit you get this plot here.'" "Now the grand combination." "Here it goes." "So this distribution is extremely clean, except one big spike, here, in this region here." "Excess with a local significance of 5.0 sigma at a mass of 126.5 GeV." "APPLAUSE AND CHEERING" "As a layman I would now say... .."I think we have it."" "APPLAUSE CONTINUES" "Come here, come here!" "CHEERING" "OK." "Where's Peter?" "Peter is there." "Get Peter." "Peter's there." "Peter!" "APPLAUSE AND CHEERING" "Well, I would like to add my congratulations to everybody involved in this tremendous achievement." "For me, it's really an incredible thing that it's happened in my lifetime." "Not only in your lifetime, Peter." "LAUGHTER" "APPLAUSE" "That's a great day, huh?" "That's a great day." "And I think all of us, and all of the people outside watching it in the different meeting rooms, everybody who was involved and is involved in the project, can be proud of this day." "OK, enjoy it!" "We found the Higgs!" "Scientists this morning announced they are almost certain they've discovered what has been called the "God particle."" "It is not every day that you see a whole bunch of scientists, standing up with champagne bottles and cheering." "Now, the God particle, we physicists wince when we hear these words." "It's the last piece of the puzzle, physicists have been looking for for decades." "Thank you for your attention, thanks to everybody on the panel." "If I could just ask you all to remain seated for a few minutes." "Clear the passage, here, please." "Clear the passage here, please." "Can we have a clear passage?" "Thank you." "Thank you." "Congratulations." "Thank you." "I did feel a sense of pride, when the Higgs was announced." "But I felt a sense of pride for humanity." "That, you know, we little people on a little planet with tiny brains, can go so deep and understand what happens." "Now we're talking about sub-nuclear distances 1,000 times smaller than an atomic nucleus." "Nevertheless, we can get things right, and just the power of the human mind." "It's astonishing that there are any laws of nature at all." "That they're describable by mathematics..." "That mathematics is a tool that humans can understand." "That the laws of nature can be written on a page." "It's the greatest of all mysteries." "There is a strong sense that we are hearing nature talk to us." "Turns out, the Higgs mass is about as interesting as it could be." "It's sort of in no-man's land." "It doesn't prefer symmetries and it doesn't prefer multiverse but it's right in the middle." "The data is puzzling enough, that it hasn't excluded any of the theories I was involved with but it hasn't confirmed them either." "But, until we look at detailed properties of the Higgs, and until we have the high-energy version of the LHC in a couple of years, we will not be able to make a stronger statement." "'The most important, first lesson, of the discovery of the Higgs, 'is that physics works." "'The Higgs on the one hand completes the most successful 'scientific theory we've ever had, on the other hand opens the door 'to some very major paradoxes that we now must address." "'We're at a fork in the road, and the LHC is steadfastly refusing 'to push us in one direction or the other." "'The multiverse on the one side 'and some beautiful symmetry on the other side." "'It's cranking up the suspense as much as it possibly can.'" "Before the LHC started, we would always say "new physics" ""is just around the corner."" "And now we're kind of like, "new physics is still out there."" "And, for one, I'm not discouraged by this, by any means, because, we know that new physics has to be out there." "The next step is, the LHC goes into a shut down, stays off for two years for improvements and upgrades and when it returns it's going to be twice the energy." "And for sure my vote's for Supersymmetry." "Jesus." "That was exciting." "If this is true, the Higgs is about 125 GeV and that means..." "Yeah, actually almost all of my models are ruled out." "Which..." "All the Supersymmetry models, which is pretty cool." "I mean Supersymmetry could still be true, but it would have to be a very strange version of a theory." "And if it's the multiverse, well other universes would be amazing, of course." "But it could also mean, no other new particles discovered." "And, then, a Higgs with a mass of 125 is right at a critical point for the fate of our universe." "Without any other new particles, that Higgs is unstable, it's temporary." "And since the Higgs holds everything together, if the Higgs goes... ..everything goes." "It's amazing that the Higgs, the centre of the Standard Model, the thing we've all been looking for, could actually also be the thing that destroys everything." "The creator and the destroyer." "But...we could discover new particles and then none of that would be true." "And, anyway, we have something to do." "There is a very nice sentence in The Divine Comedy by Dante who says," ""Fatti non foste a viver come bruti," ""ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza,"" "which means, "We were not born to live as animals," ""but to pursue knowledge and virtue."" "So, science and knowledge are very important." "Like art is very important." "It's a need of mankind." "I just saw, two weeks ago, Werner Herzog, talking about and then screening his new movie." "It was about these incredible caves that they discovered a few years ago in France." "Stunningly beautiful." "Gorgeously drawn horses, bison, rhinoceros, lions because 40,000 years ago, this is what was going on there." "In exploration, and science is exploration, there needs to be the set of people who have no rules and they are going into the frontier and come back with the strange animals and the interesting rocks and the amazing pictures to show us what's out there." "Discover something." "Why do humans do science?" "Why do they do art?" "The things that are least important for our survival, are the very things that make us human."