Speaker 1: It's very natural in physics to describe the unknown in
Speaker 1: terms of the known, and so we understand like grains
Speaker 1: of sand and tiny rocks and this stuff. So when
Speaker 1: we think of particles, we like to think of them
Speaker 1: as tiny little balls of stuff. But they're not balls
Speaker 1: of stuff because they have no space to them. So
Speaker 1: then if they don't have space to them, how can
Speaker 1: they have stuff to them? Because we think of mass
Speaker 1: is being stuff. Right, Like, I'm made up of all
Speaker 1: the particles in me, and I have mass because of
Speaker 1: all those particles having mass, I'm like the sum of
Speaker 1: all those particles. I am Jorge, and I'm Daniel. Welcome
Speaker 1: to Daniel and Jorge. Explained the universe. Explain the universe.
Speaker 1: The universe. Explain the universe, the whole universe. People. That's
Speaker 1: the topic of this podcast today. We're gonna be asking
Speaker 1: the question what is the Higgs boson? What is the
Speaker 1: Higgs boson? After all? Yeah, it turns out it's a
Speaker 1: really important particle, right, Daniel, that's right. It cost US
Speaker 1: ten billion dollars to build the LHC and find the
Speaker 1: Higgs boson. Good thing, we found it. A good thing.
Speaker 1: We found it. And actually I was kind of disappointed
Speaker 1: when we found it, but we can get into that later. Um,
Speaker 1: But the Higgs boson is a big discovery. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: it's very important because it's it's like what keeps everything together.
Speaker 1: We wouldn't be here without the Higgs boson, that's right.
Speaker 1: We wouldn't be here without photons or ws or z's
Speaker 1: or Higgs boson. It all comes together in the beautiful
Speaker 1: symphony of particles that make up our universe. Right. But
Speaker 1: it's sort of the most recently discovered particle and in
Speaker 1: lots of ways, the weirdest. So we thought it'd be
Speaker 1: fun to talk about and actually break it down, like
Speaker 1: what is the Higgs boson? After all? But before we
Speaker 1: jump into it, Um, I thought i'd be cool to
Speaker 1: talk about how this is. The Higgs boson is actually
Speaker 1: sort of how we started working together. That's right. That
Speaker 1: was our first date. Right, let's talk about the Higgs boson.
Speaker 1: That's right. We met on physics. Tender, physics plus cartoonists tender. No,
Speaker 1: but you're right, it's unusual for physicists and cartoonists to
Speaker 1: spend this much time talking about science, So let's tell
Speaker 1: them how that started. Yeah. So I'm a cartoonist. I
Speaker 1: draw something called PhD comics, and I've been doing that
Speaker 1: for a long time on the Internet, and then one
Speaker 1: day I just get this email from this physicist at
Speaker 1: the University of California at Irvine saying, hey, jor hey,
Speaker 1: I would like to pay you too and commission you
Speaker 1: to draw some comics about the Higgs boson. And is
Speaker 1: that the first time a physicists had ever cold emailed you?
Speaker 1: That was the first time a physicist has offered to
Speaker 1: pay me, to be honest, So I was like, what
Speaker 1: you want to pay me? What is that about? But
Speaker 1: I thought was that was pretty cool. It seemed like
Speaker 1: it's kind of something I was needing. And you know,
Speaker 1: I had been seeing a lot of the buzz about
Speaker 1: the Higgs boson and the search for the Higgs boson
Speaker 1: a few years ago, and so I was really intrigued
Speaker 1: about about what it was. I wanted to learn more
Speaker 1: about it, and so I said, yeah, let's let's make
Speaker 1: something that explains what the Higgs boson is. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: I've been reading all the buzz about the Higgs boson
Speaker 1: and I thought, man, this is all buzz and no reality.
Speaker 1: You know, there's so much writing about the Higgs boson.
Speaker 1: That's just like throws together a bunch of important sounding words,
Speaker 1: which doesn't actually explain it. And right, I felt like
Speaker 1: there was this gap where we weren't really digging into
Speaker 1: it and communicating with the public what it was actually like.
Speaker 1: And I was hoping, you know, something visual would work. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like people are sort of afraid of getting too
Speaker 1: far into it, right, Like nobody wanted to touch kind
Speaker 1: of the serious mechanics and how it was, how it was,
Speaker 1: how you guys were looking for it. Yeah, and a
Speaker 1: lot of it was sort of poetic writing. You know,
Speaker 1: there's things like in the New York Times when they
Speaker 1: say that scientists have revealed the deepest layer of reality
Speaker 1: humans have ever probed, and like, I mean, this is
Speaker 1: my field. I don't even know what that means, Like
Speaker 1: what like where what is that guy smoking? And where
Speaker 1: can I get some You're like poetry? So you're actually
Speaker 1: one of the scientists who worked on Like you're you're
Speaker 1: like one of the one a couple of thousand physicists
Speaker 1: that worked on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. That's right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's several thousand of us all collaborating at this collider
Speaker 1: and the detectors surrounding the collision points, and we all
Speaker 1: work together to make this project happen, all right, So
Speaker 1: you reach out to me, and so we we created
Speaker 1: this video called the Higgs Boson explained. The Higgs theory
Speaker 1: starts with this. Imagine a field that for me, it's
Speaker 1: the entire universe, and every particle UH feels this field
Speaker 1: is affected by this field in different amounts. So some
Speaker 1: particles are really slowed down by interaction to this field,
Speaker 1: like you know, swimming through molasses, and other particles hardly
Speaker 1: feel it. So the ones that hardly feel it, they
Speaker 1: have a small mass. The ones that are really affected
Speaker 1: by the couple strongly to this field are slowed down
Speaker 1: a lot. They have large mass. So you've turned the
Speaker 1: question of why do particles have different masses into a
Speaker 1: different question why do particles feel the Higgs field differently?
Speaker 1: But there is one manifestation of the field is the
Speaker 1: existence of this particle. Yeah, that's right. You were at
Speaker 1: CERN and we sat down to the cafeteria and just
Speaker 1: talked about physics for hours and hours, and you recorded it,
Speaker 1: and it recorded like hours of conversation then edited down
Speaker 1: to a few minutes to make me sound really sharp.
Speaker 1: Thanks thanks for that, by the way, I was trying
Speaker 1: to make you sound poltic. Um. So yeah. So then
Speaker 1: we put it out there and it was super popular,
Speaker 1: and then they discovered the Higgs boson actually, and then
Speaker 1: the video went viral, like millions and millions of people
Speaker 1: saw this video and um, and it was amazing. It
Speaker 1: was great, and people were saying, like like the New
Speaker 1: York Times and CBS News, all these places were saying,
Speaker 1: this is the clearest and easiest to understand explanation of
Speaker 1: what the Higgs boson was. And so you might ask,
Speaker 1: since we put out that video, has everybody now just
Speaker 1: everybody understand the Higgs boson? How well have we succeeded
Speaker 1: in explaining the Higgs boson people in that short video. Well,
Speaker 1: I think the video is up to like three million
Speaker 1: views or something, so we've reached at least three million people,
Speaker 1: that's right. Well, I went out on campus and asked
Speaker 1: random people. I walked into what is the Higgs boson?
Speaker 1: Do you know what it is? Do you care about it?
Speaker 1: What do you understand about it? And here's what they
Speaker 1: had to say. Have you heard of the Higgs boson. Yes,
Speaker 1: it's a particle. I have no idea. No, it's a
Speaker 1: sub potomic particle. Alright, So it sort of seems like
Speaker 1: maybe everyone has sort of heard about it. Everyone has
Speaker 1: heard about the Higgs boson. That's right. The buzz has
Speaker 1: succeeded in at least convincing people that the Higgs is
Speaker 1: a thing. Good brand management there, brand exactly if we
Speaker 1: could only copyright that or something. Yes, so people know
Speaker 1: the Higgs is a thing. Some people call it, say
Speaker 1: it's a particle, but that's really about it. That's like
Speaker 1: the level of knowledge that's penetrated sort of the cultural
Speaker 1: zeitgeist into people's minds. The Higgs is a particle. People
Speaker 1: have found it, That's what's the thing, Right, It's a
Speaker 1: Nobody seemed to know what it was or what it
Speaker 1: was for. Yeah, nobody said anything about how it's responsible
Speaker 1: for giving particles mass, or the meaning of the discovery,
Speaker 1: or why it's significant or anything like that. So from
Speaker 1: that point of you, I think UM science has done
Speaker 1: a good job and telling people what they found, But
Speaker 1: I'm not sure that we've really succeeded in explaining what
Speaker 1: is the Higgs boson? Why is it interesting? So that's
Speaker 1: why we thought it would be a good episode for
Speaker 1: this podcast. So it's like, you've done a good job
Speaker 1: of telling people that you're doing your job and the
Speaker 1: job is important, but don't don't really ask is what's
Speaker 1: going on? That's about as far as we've gone. No,
Speaker 1: I'm happy to talk to people about it. That's why
Speaker 1: we're here. Yeah, that's right, that's what so tell us, Uh, well,
Speaker 1: what is the Higgs boson? What is it for? What
Speaker 1: is it for? Well, um, the Higgs boson is a particle, right,
Speaker 1: and we have we're familiar with lots of particles, you know,
Speaker 1: electrons and corks and other larger particles like protons and
Speaker 1: neutrons and most of the particles in our everyday world.
Speaker 1: They're the things that make up matter, you know, electrons
Speaker 1: and these corks make up the stuff that we're made
Speaker 1: out of the stuff. We're made of stuff. And one
Speaker 1: mystery we always wondered about was like, how do these
Speaker 1: particles have mass? How do these particles weigh anything? You know,
Speaker 1: how do these particles have any stuff to them? What
Speaker 1: do you mean, like, why do they have mass? What
Speaker 1: does that even mean? To just wonder if something has mass? Well,
Speaker 1: it's interesting because you think about these particles and mathematically
Speaker 1: we think of these particles as just points in space
Speaker 1: like dots, like zero volume, Like how big is the electron.
Speaker 1: People have some fuzzy ways to calculate electron size, you know,
Speaker 1: the electron radius, using like the photons that's surrounded, but
Speaker 1: at its core, the electron itself is zero volume point
Speaker 1: in space. And I always thought that's weird. So it's
Speaker 1: not like a basketball. Like a basketball, you can put
Speaker 1: it down and it had it goes from like here
Speaker 1: to here, and it has a surface to it, right,
Speaker 1: has an extent exactly, basketball has an extent. One side
Speaker 1: of it is not the same place as the other
Speaker 1: side of it. Right this you can measure its length
Speaker 1: and its width and its height exactly has a volume.
Speaker 1: But electrons and point particles are not like that. They're
Speaker 1: not like that. Two different particles can have different masses,
Speaker 1: but they're both the same side, is right. So if
Speaker 1: you if you're thinking, oh, are these particles all made
Speaker 1: it out of some sort of like basic universe stuff
Speaker 1: and one of them is a bigger spoonful than the
Speaker 1: other one, will know they're both zero size spoonfuls. So
Speaker 1: that just can't explain why one has more mass than
Speaker 1: the other. And but it can't explain why either one
Speaker 1: has any mass, because there's no room for stuff in
Speaker 1: there anyway, right, there's no like, um, there's no more
Speaker 1: of something in one of them and more or less
Speaker 1: of something in the other. There's just no there's nothing,
Speaker 1: there's no stuff to it. And so that was a
Speaker 1: big mystery. That was a big mystery, like how did
Speaker 1: these particles get mass exactly? Yeah, let's talk about that,
Speaker 1: but first let's take a quick break. I think it's
Speaker 1: in the end more natural to think about the mass
Speaker 1: these particles not as the amount of tiny unit her
Speaker 1: stuff in them, but just like a label. Right, Like
Speaker 1: you think about the electron. You know the electron is
Speaker 1: negative charge, but you don't worry like where in the
Speaker 1: electron is that negative charge? Is there room to put
Speaker 1: that charge in the electron? You don't think about that
Speaker 1: or worry about that, the same way you think about mass.
Speaker 1: Mass is just a label for particles. We don't understand
Speaker 1: really what these particles things are. What we think of
Speaker 1: them as points in space with a set of labels, spin, mass, charge,
Speaker 1: all sorts of other interactions and that's basically it. And
Speaker 1: so mass isn't like amount of stuff. It's just another label, um,
Speaker 1: and it's a label that affects how these particles move. Right,
Speaker 1: Mass means inertia means it's harder for it to speed
Speaker 1: up and harder for it to slow down, just like
Speaker 1: maybe like the electron has negative one electrical charge, and
Speaker 1: maybe like I want to say a prolem, but I
Speaker 1: know persons are made out of quarks, but like one
Speaker 1: of the quarks has plus one third allergical charge. That's
Speaker 1: just like something that is inherent in it. That's right.
Speaker 1: In a hundred years, we might have an explanation for that.
Speaker 1: We might have sub corks which are made out of
Speaker 1: something else and add up to have the minus one
Speaker 1: third charge or the plus two thirds charge or whatever.
Speaker 1: We might someday have an explanation for that, but currently
Speaker 1: we don't, and so we just think of them as
Speaker 1: these point particles. And the Higgs boson explains that that
Speaker 1: was the mystery, Right, how can particles have mass? What
Speaker 1: is this thing we call mass for a particle? How
Speaker 1: does that even make sense? And the Higgs boson is
Speaker 1: part of this larger idea called the Higgs mechanism, which
Speaker 1: includes also the Higgs field, and the Higgs field is
Speaker 1: something which permeates all of space. It's just like you know,
Speaker 1: the way like electromagnetic fields can you know, fill space. Also,
Speaker 1: they theorize this particle a long time ago, like in
Speaker 1: the sixties they said, um, well we have this mystery
Speaker 1: about why some particles have mass, why did they have mass?
Speaker 1: So we think we have this theory and this was
Speaker 1: down done in the sixties. Yeah, yeah, and so just
Speaker 1: to make sure we finished the explanation of what they
Speaker 1: actually Higgs boson is right, sis field the field space
Speaker 1: and particles feel this field and if they feel it
Speaker 1: really strongly, then it prevents them from speeding up and
Speaker 1: slowing down. And that's the same thing as having mass.
Speaker 1: That is what having mass means. That means you have inertia.
Speaker 1: Inertia is the property of things to resist being slowed
Speaker 1: down and the property to resist being sped up. So
Speaker 1: interacting with the Higgs field is the same thing as
Speaker 1: having mass. So what do you mean like a field,
Speaker 1: Like it's just like this thing, this mathematic is it
Speaker 1: like a mathematical concept that sucks surrounding us, or it's
Speaker 1: like actually a thing. It's actually a thing. The field
Speaker 1: is actually a thing, like the way an electric field is. Right.
Speaker 1: Electric field is a mathematical concept, but it's also a
Speaker 1: physical thing. You can measure it um you put an
Speaker 1: electron and electric field, it'll move, so you can see it. Right.
Speaker 1: You line up magnetic shavings on a table, you can
Speaker 1: see magnetic fields, like your compass sees a magnetic field. Right.
Speaker 1: So Higgs field is just like another field, like a
Speaker 1: magnetic field or electric field. Right. But usually in a
Speaker 1: like the mechanic field, there's a source, right, like there's
Speaker 1: a magnet, or there's like a charge, or there's a
Speaker 1: battery or something like that. But what is like this
Speaker 1: Higgs field is just there. Yeah. And that's one of
Speaker 1: the fascinating things about it is that without any particular
Speaker 1: localized source, it has some energy to its, some value
Speaker 1: to it, all the way through the universe. And that's
Speaker 1: why these particles can get mass. It's called a vacuum
Speaker 1: expectation value, which is a technical term I Pobily shouldn't
Speaker 1: have mentioned. But it's a really weird thing about this
Speaker 1: field is that it fills the universe and without any
Speaker 1: particular source, it has some strength to it, and the
Speaker 1: effect of that is to give all particles inertia, which
Speaker 1: is basically the same as mass. So when you say
Speaker 1: that like particle A has this much mass, it means
Speaker 1: that when it tries to move around, it feels the
Speaker 1: Higgs field that much. Yeah. When if you have particle
Speaker 1: A and then you give it a push, right, well,
Speaker 1: acceleration F equals m A right, so a little push
Speaker 1: should give you acceleration, But the amount of acceleration asian
Speaker 1: you get from the push depends on the M part
Speaker 1: of F equals m A. Right. The larger your force,
Speaker 1: the more your acceleration. But the larger your mass, the
Speaker 1: less your acceleration. So you need a really big push
Speaker 1: to accelerate the Earth, for example, and a really little
Speaker 1: push to accelerate you know, a grain of sand. And
Speaker 1: so you would say that that's because the Earth is
Speaker 1: interacting more strongly with the Higgs field, whereas the little
Speaker 1: grain of salt is like almost ignored by the Higgs field. Yeah,
Speaker 1: in comparison exactly. And so really massive particles interact with
Speaker 1: the Higgs field a lot, and and massless particles or
Speaker 1: particles that have almost no mass hardly interact with the
Speaker 1: Higgs field at all, there's really easy to accelerate or
Speaker 1: to slow down. Have almost no inertia. So it's kind
Speaker 1: of like it's like you're in the ocean. You're underwater,
Speaker 1: and uh, if you are really massive, then maybe you
Speaker 1: have kind of like an odd shape and so it's
Speaker 1: really hard to move in the water. But maybe if
Speaker 1: you have a sleep shape, and it's really easy for
Speaker 1: you to move around in the water, and so that
Speaker 1: sort of shapeness is maybe what mass would be. Yeah,
Speaker 1: people try really hard to come up with like intuitive
Speaker 1: analogies for the Higgs field, and almost all of them
Speaker 1: are roughly right, and that they give you the sense
Speaker 1: that the Higgs field is the thing that makes it
Speaker 1: hard to move through space, but they're technically almost all
Speaker 1: not correct because what the thing you describe, which is like,
Speaker 1: you know what friction from water is different from inertia, right,
Speaker 1: Friction from water is always going to slow you down.
Speaker 1: Inertia makes it hard to slow down. So something that's
Speaker 1: moving really really fast it's hard to slow down because
Speaker 1: it has inertia. M So it's just some some sort
Speaker 1: of field that affects how easily you can change in speed, right,
Speaker 1: whether it's gleating up or slowing down. So we should
Speaker 1: just stop at that and not try to make any
Speaker 1: molasses or politicians in the crowd analogies that's right, exactly,
Speaker 1: or deep poetic statements about the meaning of the universe exactly, right. Um.
Speaker 1: But yeah, and you were saying earlier people came on
Speaker 1: this idea decades ago, right, yeah, and so they took
Speaker 1: him that long and billion dollars to find it, even
Speaker 1: more than thirteen billion dollars. But it's it's a cool
Speaker 1: story because it's an idea that came sort of out
Speaker 1: of a search for beauty or poetry. Actually, I shouldn't
Speaker 1: have I shouldn't have dogged poetry or a long this
Speaker 1: podcast of a huge mistake. I didn't mean poetry in
Speaker 1: a negative sense of an empty poetry, right, right, right,
Speaker 1: poetry without mathematical references. That's right. We just lost the
Speaker 1: huge poetry loving audience segment of this audience. Let's get
Speaker 1: him back. Let's get him back, prepared turn on poetry now. Okay,
Speaker 1: So people were thinking about the particles we've seen and
Speaker 1: how they work, and they were wondering about patterns there
Speaker 1: and the short version of The story is that they
Speaker 1: noticed a pattern and the patterns would be missing something.
Speaker 1: You know. It's like they looked at the list of
Speaker 1: particles we had in the forces and they said, m hmm,
Speaker 1: this would be so prettier, this would be so much
Speaker 1: more elegant if there was one more piece here, one
Speaker 1: thing that made that that tied it all together, you know,
Speaker 1: like the rug that tied the Bowski's room together. Like
Speaker 1: the equation seemed out of balance, right, Like it's we
Speaker 1: had they had an equation and it just it was
Speaker 1: just kind of imbalanced. Is that what you mean by beauty? Yeah,
Speaker 1: And in particular, people were trying to unify forces. There's
Speaker 1: a long history in physics of trying to bring everything
Speaker 1: together into a single equation, like can we describe all
Speaker 1: the physics in a single equation? And you know, for
Speaker 1: a long time we've had different um we've talked about
Speaker 1: a different phenomena like magnetism and electricity, and one of
Speaker 1: some of the great advances in physics have been in
Speaker 1: unifying those forces, like showing electricity and magnetism are actually
Speaker 1: part of the same force. It's called electromagnetism. And the
Speaker 1: things that we think of as as magnetic and I
Speaker 1: think to think of electric, aren't you just two sides
Speaker 1: of the same coin. So there's a great tradition there.
Speaker 1: It's like simplifying things bringing them together. And so people
Speaker 1: were trying to do that one more time, and they're saying,
Speaker 1: can we bring the weak force, the thing that's responsible
Speaker 1: for like radioactive decay. Can we bring that together with electromagnetism.
Speaker 1: One problem is that the weak force is really really
Speaker 1: is really really weak is compared to electromagnetism. And the
Speaker 1: reason the weak force is so weak is because the
Speaker 1: particles that carry it, the W and the z boson,
Speaker 1: are really heavy, if huge amounts of mass, whereas the
Speaker 1: photon for electromagnetism is really light. So one reason that
Speaker 1: electromagnetism is so powerful, such a strong force, is that
Speaker 1: the photon, the thing that carries it, can go really
Speaker 1: far there is no mass, whereas the W n z
Speaker 1: bosons have so much mass it makes it a very
Speaker 1: short range force. So the question they were trying to
Speaker 1: understand is how do we bring these two things together.
Speaker 1: Why do the W z bosons have mass and the
Speaker 1: photon doesn't. So obviously, the equation they were trying to
Speaker 1: make more elegant. So it was weird that some particles
Speaker 1: would have mass and some others would not. That was
Speaker 1: like theoretically mathematically weird, and so they came up with
Speaker 1: this idea of the Higgs field to patch it up.
Speaker 1: That's right, that's right, the Higgs field and the Higgs
Speaker 1: particle together in this thing called the Higgs mechanism. And
Speaker 1: if you add the Higgs mechanism to the theory, then boom,
Speaker 1: it explains it. It connects the weak force with electromagnetism,
Speaker 1: and it explains why the W and Z have mass
Speaker 1: and the photon doesn't. And so that was really beautiful.
Speaker 1: People are like, wow, that really makes sense. That's pretty.
Speaker 1: You know, there's like an elegance to that theory, and
Speaker 1: people were hoping that it's also true. You know, Nature
Speaker 1: doesn't have to come up with nure, doesn't have to
Speaker 1: reveal that the universe is beautiful. And sometimes, as as
Speaker 1: human physicists, we use like like aesthetic sense to like
Speaker 1: sense what is nature's solution, Like how should things work?
Speaker 1: And we want things to be pretty. It doesn't always
Speaker 1: work out that way. This history is littered with like
Speaker 1: beautiful theories that turned out to be wrong. Well, this
Speaker 1: is a perfect point to take a break. So but
Speaker 1: back to the story of the Higgs boson. Yeah, after
Speaker 1: all that, they found it, right, How did they find
Speaker 1: the Higgs boson? Yeah, well they were looking for it
Speaker 1: for a long time. Um, and people thought there was
Speaker 1: a collider in Geneva before the Large John Collider. There
Speaker 1: was one called the Large Electron Positron Collider that leap
Speaker 1: l EP and people built that one, and they really
Speaker 1: were hoping to find the Higgs Boson there because like
Speaker 1: how their name has the word large in it, you know,
Speaker 1: like what if you build a bigger one, what is
Speaker 1: that one going to be called very large? The very
Speaker 1: largest v l h C is the plan for the
Speaker 1: next one super large, uber large, hyper large, super duper large. Anyways, Um,
Speaker 1: so there was one before the large, the LHC UM
Speaker 1: but that they they didn't find it, so they build
Speaker 1: the bigger one. They didn't find it, but they thought
Speaker 1: they did. Actually, so it ran until the early two thousands,
Speaker 1: and they had a very short window to run it
Speaker 1: in because they had to turn it off because they
Speaker 1: were building the Large Hadron Collider in the same tunnel.
Speaker 1: One scheme for making the hadron collider. Cheaper was to
Speaker 1: reuse the existing tunnel so that to turn off the
Speaker 1: electron positron collider so they could build the hadron collider.
Speaker 1: But in the last few weeks of running the electron
Speaker 1: positron collider, people started seeing hints of the Higgs boson.
Speaker 1: They're smashing these particles together, and they started to see
Speaker 1: collisions that looked just like what you would expect from
Speaker 1: a Higgs boson. The thing is, we didn't know how
Speaker 1: heavy the Higgs boson was. That's one thing the theory
Speaker 1: didn't predict. Is it really really light, is it kind
Speaker 1: of heavy, is it medium heavy? Is it's super duper heavy.
Speaker 1: So we didn't know exactly where to look for it,
Speaker 1: and right on the edge of where the large electron
Speaker 1: positron collider could have seen it. It started to pop
Speaker 1: up just in the last few weeks. But then they said,
Speaker 1: but no, we just got thirteen billion dollars to make
Speaker 1: a very one. Don't find it yet exactly exactly. And
Speaker 1: there was a huge argument in the community, like should
Speaker 1: we put off building the L A C and keep
Speaker 1: running this one because we might be like on the
Speaker 1: verge of a discovery or um should we say, look,
Speaker 1: we have a plan, let's shut this thing down, build
Speaker 1: the next one, um and find it there for sure.
Speaker 1: And the problem was that across the pond outside Chicago,
Speaker 1: the Americans were working on their collider, which is the
Speaker 1: Tevatron Fermulab, and it was going to run sort of
Speaker 1: in the gap there between the large electron positron collider
Speaker 1: and the Hadron collider at CERN, and the Europeans were
Speaker 1: really worried that if they gave this opportunity up, if
Speaker 1: they turned off their collider, that the Americans would discover
Speaker 1: the Higgs boson while they were busy building the Hadron collider.
Speaker 1: That was their fear. Suspiciously, the Americans were like, no, yeah,
Speaker 1: shut it down down UM. So certain decided to shut
Speaker 1: it down. They were like, we see this evidence. It's interesting.
Speaker 1: It's not compelling enough for us to cheer age our
Speaker 1: entire program. You know, like when my son has to
Speaker 1: go to dinner, but he does want to turn off
Speaker 1: the video game he's playing, that's right. They were like,
Speaker 1: So the Europeans saved their game while they're building the
Speaker 1: next colider, and the the Americans turned on their their
Speaker 1: collider and they looked for it, and they didn't find it.
Speaker 1: I mean they saw a few things hints here and there,
Speaker 1: so they wouldn't haven't even found anything. Then the LP
Speaker 1: would not have found anything. It turned out that the
Speaker 1: Higgs was not where they thought it was. Yeah, what
Speaker 1: they were seeing was just a fluctuation. So that was
Speaker 1: and he was a little bit heavier than that. So okay,
Speaker 1: So what does the act what does the large patron
Speaker 1: collider actually do like and specifically how how does it
Speaker 1: do that? What does it do to find how what
Speaker 1: did it do to find the Higgs bloson? So what
Speaker 1: we do is we smash protons together. And protons really
Speaker 1: high energy, and protons inside them have little particles called
Speaker 1: quarks and also particles called gluons. And when we smashed
Speaker 1: protons together, through the corks and the gluons inside the
Speaker 1: proteon that do the smashing. Think of protons is like
Speaker 1: little bags of particles and the cork and the gluons
Speaker 1: smashed together, and then sometimes like one in a tri
Speaker 1: zillion times, those quirk and gluons will smash together to
Speaker 1: make a Higgs boson. We run this thing every twenty
Speaker 1: five nanoseconds because most of the time. When we smush
Speaker 1: particles together, boring particles come out, particles we've seen over
Speaker 1: and over again. So the rare the interesting stuff is
Speaker 1: really rare, which is why we have to run it
Speaker 1: really often to spot the rare ones. And so it's
Speaker 1: like one in the trisilient times the Higgs boson appears,
Speaker 1: it doesn't live for very long. The thing I think
Speaker 1: people should understand is that you can don't make a
Speaker 1: Higgs boson and then you have it. It's not like
Speaker 1: you can fill a glass jar with Higgs bosons that
Speaker 1: we've made at the LHC. They exist for like ten
Speaker 1: to the negative twenty something seconds, and then they decay.
Speaker 1: They turned into other stuff like evaporate kind. Yeah, they're
Speaker 1: like heavy and unstable and so they break up. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they yeah, exactly into other stuff that we can see.
Speaker 1: Like one of the most common things they do is
Speaker 1: turn into two bottom quarks for examp able. And so
Speaker 1: how do we actually see the Higgs boson. Well, one
Speaker 1: way we do what is we look for events with
Speaker 1: two bottom corks in them. The problem is there's lots
Speaker 1: of other ways to make events with two bottom corks
Speaker 1: in them. Lots of times when we collide protons, we
Speaker 1: get events with two bottom corks in them that wasn't
Speaker 1: from the Higgs boson. So you have to figure out
Speaker 1: which of the stuff that you see might have come
Speaker 1: from Higgs boson that existed for like a really short
Speaker 1: amount of time, that's right. And so it's like visiting
Speaker 1: the scene of a car crash and trying to figure
Speaker 1: out what happened. Um, all you can see is the
Speaker 1: debris afterwards. You don't get to see the car crash itself,
Speaker 1: and you have to be like, all right, I think
Speaker 1: from the debris that it was two yellow volkswagens that
Speaker 1: crashed onto each other, that's right. I think the Higgs
Speaker 1: boson was driving and it veered off the bridge. So
Speaker 1: then that's why it costs so much. It's you have
Speaker 1: to like run this thing. It was huge. You needed
Speaker 1: a lot of energy, that's right, and you had to
Speaker 1: run for a long time. And so then you found
Speaker 1: enough observations of the debris to know, Okay, I think
Speaker 1: in there we can definitely say that there was a
Speaker 1: Higgs boson that popped into existence for a brief amount
Speaker 1: of time, that's right. What we do is we take
Speaker 1: the energy of those two bottom qrks and we add
Speaker 1: them up and we say how much energy was there?
Speaker 1: And if it was a Higgs boson, then the energy
Speaker 1: of the two bottom corks is going to mostly add
Speaker 1: up to be the mass of that Higgs boson. So
Speaker 1: you do that a bunch of bunch of times and
Speaker 1: then you add them all up, and if the Higgs
Speaker 1: boson was there, you'll see a little bump. You'll see
Speaker 1: you make a plot for example, yeah, bump at the day.
Speaker 1: If you make a plot for example of like how
Speaker 1: much energy was in the two bottom quarks versus how
Speaker 1: often you see it, you'll see a bunch of collisions
Speaker 1: that all have the same energy in the two bottom qurks,
Speaker 1: and that will be at the mass of the Higgs boson.
Speaker 1: So we were bump hunting. We didn't know where we
Speaker 1: might see it. Bump hunting. That should be the next
Speaker 1: show in the Discovery Channel, bump Hunters. I think there's
Speaker 1: probably some easy, salacious misunderstanding of bump hunting, you know.
Speaker 1: So they so they found it right, and this was
Speaker 1: I think to the is in what was it two thousand,
Speaker 1: thirteen fourteen that they founded it was it was sort
Speaker 1: of slow like we started to see hints of it.
Speaker 1: We saw little bumps, and then they would go away,
Speaker 1: and we saw and then we finally started to see
Speaker 1: more significant bumps that just grew and grew and grew.
Speaker 1: And so the actual discovery the Higgs wasn't like an
Speaker 1: aha moment like one day like boom, here it is,
Speaker 1: we found it. There it is, you can all see it.
Speaker 1: It was a slow accumulation of data. It's sort of
Speaker 1: like you know, the water draining out of a out
Speaker 1: of the ocean, and you can revealing things on the seafloor,
Speaker 1: like very gradually we saw this bump rising out of
Speaker 1: the take he saw a little shadow of it here,
Speaker 1: a little shadowed it were there, and then suddenly you
Speaker 1: had the confidence to say, I think all of these things,
Speaker 1: say that the Higgs boson is a thing. That's right.
Speaker 1: And it gradually accumulated. So it was sort of a
Speaker 1: slow burn, and at some point it passes some threshold
Speaker 1: where statisticians say we were allowed to say we've discovered
Speaker 1: the Higgs boson, and so huge fanfare, lots of excitement,
Speaker 1: lots of like news cover rige in the media. Why
Speaker 1: do you think it was such a like media frenzy
Speaker 1: dis Higgs boson, Like you know, like scientists discover stuff
Speaker 1: every day all the time. Why do you think people
Speaker 1: got so excited about discovery of this particle? That's a
Speaker 1: great question. I wish I understood how the whole science
Speaker 1: journalism world worked, why they all get excited about something
Speaker 1: sometimes and other times you just can't get them interested
Speaker 1: at all. I don't know. I think that Certain has
Speaker 1: a great PR team and that they really built their
Speaker 1: argument about why Certain is exciting based on this um
Speaker 1: this goal, this let's discover the Higgs boson, and that
Speaker 1: has positives and negatives, like the positives that are if
Speaker 1: you spend several years hyping this up, then when you
Speaker 1: actually are ready to deliver your discovery, people are hyped up. Oh,
Speaker 1: I see. Part of so part of it was just
Speaker 1: like the the size of the project. People were really
Speaker 1: hyped up about it. Yeah, and Certain is organized and
Speaker 1: they know how to do PR and they have been
Speaker 1: priming science journalists for a long time. But it's sort
Speaker 1: of important because it's it's kind of it closed the gap, right,
Speaker 1: It's sort of like put the little button on this
Speaker 1: theory of the universe that physics sad, right. It was
Speaker 1: kind of like this piece that people have been theorizing
Speaker 1: for a long time and so now here it is. Here,
Speaker 1: here was the evidence that this theory was right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and a lot of people look at that positively. I
Speaker 1: actually think this it's kind of a negative story. I mean,
Speaker 1: people's people sold the LHC is like, here's we're going
Speaker 1: to discover the Higgs boson and that's going to be
Speaker 1: the answer to this decades long question. And after that
Speaker 1: the standard model is finished. And it's certainly true that
Speaker 1: we've been looking for for a long time and that
Speaker 1: we found it, and it validated this idea of this
Speaker 1: beautiful mathematical idea which came you know, just from this
Speaker 1: esthetic sense of mathematical beauty. That's awesome, that's an awesome story. Um.
Speaker 1: And it was the missing piece of the standard model,
Speaker 1: the piece we didn't have. So now we have a
Speaker 1: theory which is complete in the sense that it works right,
Speaker 1: there's no obvious missing piece. But it doesn't mean that
Speaker 1: there aren't questions remaining. And I think one downside of
Speaker 1: saying the late C was about discovering the Higgs is
Speaker 1: that people think, oh, we're done, Like well, we've finished
Speaker 1: this theory and now it's over, and like, why are
Speaker 1: you still running the late c um And the other
Speaker 1: thing is that some of us were hoping we wouldn't
Speaker 1: find the Higgs. I mean, the Higgs is sort of
Speaker 1: like a nice wrap up to that story, but there
Speaker 1: were other ideas out there, ideas that might have been
Speaker 1: more exciting. And so in some ways, finding something that
Speaker 1: wasn't the Higgs, something weird and strange and unexpected, something
Speaker 1: that wasn't predicted. But the theory is something where we
Speaker 1: didn't have like a mental slot for it already. That
Speaker 1: would have been much more exciting, something totally unexpected than
Speaker 1: I cracked open particle physics and let us understand things
Speaker 1: about why particles get different masses, or what is dark matter?
Speaker 1: You know, what are the patterns of the particles. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of questions we don't have the answers to
Speaker 1: just because we found the Higgs. I can see a
Speaker 1: politician being like, all right, guys, so you're telling me
Speaker 1: that you were totally wrong and you misspent all this money,
Speaker 1: But it turns out that unluckily it's actually good news.
Speaker 1: That's right. Well, for me, the most exciting thing is
Speaker 1: the exploration. Like I want to build that three trillion
Speaker 1: dollar collider because it lets just explore the universe at
Speaker 1: a scale we've never seen before. And I'm excited for
Speaker 1: unexpected discoveries much more than I'm excited for expected discoveries.
Speaker 1: You know. It's like if somebody told you exactly where
Speaker 1: to find a special little rock, it'd be cool to
Speaker 1: go there and see, like, oh, look they found this
Speaker 1: little rock. Would be much cooler to find something you
Speaker 1: didn't expecta