Working with the Large Hadron Collider

So I want to introduce to all of you, if you haven't listened to his amazing podcast yet, Daniel Whitson. Dr Daniel Whitson that Welcome to the show. Hi, thanks a lot for having me on. I am so glad to have you here now. Daniel, you are one half of the podcast team of Daniel and Jorge Explained the Universe, and thank you for taking time away from explaining the universe to grace my humble show with your presence. I greatly appreciate it. Well, thanks a lot for having me on.

You guys talk about really fascinating stuff, so it's a pleasure to be here. It's been a pleasure listening to your show. We'll talk a little bit more about that towards the end of the episode, but just so that my listeners kind of understand where you you're coming from before we get into work with the Large Hadron Collider and CERN and particle physics. Tell us a bit about yourself, all right, Well, I'm devastatingly good looking, which is why

I have a podcast, and m familiar my my. The most important thing to know about me in this context, I guess, is that I am a high energy physicist, which means that I'm interested in studying the universe at the smallest scale, and I do so by smashing stuff together at the highest energy. It's like, you know, you want to understand how things work, take them apart, and that basically what we do is we try to take

the whole universe apart and understand how it works. So I'm a professor at the University of California at Irvine that's in Orange County and m I work there, and I work also at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva where the actual collider is, and we have a big team of people smashing particles together and trying to figure out what is the smallest bit of matter and how does it all fit together? And where, how did everything start? And how is it going to end? And we basically

try to tackle those really big sexy questions. Yeah, I I love the way you describe that, the idea of taking apart the very basic particles that make up stuff and and and finding out what makes that work. It's very relatable to all the stories of the various innovators who got their start taking apart the various pieces of technology they have, often to the detriment of their family, and then learning how it works and then hopefully being

able to put it back together again. Except we're looking at reality here, how the the very fabric that makes

up existence works. And uh I also I watched a great presentation that you and Jorge gave in which you talked about your book and you talked about the gaps and scientific knowledge, and that also made me feel like I am all a smart person, only because in the past I have described our understanding of the universe like we're staring through a key hole and we can only see a little bit of the illuminated room that's beyond the keyhole, and there's stuff and shadows, So there are

things that we don't really see, and there are elements that are out of you and to us. That's that's our understanding of the universe. We only see a very narrow band of what really exists out there, and our goal is to expand that over time. That's right, and the most amazing thing in my perspective is that we've only recently disc covered that we are looking through the keyhole. I mean, for a long time we thought we were

saying everything. We thought, well, we've seen the way the universe is now, we just need to figure out how to explain it. We made a lot of progress and the last fifty year, in the last twenty or fifty years, we've discovered that there's a lot of stuff out there that we don't have any understanding of, dark matter, dark energy, huge chunks of the universe which completely defy our our explanation.

That doesn't mean it can't be explained. You don't have to go to like weird woo woo crystal energy stuff. It just means that there's a lot more science left to do. And for me, those are wonderful moments in the history of science when you you know, you pull back a layer of reality and discover, oh my gosh, wow, things are totally different from what we expected, or you know, it turns out we were only studying the the tail of the elephant, and we need to look at the

rest of it. And and that's exciting. Not because the science is humbled and realizing that we don't understand everything, that's that's a wonderful experience. It's exciting because it means there are discoveries left to come, right. I mean that maybe some of the most dramatic, most insightful realizations about the nature of the universe might still be ahead of us.

I like thinking about how in the future and a hundred years people might look back with great knowledge of how the universe works and wonder what it was like to be us when we lived in such ignorance, right when we didn't know so many things about so many basic things about the universe. Um and what you said earlier really resonate with me about trying to figure things out by taking them apart. I think that there's an

innate curiosity and being human. I mean, that's what makes being human fun, it makes being being alive worth It is that we are driven by this desire to know to understand the things around us. So if you're the kind of person who's like, how does a blender work? Let me take it apart, or you know, how does this thing in my car work? Let me look under the hood and poke around. Then you're basically a physicist.

You're the kind of person who wants to understand things by taking them apart, by boiling them down to the most essential elements, and using that to explain your car, and then also your blender, and then other things you

haven't seen. But for right, it's about learning generalizable, universal truths. Yeah, and and I would also argue that the history of of humanity has been one in which we have attempted to explain the why things are the way they are for for all of our history, and the as we eliminate gaps piece by piece, and knowing that we still have enormous gaps left to fill in, we start to really hone in on that over time we're able to replace things where we had the explanation of a uh.

Well though, that that's the gods battling it out in Olympus, and that's where the thunder comes from. To know now we have a deeper understanding to the point now where we even are able to get a grasp on the idea that as humans, as as we are the way we have evolved, we have limitations in our perception. There are things that we are capable of perceiving because we

have evolved. It is advantageous, it made sense in our environment, but that doesn't mean that's everything there is out there, which kind of leads into discussions that I've heard about, you know, the various dimensions that we were capable of perceiving. Some of those obviously we can we can observe the physical dimensions, and then once you start figuring that out, you say, well, it may be a leap to you to think there are so many more dimensions or potentially

more dimensions than the ones we can perceive. But we also know that we can't see things in the infrared or ultra violet UH wave forms. But with technology, we

can convert that into light that we can see. And once you start looking at things like that level where you say, oh, yeah, I guess we have developed tools that let us go beyond our limitations in our perception, then it kind of opens up your mind into the idea of now I kind of understand how there can be things like dark energy and dark matter that are beyond our current capability of detecting it, because it took thousands of years for us to get to the point

where we could, uh could even indirectly observe stuff like being for red in the ultraviolet. So that's sort of the approach I take with people as well, the idea that it feels like you're taking a big leap when you start going into things like particle physics, when you start talking about quantum quantum effects, because everything seems so strange. It doesn't it doesn't work the way the classical physics work, and it's it feels like you're asking people to take

a leap of faith. But once you start to build on those blocks, they say, okay, all right, now I'm with you. Now I got it. And that kind of brings us over to the work that we see over at at CERN and the large Hey drunk collider. Now, one thing I like to remind people about as well before we get there. I thinks he's touched on a

really interesting topic there. You know, Um, I think people have been thinking about mysteries for a long time, right, And for a long time, the world was really mysterious. It was obvious that there were mysteries. You could just go outside and there were things you didn't understand. What is lightning? Right? Um? And it's sort of it was a common feeling that the world was mysterious, you know, like there are more things in the heavens and earth

than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Right, it's it's even in literature. But we've sort of lost that. I think a lot of people these days when they walk around, they feel like they mostly understand stuff, like, yeah, we know how weather works. Maybe we can't predict it exactly, but we understand the mechanism of it and gravity we

have an understanding of that. And the sense of experiencing mystery on a daily basis is sort of gone because science has made so much progress in explaining the various bits around us. And I want to remind people that the bigger questions, the larger questions questions we're asking ourselves, like why are we here? How should we live? How? What is the history of everything? Those questions are still

totally unanswered. And uh, And as you said, I think is really insightful about how we don't even know what we don't know, because there's a lot of things that

we've only recently discovered. We don't we we didn't understand right that there's things happening around us that we're not aware of, various kinds of particles moving, and even different kinds of light that's invisible to us, as you said, And there's really no limit on how much of that there can be, right, I mean, we know certain things. We know dark matter is invisible, we know neutrinos are invisible.

There could be other things out there that are also invisible that we just haven't even yet discovered that they're there through some sort of very slight hints. Right. So the amount of discoveries left remaining in the future is enormous,

which is the kind of thing that gets me all excited. Yeah, I I have a feeling, Well, first of all, I have a feeling I'm gonna need to fly out to California and have have like just maybe a four hour long conversation with you, because I haven't feeling that's exactly what's going to be needed, because I this is the source of stuff I love to talk about, just to anyone who will, you know, be patient enough to let me chatter at them, let me ask you a question

that you you mentioned about how we used to explain things in terms of gods, and I think that makes a lot of sense because humans are good at like identifying agency and willfulness in places where there aren't any, Right. But there's another element to that, which is the sort of the narrative. Right, These gods don't just have personalities and wheels that had stories that reasons why they were doing what they were doing. And I feel like storytelling is a big part of who we are as a species.

And it's still even though we're not explaining things in terms of God's it still drives our science. Like you know, if you asked me, um, what would you do if you knew the final answer to particle physics, Like if you could explain the whole universe in terms of one particle, Um, you know that, I would say, then we would want to tell a story, right, We want to tell a story about what that means about the universe and why the universe? Why is the universe this way and not

the other way? First we have to figure out what way is the universe, and then we want to know, like why that way. In the end, we're still telling stories to ourselves about how the universe came to be and what it means and how we should live our lives.

So it's a very human endeavor. Well, certainly, I mean, we we call it matter, and we know about anti matter, but we chose the optimist route right when we describe, when we describe these things that are antithetical to one another, and they they annihilate one another when they come into contact. And for some reason that we don't fully understand, we had slightly more matter than we had antimatter, and therefore

we've got stuff. I mean, if we had been pessimists, we would call the stuff we have the antimatter, right, So clearly there's a narrative issue there. So here, seriously, here's the question. Then the question is do you think if we met an alien species of physicists, do you think they would be asking the same questions or would they be satisfied with our answers, or do you think the kind of questions we're asking are inherently human in

some way that we don't even understand? What an excellent question. Now, obviously, from the scientific perspective, I have to tell you that I have a very small sample size of intelligent life forms that I can work from. I only have the one. Really, you, you mean you're the only intelligent life form, you know, I mean of entire I'm talking about entire species. I

guess I'm not not only. I mean, I could get super nihilistic and and and very egotistical and say, well, I can only experience my own experience, and therefore I know I'm intelligence. But I'm just granting everybody else that consideration. Um, that's very this This gets into philosophy and then, which I also fascinated by. But I'm a pragmatist, so eventually

I get very irritated. Um, that's an excellent question, and and honestly, the it's one that I haven't given a lot of consideration too, largely because I have accepted the fact, or at least accepted the notion that any sufficiently intelligent species that may exist somewhere else could be so very different from what we experience that that the word alien only begins to describe how we would uh define such a species, And that perhaps their approach to understanding and

explaining the universe to themselves would be very different. But it seems like it would follow a similar pattern but I say that only because that's what that's what has happened here. I don't have anywhere else to draw any conclusions from. So, um, it's so hard to imagine outside of your experience, right, It's it's very, very difficult. Yet in science, when we discover something new, we're always describing it in terms of the things we know. Like we

want to know what is light? Is it a little particle? Is it a little way? Because of the things we know? Right, when we find something that's totally new and different, we don't even really have the words to describe it. So imagining what it's like to be an alien scientist, I think it's an impossible question. So yeah, and that's that's why I posed it to you. It's why it's why I while I find science fiction endlessly entertaining, I love

science fiction. I also always I roll my eyes a little bit when I see the star Trek approach of every alien race is a humanoid with slightly different bumps on their head, and they speak English the same way. Yeah, the Universal Translator has no problem picking up what their speech patterns are. So that like, even when you use the Universal translator, uh, the you know, d o Sex Macina coming in and saying, oh, yeah, this is going

to translate everything magically. You think you kind of need a sample size, don't you, before you really get a grasp on it. But I mean, we have a hard enough trouble, hard enough time even on Earth sometimes understanding human cultures from around the globe, you know, so understanding how to interact with aliens. I think it's gonna be helpless. Like if we ever heard a message from aliens, and you know, even decoding it would be a huge problem

if you could even get past that. I have challenges understanding some of my relatives, and we all speak the same language and arguably come from the same culture. Are you sure they all come from Earth? I mean, that might be an explanation. I got an uncle that's questionable, but pretty much everyone else I got a pretty good handle on. This is This is great. This is gonna be an eighteen partner. Guys, I'm just gonna sit here and and and and monopolized annuals. Time for the rest

of you. Want to talk about the large Adran Collider rather than philosophy of alien civilization, I wouldn't say. Rather, I'll just say that my questions were about, well, you know, there's one topic which connects them um, which is the one way we might discover an alien civilization is by first detecting their particle physicists. I have not heard this.

It might be if somebody's if aliens are building like enormous particle colliders like the size of a solar system, and we might eventually like sweep through the essentially the pollution from that part from that particle accelerator and discover them in that way. That would be pretty crazy way to find an alien species, But that would be awesome because it would it would tell us that, hey, look, particle physics is not just a human thing, it's a

universal thing. Everyone wants to know what the universe is made out of, and everyone's figuring it out by smashing stuff together. So that would be pretty exciting discovery. It is interesting I had not heard about that particul are a kind of an idea. I've heard of, of course, enormous constructs that could especially when you talk about things like the Kardashov scale and you're thinking about like the

dice and sphere and that kind of stuff. These hypothetical UM machines that would need to exist in order to to take advantage of, say, an entire solar system's energy output, which would be necessary to reach those higher levels of civilization that we've heard about. But I hadn't heard about. I hadn't thought about a particle accelery the size of a solar system. To be perfectly honest, the large Hadron collider is is a big enough beast for me to

try and get my mind wrapped around. I mean, they're talking about pretty expensive. So yeah, the solar system sized collider is going to take another level of civilization before we can afford that kind of equipment. Yeah. Hey, guys, this is Jonathan from the Future just breaking into Jonathan from the past to explain that we're going to take a quick break with our conversation with Daniel Whiteson to thank our sponsor. So getting to the large Hadron Collider. Uh,

that would you know? And CERN as well. A lot of people think of of CERN is just because the Large Hadron Collider got so much press a few years ago when it was when they were preparing to bring it up online and they were starting to stub up the energy levels. I think a lot of people just associated those two as being. Uh, the only real like they CERN is just that's the agency to oversee the

Large Hadron Collider. I like to remind people that CERN is also the organization where because CERN exists, we have a worldwide web. I mean the web started from Tim berners Lee, who was working for CERTAIN at the time. So, uh, I like to remind people that it's beyond that. But let's talk a bit so. So CERN is a European agency. That UM is a scientifically oriented agency looking into things like these, these high energy reactions. And the large Hadron

Collider is a particle accelerator. Uh, can I give us an overview of what the LHC is for for someone who has heard the term but they don't really get they don't grock it entirely, alright, Sure, UM, the large hay Droun Collider. The basic idea is, let's figure out what's inside matter. Let's figure out what's inside matter, and let's do that by smashing particles together. So what you do with the large Hadron collider the word large it obviously just means it's really big. Hadron is a kind

of particle, and proton is the example of it. So you could also call it the Large Proton Collider. UM. And we take protons, which are essentially just the nucleus of hydrogen. So you start with hydrogen gas which is easy to get, heat it up, so the electrons boil off, and you left with just the nucleus, which is protons. And what we do is we give those protons a kick. We use electromagnetic waves to push them, and we push them faster and faster and faster and faster until they're

going about in ninety niono the speed of light. And then we smash them into each other. And the idea is, see what comes out, See what kind of weird mysterious quantum mechanical magic happens to give you new kinds of matter and new weird particles. Um. But as you said, the Large Hadron Collider is so to the flagship property flagship Experimenter, but certain is much broader than that. It's

a it's a European organization, but it's also international. I mean, I've I've been there many summers and you sit at a table at the restaurant and there's people speaking all

sorts of languages. You know, this Italian at this table and Russian at that table and tie at the other table, and Chinese over here, and you meet people from hundreds of countries, well not hundreds, but more than a hundred countries, and it's a it's a super international place, which is really wonderful, and right now it really is the center of the world and the Solar System, and you know, maybe the galaxy in terms of particle physics. But we

do more than just the Large Hadron Collider. We also have experiments studying the mysterious particle called the new trino. Neutrinos are produced by the Sun and the surface of the Earth is just bombarded with neutrinos, but they're mostly invisible to us. They don't interact with us, but they have a lot of really interesting properties that we don't understand. So CERTAIN does a lot of neutrino physics as well. Um they do cosmic ray physics, looking at weird particles

from space. They do a big variety of particle physics. And CERTAIN has played a big role in politics as well. I don't know if you're aware, but Certain was founded after World War Two, the idea being let's get all the scientists of Europe to work together on projects rather than hiding in their own labs and hating each other and sort of like using science as this common human bridge, like let's get connected. Let's not have our own like

individual weapons projects. Let's find something we can all work together on in a positive way. And I think it's really credited with tying European science together in a way that's made it more effective. And you know, building harmonies between nations is also good, and I know that personally at certain I've eaten a lot of weird food from different countries and that's helped me understand, you know, um, why the Belgians is like horse meat and why the

Chinese eat these weird things. And it's a fun cultural experience as well as scientific. Well yeah, and and uh, you know, getting into some of the fun stuff. Well we'll talk about later. But I love reading about, uh, things that remind us that scientists are also human. I mean it's it's easy to kind of forget from a

layman perspective. You you hear about science, and you hear about scientists, and it tends to almost be another For people who are not necessarily involved in science, or are not they don't work with scientists, and so they start to think of that as their own category of living thing.

There's a scientist kind of like doctors. There's doctors, they're scientists, and uh, it's like that time that you meet your middle school science teacher at the grocery store buying cereal and you're like, what you know, breakfast, this is not. This is not. Scientists have families and ambitions and disappointments and and rock rock groups, as it turns out, in rock groups, and you know, ankle injuries and all the same sort of things that people have. Absolutely, so what

experiment at the LHC did you are you working with? Specifically, they're different because they're different ones that are associated with different points along the LHC. As I understand it, where it's different essentially collision points that are looking at very specific uh, byproducts of these high energy collisions. That's right. So we have two beams of protons um, one going one way around the circle and the other going the other way. And if somebody out there is wondering, well,

why is it a circle? The reason is the circle is that it takes a while to get protons up to high enough speed. That's what we want to do, is we want to reuse those little boosters. The circle is essentially a string of little boosters. Each one gives a little kick and gets it going faster and faster. And so if you can spin it around multiple times, that you can get it going faster and faster. It's like when your kids on the merry go round or nothing merry around. What is that thing called the at

the playground that spins around? Yeah, I know what you're talking about. I honestly don't know the name of that either. The vominator the vominator um uh and and you put them on there and you spend it, you keep pushing, it goes faster and faster. So that's why it goes in a circle. Um. And in order to bend them in a circle, we have these really strong magnets. So the way the collider works is it's a kick to make it faster and then a magnet to bend it to go in a circle. And because we want to

collide the protons, we actually have two of these. We have one going one way and other than protons going the other way, and so four places around the ring we cross those beams, right, we try to collide them. And and also it's not individual proton. It's not like we put one proton in the in one beam and another proton the other beam, and we zoomed around. We smashed one proton. It's really hard to get protons to hit each other because they're so small um, and so

we actually have like a little gas of protons. It's a we call it a technical term, is a bunch of protons, and it's in tend to some number of protons that we passed through another gas of protons hoping to get some collisions. And so there's four places around the ring that this happens, and each one is surrounded by a massive set of detectors um to observe what happens. Think of it like a really big digital camera. And

I work on one of those. And the name of the detector is the Atlas detector, which has like which sets the record from maybe the worst scientific acronym ever, because it has an acronym inside. I think Atlas stands for a large toroidal LHC apparatus. It's the most tortured acronym ever. Anyway, Atlas surrounds one of the collision points and we smash the protons together there and that's where

the magic happens. And you might be thinking, uh, you know, if you smash protons together, all you can learn about is what's inside protons, right the way, if you take your blender apart, you can learn about what's inside blenders. That's true, and we can learn about what's inside blenders, but as what's inside protons um. But we can also do something else because of the magic of quantum mechanics. What happens when you collide a proton and another proton

is that the particles inside them interact. So inside a proton we have quirks of quirks and down corks, and those quirks can interact and they can actually annihilate, which means that they convert from mass from little bits of stuff flying through the particle collider into energy. Okay, so the particles are gone, the stuff that made them up

is destroyed. It's turned into energy, and then that energy gets turned back into mass because a little blob of energy is very unstable, doesn't like they hang out very long, and so it turns back into mass and it doesn't have to turn back into the same kind of stuff that it's started from. So you can turn for example,

two up corks. You can annihilate them together, turn them into a ball of energy, and then they can turn into muans or electrons or other weird kinds of particles, and it's not required that it's made of the same stuff because the stuff has disappeared, it's been annihilated. So it really is like modern day alchemy. You know, we're turning one kind of stuff into another kind of stuff, and that's magical because it means we can create any kind of stuff that's sort of on the universe's menu.

We don't have to know it's there in advance. We just pour enough energy into the collisions and eventually all the kinds of stuff will pop out. So it's it's really like an exploration machine. It's like saying, what's out there, what's on Nature's list of particles? What can we make if we put enough energy into the collider. And so that's how we smash protons together to try to figure out what is the list of particles that the universe

has on the list of sort of allowed states. And that's that's what we're doing to try to get inside into this question of what is the universe made out of? That's incredibly cool, like I've never heard it described that way.

So too, the thought of of smashing these protons together at incredibly high energies and then you end up as part of that uh at almost like the proto energy that can convert into various different types of things based on possibly criteria that we don't fully understand, I mean obviously, And those are the laws we're trying to figure out, you know, we're trying to write down mathematical equations that predict how often you'll see this kind of particle, how

often you see that kind of particle, And the kinds of particles that we've studied, you know, electrons and muance whatever. We understand how those are made, and we can calculate very precisely how often we should see them and uh and what energies, and so that's the kind of thing we study. We we understand in pretty and pretty good detail why some particles are made and when and how often.

What we're looking for is the weird stuff, the stuff we haven't predicted, or the stuff we hadn't anticipated, or you know, the things that people have predicted but we haven't seen yet. And those things tend to be more rare, which is why we smash the particles together so often. We do it every twenty five nanoseconds, all day, all year long. And the reason is most of the stuff

that happens is boring. We've seen it before. Occasionally, very rarely, something weird will happen and that will give us a clue about maybe a new kind of rare particle. So I imagine if you're doing this that frequently with that many protons, knowing not that all of them are are colliding, but still a good amount of them are UM and you have these four different points where they're all gathering data that you're you're getting getting a few zeros and

ones out of there. There's a lot I'm guessing a lot of information gets generated all the time through these experiments. It's a it's a tidal wave of data. Every time we have a collision, we read out the whole detector, which has a hundred million different detector channels. So it's a massive basically digital image of the detector every every every twenty five nanoseconds UM and so that's pretty it's a pretty large volume of data UM and we it's so big that we can't even save it all, right.

We if we saved it all, it would take huge amount of resource, says, and we wouldn't have no time to go through it. So what we and most of it is not very interesting. Of what happens is just like two protons come in, they kind of bounce off each other, two protons come out. You know, it's rare that you actually have them, like a deep collision that

interacts with the particles inside that makes something weird. And so what we do is we have this system we call it the trigger, that makes a keep or kill decision on the fly, and it says was it interesting enough to save? If so, then shunt it down the down the view the wires towards the disk. If no, throw it away. And so we have to make these keep or kill decisions every twenty five nanoseconds. And when

it's gone, it's gone. It's not like it's saved to back up and you can go through it another time. It's just we just toss it out. And so that's a really vital system. That's actually the part that my

group works on. Is this trigger system interesting? Yeah? I always thought when I was learning more about this, I wrote an article about how the large Hadron collider works as part of my work for how stuff works, And while I was working on it, it struck me just how amazing the actual apparatus is of creating these beams

and steering them and creating the collision points. And then it occurred to me that as challenging as it is, you know, as much learning and engineering and all the expertise that would be required to make such a thing happen. As impressive as that is, it's it's also incredibly impressive to think about how do you deal with the information

that you generate from such a thing. It's so large, and the ability to differentiate between what is interesting versus what has already been known and therefore like this is something that we don't necessarily need to consider because it's this is this is like we might as well have this etched on the side of a mountain already. We're good,

let's just concentrate this other stuff. Um. And as you start to look at the challenges that people have with big data in general, which is orders of magnitude smaller than one is being generated at the LHC. But you look at those challenges just like businesses who are saying like, we don't even know what what data we have at

this point, and you think, well, that's troubling. Then you realize, well, if we're having trouble with that, imagine the challenge of sifting through all that information to find these gems, these these indications of something unknown or not fully understood. And

it boggled my mind. So to me, that is one of the the huge achievements was not just the incredible technological triumph of building a particle accelerator as large and as powerful as the LHC, but then creating the way to deal with the information that's generated as a result. And I think a lot of people don't necessarily appreciate that or understand that because they're just thinking of, uh,

there's probably conceptualizing. You know, these these particles hitting each other really at high speed, and then there's maybe a flash of light or something, and then there's a little squiggly line that goes off into the distance and you think, oh, that was a cork, right. It's it's because these are so far outside the normal experience, it's hard to think of, well, i'll tell you some details about it. That's actually the

part of it that I'm most interested in UM. But first of the human side of it is that this apparatus is so complex that everybody who participates and it's you know, tens of thousands of scientists all working together. Certainly not my project by myself. Everybody who participates only

does a little bit. You know, the people who specialize in getting the beams to go really high speed, and people who specialize in focusing the beams, and people who specialize in building the detectors that surround the beam, and people who specialize in um in the trigger, and people who specialize in analyzing the data. And one of the

cool things is that you can specialize. You can say I really like climbing around the detector with a wrench and I want to spend my days doing that, or you can say, oh, I'm really interested in the data reduction problem. And so we sort of get to attract all types and people who are good at different things, and everybod gets to do the part they want rather than having to do all of it by themselves. UM.

So I think that's really fun. And the part that I'm most interested in is exactly what you were just mentioning, is how do you go from this huge pile of data to saying things about the universe right to say, I've got all these zeros and ones. How do I then say, oh, look, we have the Higgs boson, we know it exists, or we found dark matter or something like that. And and one of the problems is that we don't create these particles and then like have them

in a jar. It's not like we're producing a pile of higgs bosons and we can point them to them and say, look, these are higgs bosons. You can tell you can touch them, or they have some weird property or something right the way, like in condensed matter, they can make new kinds of goo and then they can show it to you. And then, as with strange effects or something, the higgs bosons that we produce only last

for like ten to the minus twenty something seconds. So this this picture I told you where the corks collide, they turned into something um some energy. Then they turned into a new particle. That's true, but that new particle might only last for a really really short amount of time because a lot of these particles are very heavy and unstable, and they don't like to live very long, unlike you know, electrons or protons which can last for

billions or trillions of years. We don't even know. Some of these particles are inherently unstable and they turn into other particles, and so what we see in our detector is never direct proof of that new particle. Instead, it's always indirect evidence. It's like, um, you came to a um, it came to an intersection, and you see, you know, shards in the ground. You see glass over here, and you see steel over there, and there's a dead body over here, and you have to figure out what happened.

It's always like that that we're we're looking at what came out of the collision and trying to figure out what happened in the middle. And so a lot of what we do is is really complicated statistical inference. We say, given the data that we saw, which theory of the universe is more likely in the theory with the Eggs

boson or without the Higgs boson. So most of the actual work involved is in constructing those two hypotheses and comparing them to the data, saying how can we analyze the data, how can we um you know, plow through the data in a way so that these two hypotheses give different predictions. Like in the case of the search for the Higgs boson, we were looking for collisions that had to photons coming out. So two protons come in, two photons come out, right, two little beams of light.

And that's because the higgs boson um sometimes turns into two photons, So we're looking for two photons. The problem is there are other things that also turned into two photons, lots of ways to make two photons that aren't the Higgs boson. But if you did make the Higgs boson and it turned into two photons, then it would turn into two photons with a certain amount of energy, and that amount of energy is connected to how much mass

is in the higgs boson. So we did is we just said, let's look at all the collisions that turned into two photons, and let's just compare, and we made sort of a plot where we said, on the X axis is the amount of energy and the collisions, and

then why excess is the number. So if you're envisioning this, we have one theory that says there should be a smooth distribution, and then what the theory with the Higgs boson says, well, there should be a smooth distribution, but then you should you should get a bump, You should get an enhancement around the mass of the Higgs. So one theory is there is no Higgs boson, and you should get a bunch of just random collisions with two photons,

no special energy levels. And the other theory is you have a Higgs boson, which means you get extra production of two photon events and they should cluster and they should all have a similar energy. So if you make this uh this plot, you should get a bump near the mass of the Higgs. And so essentially we have two hypotheses. We say no Higgs boson or Higgs boson, and then we look at the data. So we've done the hard work of constructing two possible ideas and figuring

out what question to ask the data. That's always the crucial thing. It's a question are you asking the data? And we've composed the question in a way that we hope the data can answer it. And that's how we discover the Higgs boson. Is the data followed one curve, the curve with a bump in it, and not the

smooth curve, the curve that had no Higgs boson. So a lot of the work we do is involved in in analyzing that data, and because it's such a big project, we have people specializing in these areas, and this is my area specialty is analyzing this data. And one of my other interests is in computer science and artificial intelligence. And in the last five years we've been borrowing really heavily from computer science all these new tools they've developed

to do really fantastical artificial intelligence to recognize patterns. We found ways to take those tools and apply them to these questions to say to artificial intelligence tools, can you find patterns in this data? Can you learn to find Higgs bosons in these ones and zeros um and separate them from things that are not higgs bosons but look like them. So we've a lot of fun bringing in ideas from other fields. We don't invent a lot of

this stuff by ourselves. We sort of you know, we have a nail and we sift around for somebody nearby who might have a hammer. M h. Well, that to me is always a fascinating thing as well. It's it's a different level of innovation where you are thinking rather than let's let's invent a brand new tool to do this thing. You say, well, do we have any tools that perhaps are not currently being used to do this thing, but with some some work, we could repurpose them for

this thing. Um to that, Usually it's a happy discovery. Yeah. I remember going over to the computer science department it was like two thousand twelve and describing this project and saying, look, here's the problem we have. We don't have a tool that can solve this problem. What do you have? And they said, oh, my gosh, we have the perfect tool.

Currently we're using it to solve this other problem. And I was like, well, what problem are you solving and they said, oh, we're trying to figure out how to answer the question is there a cat in this Internet video? Right? Which is like the perfect example of how of a hard but relevant problem. Like it's not easy to say, here's a video, can you tell me if there's a cadet? It's the kind of thing it's easy for a person, but it's really hard for a computer program. Right, how

do you define a cat? And then it's moving through the videos on different colors of cats, cats, of different behaviors. It's a difficult problem and it's one where there's a lot of data available. So the computer scientists latched onto this problem not because it was important or particularly interesting or useful, but just because it was hard and they had a lot of data. So when I came to them with another problem that was hard, where we had a lot of data but actually had some like scientific

value and and sounded cool, they were very excited. So they're excited to get to use their tool and something that was actually relevant to society into physics and to science. And we were excited, of course to use their awesome tool, which worked really, really well. So it's usually a sort of a peanut butter and chocolate situation when you can find this sort of crossovers nice. I like, I like

the peanut ab her chocolate analogy. And of course, uh, the neat thing to me about the machine learning process that you were talking about with with identifying cats and videos taking an approach like that, where again seemingly if you if you explain that to someone, they sound they say, well, that sounds like it's trivial. It's I mean, it may

be a hard computer problem, but what's the purpose. And my argument to them has always been, well, a human can immediately tell if the computer was right or wrong when it or the machine was right or wrong when it comes to its conclusion, and therefore go in and

tweak the waitings of the various decision points. That if you're using an our official neural network, you change the waitings of the the various values so that it can slowly hone in on what is it to be a cat and and understand what catness really is, not not the character from Hunger Games, but what catness really is. And that once you do that, yes, exactly, that's that's

exactly what you want to do. Right If you're trying to create a tool like this, you want to pick a goal where a human can say, yes, the the computer has managed to hit that goal, or no, the computer has not. So that way, once you've perfected the approach and you can then start to apply it to things where uh, we don't have as full of an understanding. You know. It's the difference between supervised learning with machine learning and unsupervised learning, and and to me, that's a

very fascinating area of study. I've talked about that a lot on tech stuff as well, and uh, it also gets into other issues that I won't. I won't dive into here, things like the the need for transparency for these kind of systems so that we understand how they get to their conclusions and it's not just a black box, etcetera, etcetera. But I digress. How does it know what a cat? Exactly? Exactly? Yeah,

interpreting these networks is very important. Yeah. If you get to a point where you watch a video and you say, oh, I didn't see a cat in there, but the computer says there's a cat in there. The computer says, no, there absolutely as a cat in there. Just because you didn't see it doesn't mean it's not there. And then you start to get a little worried, just thinking are

we are we heading toward how territory here? Let's uh, let's pump the brakes a little bit and find out how you got to this happened to seed to the computers the job of determining whether is the cat in the video? They're better than I am. You say that, but I find cat video so cathartic. Um. So this one thing I wanted to to touch on just briefly, um, And that might be difficult to do. But yeah, we

mentioned Higgs boson quite a quite a bit. And uh, how would you describe what the Higgs boson is to someone who's interested in it but doesn't have that background in in physics. Yeah, so the Higgs boson is fascinating little particle, and it's a sort of part of the answer to the question what is stuff? You know, we want to understand what are things made out of? But part of that is understanding like what am I made

out of? What is the substance of me? And you imagine that if you take yourself apart, you're made out of molecules. Those molecules are made out of atoms. Those atoms are made out of protons and electrons and neutrons, and the protons are made out of quarks. So at this point we can describe everything that you're made out of in terms of quarks and electrons um. But what we still don't know is what are those made out of? Like do they get a little scoop of universe stuff?

You know, there's some sort of basic matter unit, and we don't understand like how do they have mass? Where does their mass come from? And it's a mystery because in our theory, these particles are not little balls. Like when I say a particle, you're probably imagining like a little spinning beach ball, right, a tiny little dot of actual stuff, but something with extent to it, something with size. Well, in our current theory, these particles don't have any size.

Their dots their points in space, which means where is the stuff to them? Right? Where is the mass? Where does the mass come from? Um, there's no room for any mass in a point. Right. If there's mass, there have infinite density, which makes no sense at all. You have like all these tiny black holes. So the Higgs boson is in a way that is a way to answer that. What it does is it says that the mass the particles have doesn't come from a little scoop

of universe stuff that they got. Instead, you have to think of it's sort of like a charge. Like when I tell you an electron has a negative charge, that doesn't bother you. But what if I told you electron is a point particle there's no room for it. Would you ask where does the negative charge go? Or is there room for the negative charge? You just think of negative charge is sort of like a label, something that you can apply to a tiny dot. We should think of mass the same way. Mass is not a little

serving of universe stuff. It's like a charge, and a charge of something that tells us how things interact. So an electron has a negative charge, which means it, you know, um gets repelled from positive stuff, and they can interact with photons and things like that. Um particles that have mass. Um those particles that have mass us they have mass, which is a charge. It tells us how it interacts

with the higgs boson. So the Higgs boson is the thing that gives these that that interacts with these particles and makes them move as if they had mass. So they have some of the label on them, and the higgs boson interacts with them if you have if you have a lot of mass, higgs boson interacts with them a lot, and that's what gives them inertia. It makes makes it hard for them to speed up or hard

for them to slow down. Right, And so that's what the Higgs boson does, is it gives mass to these particles or explains how a tiny little particle can have any mass at all. And the fascinating thing is that the idea, who has been around for decades before we actually found it. Some theorist was looking at the list of particles and the math behind them and saying, this doesn't really make sense, like how do these particles? How can these particles have mass? There's no way to give

them mass in our theory. Like, we have a really beautiful theory that would work perfectly if all the particles in the universe had no mass, But the particles have mass, and when you try to add mass in various ways, it just doesn't work mathematically. It breaks all sorts of other rules. So he came up with a way to give mass to these particles by having them interact with this other new particle we've never seen before. And the thing I love about that is that it's it's purely aesthetic.

It's like philosophical. It's like saying, I'm looking at all these puzzle pieces and it seems to be one missing. This whole story, right, this move back to the idea of a story. This whole story would make much more sense if there was one more character in it. You would just click together, would be symmetric, would be beautiful,

it would mathematically look pretty. And so he said, well, maybe there is one, right, So let's go look for it, and it was so compelling an idea that we spent decades and billions of dollars looking for it and then actually found it. Right. What a triumph for theoretical physics to say, just in my mind, I can think about the patterns of the universe and predict what else is out there that we've never seen. To me, that's incredible. Yeah,

I love that. Uh it's a story where we take a look at uh, an idea that's that's largely fleshed out, and then we think, there's this would work so great if only there was this thing. You know what, I'm just gonna I'm going to create the mathematics here. I'm gonna I'm gonna figure out mathematically how this thing could exist if everything else we've assumed is more or less right, And then, wow, that looks really nice. Boy, it would

be great if that thing exists. We should find out if that thing exists, and then and then a lot of time and thought is put to it. Not obviously I'm trivializing and I'm very much generalizing, but to me, it's just it is beautiful. But it's also there's like a level there's a level of beautiful absurdity to it that I find interesting from my perspective of not being a physicist right where to me, it's it's no, you sound like you kind of are an amateur physicist. I

mean you think about these ways like a physicist. You know, it's not all about the mathematical training. It's so sort about the front, the way you think, and the way you ask questions. So I'm happy to bestow you upon you the dubious honor of being a deputized amateur physicist. Excellent. I cannot I cannot wait to abuse my authority certificate in the mail pretty soon. Yeah, you'll see me walking into restaurants saying, give me a good table. I am

an honorary physicist, and they'll say do you Yeah. No, it doesn't work for for podcast celebrity either. I can tell you from ten years of experience. Uh. Yeah, it's the I have the level of fame that is almost but not quite completely useless, and honestly I'm okay with that. Um well, let me let me shift this a little bit. We'll kind of uh get toward the end of our conversation here to talk about some more silly fun stuff.

One of the things I think a lot of people heard about when the LHC was, you know, still powering up. It was a very long process. In fact, it was longer than we had anticipated because there were some problems that we encountered along the way. I say we, as if I had anything to do with it. You're an honorary physicist. Now you to say we they're excellent. It's

it's uh, it's so good to join the collective. But the there were there were some issues, and it also led to a lot of speculation, much of it completely baseless from people who had uh, little to no understanding of what was happening, but apparently access to wonderful platforms

from which they could espouse these these baseless claims. But we had everything from people saying this is going to create black holes without really one understanding what a black hole is, to understanding if that were in fact to happen. The time frame we're talking about, and the size the the UH of it, and and what energy level we'd be talking about less than what a mosquito generates when it flaps its wings, for example, and at a at a at a time that's so small that is impossible

for us to think of it. We can we could look at a measurement. We could look at a number with a whole bunch of zeros, you know, a dot, a bunch of zeros, and then a one after it, and think, oh, that's how long it is based on you know, point zero, zero, zero, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, one seconds. But you can't by the time you think that, so

a countless number of those have passed. And so to me, that was one of those things that I found funny and infuriating at the same time, this sort of misconception about, oh, the LHC is a doomsday device that is going to end all life because we're going to create a black

hole that will suck up the entire universe. There's even, as I recall, there's a website that had a very funny, very immateurish gift of a picture supposedly from a security camera outside the LHC just getting sucked in to to a single point as if a black hole had been created, and I thought, wow, that's amazing. That's amazing connection to

be able to continue to broadcast while spaghetti location is happening. Now, my favorite website is called has the Large Hadron Collider destroyed the world yet dot com as we promised as physicist to always keep up to date, right, So if you go to that website and it says yes, then you know, yeah, yeah, you might wanna, you might want to,

you know, might make some plans. Um, But yeah, this is a this is a common thing that's raised, and I think it's reasonable for people to wonder, like our physicists going to trigger some sort of universal apocalypse which ends society as we know it. It's a fair question, um, But it's also reasonable for us to lean on physicists expertise and answering the question. In this case, I think Serain has done an excellent job of taking this concern seriously.

So for those who don't know, there there really is a theory that we could be creating miniature black holes at the Large Hadron Collider. The idea is that gravity might be very very power. Gravity, which is the weakest force, might actually be very very powerful if you bring things really close together, like the close the size you know, the width of a proton is sort of close together.

So if you smash these protons together really high energy, they might get close enough where the gravity gets really really strong, and meaning you could create black holes, because black holes are essentially displaces where gravity gets really strong. And if that's the case, those black holes, if they last long enough, could sit there and sort of swallow matter. But you know, there's lots of reasons not to be worried about that. First of all, we think if these

black holes are created, they wouldn't last very long. They would radiate into nothing using Hawking radiation. And if they and and we believe that collisions have been happening for a long long time, like we've been being hit by particles from space forever basically, and those particles are traveling much faster than the particles at the large age On collider. So if collisions of particles were going to cause Earth

destroying black holes, it would have happened already. And so there's a pretty in depth analysis of this um And I think one thing that's funny about it is sort of the social aspect of it. Like if you ask of is this, is it possible for the LHC to destroy the universe, to destroy the Earth, The answer is technically, yes,

it's possible. You don't want to talk about exactly, but there's a difference between you know, a scientific answer and a sort of a public relations answer where it's possible, but not to the level where it's really worth talking about. Like it's possible for me to disappear in quantum mechanically appear in Paris. Sure it's not impossible, but it's the real The odds are so remote nobody should factor that

into their plans. And that's really what people are asking about, Like, is this possible at the level where we need to worry about it and make policy changes or you know, use it to base decisions on And the answer is no. Um. But you know, we as humans are pretty bad about thinking about dangers and making decisions based on that. You know, I should worry about being struck by lightning or being eaten by sharks, but we don't worry too much about handgun safety this kind of stuff. So as human as

we we have our policies upside down. Or even you know, the likelihood of getting in even a minor accident in a car, I mean, that's incredibly likely compared to these other things. But these other things because they I think largely because they and they tap into that same part of our brains that finds fascination in the unknown. There's there's that related element, the fear of the unknown. The two are very close, and the less you know about something,

the more likely you are to fear it um. And paradoxically, also the more you know about something, depending on what it is, the more you might start to fear it um. So it's it's a really interesting Oh boy, being human sure is great um. But in the end, it's all about, you know, trying to answer these questions and exploring the unknown, and to me, that's always worth it. The guys who jumped in a ship and sailed into the ocean not knowing what they were going to find, you know, they

were part of that. It's a it's a long legacy of exploration and to me, that's one of the most exciting things we can do as a species. Daniel, thank you so much for joining our show. Please can you tell us a little bit about your podcast and why everyone needs to listen to it? Sure? Our podcast is called Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe. I'm one half

of it. The other half is Jorge Chom, the internet famous cartoons behind PhD Comics, and we do a fun chat about philosophy and science and try to explain things about the universe and the idea there is to take big topics and break them up into pieces that are actually understandable, not just so you hear a lot of fancy words and you don't really understand, but so that you come away with a pretty good grasp of what

these topics are. And we cover things like the Big Bang and teleportation and fasten the light travel and history of the universe and the future of the universe. And so check it out. It's a lot of fun. It's called Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe. Yeah, it's fantastic, guys. If you have not listened, you need to check it out. I very much enjoyed it's I consider it sort of a spiritual cousin to text stuff and and and it

makes me. It makes me long for the day when I can I can get a co host who I can bounce stuff off of, and they can bounce stuff off of me. Right now, I'm playing tennis with myself, so that is always a challenge. Daniel, thank you so much for joining the show. We greatly appreciate it. Thanks very much for having me on. And hello to all your listeners. Hey, guys, Jonathan from the future again. It's

pretty awesome. They're flying cars and everything. Anyway, uh, I was just here to tell you we're going to take another quick break to thank our sponsor. That was a phenomenal conversation, or at least I had a ton of fun. I hope you guys enjoyed it. Daniel Whiteson is really great at communicating science, not just someone who practices it, but it's very good at explaining the wonder behind science.

So definitely check out that podcast. If you guys have any suggestions for future topics for tech Stuff, whether it's a technology, a company, maybe there's someone else I should interview on the show, let me know. Send me an email. The addresses tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can visit our website that is tech Stuff podcast dot com. There you're going to find links to all of our social media as well as to our store that's over at t public dot com slash tech Stuff.

Every purchase you make goes to help the show, and we greatly appreciate it, and I'll talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is that how stuff works dot com,