Introduction to the Large Hadron Collider, its purpose, the questions surrounding it, and exploring the Large Hadron Collider and the Atlas detector.

The Giant Science Experiment - Introduction to the Large Hadron Collider, its purpose, and the questions surrounding it. Inside the Particle Smasher - Exploring the Large Hadron Collider and the Atlas detector.

Understanding the minuscule size of particles, the technology used to study them, the process of colliding protons, and the scale of collisions.

The Scale of Particles - Understanding the minuscule size of particles and the technology used to study them. Proton Collisions - The process of colliding protons and the scale of collisions.

The scientific significance of smashing protons, the quest for understanding the universe, the discovery of the Higgs boson, and its importance in understanding the universe.

The Purpose of Particle Smashing - The scientific significance of smashing protons and the quest for understanding the universe. The Higgs Boson Discovery - The discovery of the Higgs boson and its importance in understanding the universe.

Debates and considerations for building a larger particle collider, the search for dark matter, and the potential of future discoveries.

The Future of Particle Accelerators - Debates and considerations for building a larger particle collider. Exploring the Unknown - The search for dark matter and the potential of future discoveries.

# Huge If True Newsletter

## Exploring the World's Largest Science Experiment

### The Giant Particle Smasher at CERN

Hey there, science enthusiasts! Welcome back to another edition of Huge If True. In this newsletter, we'll be diving into the fascinating world of particle physics and the groundbreaking research taking place at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland.

### Inside the Tunnel

- The LHC is the biggest science experiment ever built, located on the border between France and Switzerland.
- It's a massive tunnel, over 100 meters underground and 27 kilometers long, where scientists accelerate particles to nearly the speed of light and smash them together to study the fundamental building blocks of our universe.

### The Quest for Knowledge

- The purpose of this colossal endeavor is to gain insights into the mysteries of the universe, including the search for the elusive Higgs boson, also known as the "God particle."
- Through these collisions, scientists hope to unlock the secrets of dark matter, the origins of the universe, and the fundamental forces that govern our existence.

### The Future of Particle Physics

- There's a debate within the scientific community about the need for a larger, more powerful particle collider, such as the proposed Future Circular Collider (FCC), to continue pushing the boundaries of our understanding.
- The potential discovery of new particles and phenomena could have far-reaching implications for technology, medicine, and our understanding of the cosmos.

### The Impact of Pure Research

- The work at CERN has already led to significant advancements in medical imaging, cancer treatments, and even the creation of the World Wide Web.
- Investing in fundamental research is essential for laying the groundwork for future breakthroughs and innovations that can improve our lives in ways we can't yet imagine.

### Embracing Curiosity and Exploration

- At its core, the pursuit of knowledge and understanding is a testament to the human spirit and our relentless drive to explore the unknown.
- By supporting endeavors like the LHC and future particle colliders, we demonstrate our commitment to unraveling the mysteries of the universe and shaping a better future for generations to come.

### Join the Conversation

If you're interested in learning more about the incredible work happening at CERN and the world of particle physics, be sure to subscribe to Huge If True for more engaging and optimistic science journalism.

Let's continue to celebrate the spirit of curiosity and discovery as we journey toward a deeper understanding of the cosmos.

Until next time,

[Your Name]

Unveiling the Mysteries of Particle Physics at CERN

- The Large Hadron Collider is a massive underground tunnel in France and Switzerland where scientists smash particles together at near-light speeds
- The purpose is to study the fundamental building blocks of the universe and potentially discover new particles
- The collisions release energy that can turn into mysterious or unknown particles, giving insight into the early universe
- The ultimate goal is to understand the fabric of the universe and confirm the existence of the Higgs boson, also known as the "God particle"

- The discovery of the Higgs boson particle confirmed the existence of an underlying field that gives other particles mass
- The Large Hadron Collider was built to create enough energy to observe the Higgs boson
- The discovery of the Higgs boson proved a truth about the universe that was previously a mystery
- There is a debate about the future of matter and the need for a bigger collider to continue scientific research
- The byproduct of pure science at CERN has resulted in advancements in medical treatments, technology, and communication
- Fundamental research is essential for applied research and progress in understanding the universe
- The effort put into scientific research today can lead to a world we can't even imagine

The world’s most astonishing science experiment, simply explained.
Start your business with a Shopify free trial: https://www.shopify.com/cleoabram 

On the border between France and Switzerland is the biggest science experiment humanity has ever built. Over a 100 meters underground, there’s a tunnel 27 kilometers long in a big loop under nearby homes, businesses, and farms. Inside that tunnel, scientists built a blue tube big enough to crawl through, and inside that tube, they put two pipes that they keep colder and emptier than outer space. Down those pipes, they fire particles smaller than atoms in opposite directions…. and push them faster and faster… until when they’re almost at the speed of light… they SMASH TOGETHER.

This underground particle-smasher is also known as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. It took thousands of scientists from over nearly 100 different countries $5 billion dollars and 30 years to plan and build. 

My question is: Why? Why did they do that??? Why spend so much money and time to smash particles underground?  And now… why do so many scientists say what we really need to do is build… a BIGGER one?

To answer those questions, we’re going on a journey all the way to Switzerland, to the particle smasher itself! And you’re never going to see yourself or the world around you the same way… 

Chapters: 
0:00 What’s happening at CERN?
1:31 What is the Large Hadron Collider?
2:32 How did they build the Large Hadron Collider?
3:43 How small is a proton?
4:51 How do they get protons to hit each other??
6:43 Why build this?
7:43 What happens when particles smash together?
8:47 What are elementary particles?
9:37 What is the Higgs Boson?
10:46 What did they find??
11:33 Why does this matter?
12:52 Why build a bigger collider?
13:48 What is the Future Circular Collider?
14:56 What else could we build?
15:56 Who do we want to be?

You can find me on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/cleoabram 
On TikTok here: https://www.tiktok.com/@cleoabram 
Or on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/cleoabram 

Bio:
Cleo Abram is an Emmy-nominated independent video journalist. On her show, Huge If True, Cleo explores complex technology topics with rigor and optimism, helping her audience understand the world around them and see positive futures they can help build. Before going independent, Cleo was a video producer for Vox. She wrote and directed the Coding and Diamonds episodes of Vox’s Netflix show, Explained. She produced videos for Vox’s popular YouTube channel, was the host and senior producer of Vox’s first ever daily show, Answered, and was co-host and producer of Vox’s YouTube Originals show, Glad You Asked. 

Additional reading and watching:
- “Inside the World's Largest Science Experiment,” by Dianna Cowern, Physics Girl: https://youtu.be/nrXhK3Gh5EE?si=q_RO3o6kxRgZ5-rv 
- “The Higgs Boson, Part I,” by Minute Physics: https://youtu.be/9Uh5mTxRQcg?si=JmwGWKhQhRkTmOyN 
- “The Higgs boson at 10 years,” by Dr Clara Nellist (one of our wonderful experts in this video!): https://youtu.be/71aIQCeCW6c?si=MkxAAFQq_TdQlIpg 
- “The Large Hadron Collider beam pipe: everything you didn't know you wanted to know,” by Dr Clara Nellist: https://youtu.be/KoTdC3xfDwo?si=vxOWdSsnEsm_Ijfc 
- “The Higgs Discovery Explained - Ep. 1” by CERN: https://youtu.be/so2nCu2Jkbc?si=PQWjk699GzgtoLTM 
- “The Higgs Discovery Explained - Ep. 2” by CERN: https://youtu.be/pW4LTunlXS4?si=famTTom1oEls32aR 
- “The Higgs Discovery Explained - Ep. 3” by CERN: https://youtu.be/8-WFBGCvv-w?si=lpOOFj6bIcH4UYxg 
- “Seeing the Smallest Thing in the Universe,” by Dianna Cowern, Physics Girl: https://youtu.be/6IeeshkVATY?si=pWeDDCXBQyyE51i2 

Vox: https://www.vox.com/authors/cleo-abram
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm10108242/ 

Gear I use: 
Camera: Sony A7SIII
Lens: Sony 16–35 mm F2.8 GM
Audio: Sennheiser SK AVX and Zoom H4N Pro

Music: Musicbed, Tom Fox

Follow along for more episodes of Huge If True: https://www.youtube.com/cleoabram?sub_confirmation=1

—
Welcome to the joke down low:

Why did the Higgs Field get invited to church?
They wanted to have mass.

Find a way to use “mass” in a comment to let me know you’re a real one who made it to the end of the description :)

Right here, on the border between France and Switzerland, is the biggest science experiment ever built.

It's this huge tunnel, over 100 meters underground and 27 kilometers

long, running under nearby homes and businesses and farms.

And inside that tunnel, scientists put a long blue tube big enough to crawl through.

that they keep colder and emptier than outer space.

And down those pipes, they fire particles smaller than atoms in opposite directions, pushing them faster and faster and faster until when They're almost at the speed of light.

They smash together, sending subatomic debris flying off into this massive detector.

This underground particle smasher took thousands of people from over 100 different countries, $5 billion and over 30 years to plan and build.

Why spend so much money and time to smash particles together in an underground tunnel?

And now, why do so many people say that what we really need to do is build a bigger 1.

I'm going all the way to Switzerland, to the particle smasher itself, to understand what's really going on here, and to go on a journey that will forever change how I see myself and the world around me.

Part of this video is sponsored by Shopify.

I'm in an elevator on my way down to the Giant Particle Smasher, more scientifically known as the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC.

It's inside the biggest and most famous physics lab in the world, CERN.

Getting to visit here is a really big deal.

Thousands of scientists from all around the world gather here to do cutting-edge research about how the universe works.

Beyond that yellow door is 1 of the places where particles actually collide.

Specifically, this 1, the Atlas detector.

To give you a sense of scale, just look at it compared to a person.

Those are people compared to this enormous machine.

So we can see from down here that there is a shaft above us.

If people have the hobby to build a ship in a bottle, it's exactly the same way of constructing.

You have to lower it in and then construct it in place.

This giant underground detector is where those particles finally collide after being sped up close to the speed of light around that 27km track.

So the detector is symmetrical around the collision point, and so we're at 1 end of it.

The detector is big, but the actual collider part is very small.

What you can see in the center is the Large Hadron Collider, so you can really see how tiny the beam pipe is.

Each pipe is about the size of your 2 hands like this or about the diameter of an orange with thousands of magnets running along it that force the particles within that pipe into a space the width of a human hair.

I just accidentally pulled out 1 of my hairs in order to demonstrate this.

the scale that we're talking about right now?

That's the size of the space the particles are moving through.

But even a human hair is enormous compared to the particles themselves.

You already know that atoms and the particles inside of them are very small.

But they are so much tinier than most people think.

Now imagine that single hair is as big across as the entire Earth is wide.

The size of A single cell inside of that hair would be like the distance from Paris to Rome.

A protein inside that cell would be like 6 soccer fields across.

An atom inside that protein would be like 1 school bus across.

The nucleus at the center of that atom would be like the width of a grain of rice.

And the protons within that nucleus, they'd be like grains of salt.

So a proton compared to the width of your hair is like a grain of salt compared to the entire Earth.

And that is what scientists are sending flying around inside of this machine.

Protons, which are being squeezed by magnets into a space the width of a hair.

As humans, we experience only a tiny slice of the full scale of reality.

If they're sending these tiny little protons down a tunnel 27 kilometers long, how do they get them to actually hit each other?

Just think about shooting grains of salt at each other from really, really, really far away.

If you just thought, fire tons of salt, that's exactly what they do.

They don't just fire a hundred or a thousand protons at each other, they fire a hundred billion in bunches in each direction.

And when they do that, a hundred billion versus a hundred billion, guess how many actually collide?

On average we get about 50 or 60 collisions per crossing.

Which is why they'll do the whole thing over and over and over again.

There's approximately 3,000 bunches, each with over 100 billion protons, creating 1 billion collisions per second inside of this massive machine.

So I made these hats and sweatshirts as gifts for our Hugh Jif True team, and I keep getting comments about people who want to buy them.

Currently trying to figure out how I would manufacture them for you, but If I did, I know how I'd sell them.

Shopify is a commerce platform that lets anyone start and manage a business.

A lot of the creator shops that you've seen are built on Shopify.

And they're integrated with YouTube, so I could imagine being able to sell hats and sweatshirts for huge if true below our videos.

They also offer a bunch of AI tools that can help write better product descriptions and improve product images or emails.

And since audiences are everywhere, they help make it easier to sell across borders with local payment methods, they help with tax compliance, stuff like that.

Basically, they make selling things online easy for people like you and me.

So if you want a free trial, click the link in my description.

And if you want a really cool Hugh Jiffrey sweatshirt or hat, subscribe and you'll be the first to see when we launch them.

Okay, so we have thousands of scientists spending billions of dollars to smash billions of protons in an underground tunnel.

Well, if you look on the internet, you'll see that there are a lot of theories.

From ending the world to creating black holes to it already ended the world and we're living inside a black hole to paranormal activity to new dimensions to hooded figures performing rituals to summon the devil.

The truth about what is happening here is both much harder to explain, and much, much cooler.

So strap in, because it's time to break your brain.

When scientists smash these protons together, we get a glimpse at what might have happened close to the start of our universe, the Big Bang.

That's because the collisions release an enormous amount of energy for how small protons are.

But in the grand scheme of things, each collision is still less than the total energy of a hand clap.

But a very smart person figured out that energy and mass are related.

So when these protons collide at incredibly fast speeds, releasing a ton of energy, that energy can turn into physical mass.

If the energy is high enough, it can turn into mysterious or unknown particles, more of the building blocks of our universe.

Which we really want to know about, to use that knowledge to improve the world today, or to just satisfy our own curiosity.

But those special mystery particles, they only exist for an instant, before they turn back into more everyday particles that we see all the time, that then fly outward toward sensors that record exactly where they hit.

So what scientists actually see is more like a crime scene.

They can see where the particles hit the sensors, but then they need to work backward using very complex physics to reverse engineer what happened at the moment of collision and what mystery particles could have been there.

And if that sounds hard, Yeah, you're right.

We're not just doing this for fun, let's smash things together.

But we do it because we have huge, huge questions.

The idea with particle physics is to try to understand the fabric of the universe.

So you divide something, you divide it again, you divide it again, until you finally get to something you can't divide anymore.

That's what they're studying in these collisions.

Elementary particles, the building blocks of our universe.

You might recognize some, like electrons, or photons, which give us light.

We know about all of these elementary particles thanks to brilliant people doing extremely complex math and decades of experimentation to prove that math actually predicts the real world.

This is a beautiful description of how we as humans think the world around us works.

We can understand a lot about our universe.

Where we came from, where we're going, what we're made of.

It's pure research to try to understand our universe.

1 reason that they wanted to build the Large Hadron Collider specifically is that the Standard Model predicted that there should be another particle, a mystery particle, likely present near the beginning of our universe, that no 1 had ever actually detected.

They called it the Higgs boson, or more sensationally, the God particle.

The standard model seemed to suggest that this God particle was of vital importance to universal existence because, and here's where my brain starts to break a little bit, it would confirm the existence of an underlying field that gives other particles mass.

In other words, this god particle would help us understand why everything you and I feel exists.

Basically, why stuff exists was a big mystery, and this underlying field was our best mathematical explanation.

And observing the Higgs boson, the particle related to this field, would help to prove it.

The only problem was that to do that, we needed to get enough energy in 1 place to create it.

Like from smashing 2 protons together at nearly the speed of light.

And that is 1 big reason to build the Large Hadron Collider.

And after they finished, thousands of scientists spent 2 more years collecting data at 2 different detectors, until finally they were sure enough to announce to the world they did it.

They reliably created the Higgs boson, something that no 1 had ever detected before, proving a truth about our universe that had before been a mystery.

Think about how much work went into seeing that bump on that chart.

Through math, scientists predicted that if the Higgs boson exists, when we smash particles together, we should see a bump.

There were more particles being produced at that energy.

This confirmation didn't immediately change the world for people like you and me, but it showed us that as a species, we're on the right track.

We're never going to know the impact of discovering any single building block of reality.

When Sir Isaac Newton revealed the motion of our moon and our planets, He couldn't have possibly imagined there would be humans on the moon nearly 300 years later.

The same is true of our discoveries today.

We discover the building blocks now, so that our children can build with them later, in ways that we can't possibly imagine.

I don't know what understanding the Higgs boson is really going to do to change the way that we live, but in 20, 30, 50 years, the better that we understand how these particles work, the more we can create technologies that change our lives.

And the Higgs boson was by no means the only thing the Large Hadron Collider has uncovered.

It has shaped our understanding of the way that elementary particles interact and combine, and put our theories about the world to the test, Over and over and over again.

But now, some scientists argue that we might have reached a limit on what we can learn from this collider.

And there's still so much that we don't know about the universe.

So, some Scientists argue that now what we need to do is build a much, much bigger 1.

That's the big debate happening right now.

The big, big holes in our understanding of the universe.

We have measured really clearly that there's something out there that only acts through gravitation as far as we can tell.

Invisible matter would have been a better name.

It doesn't, you know, send anything out that we can see with our eyes, but it affects gravitationally and it makes a big difference.

We know this dark matter is there because it impacts things that we can see, like the way light visibly bends as it passes galaxies.

Through those effects, we can calculate dark matter accounts for 27% of our universe.

Could a bigger collider help us learn about it?

Nobody is guaranteeing it will find dark matter.

It might answer something completely different.

Maybe we'll find something we had no idea was there.

The Future Circular Collider, which of course you have to change after you've built it.

CERN estimates that building this new collider would cost roughly $17 billion, and instead of a 27 kilometer loop, it would be a hundred.

But not everyone thinks this is worth it.

They argue that the Large Hadron Collider has fallen short of what some hoped that it would achieve.

On top of that, some predictions seem to suggest we'd need even more energy than this new, bigger collider would have in order to produce anything truly new.

The byproduct of all of the pure science done at CERN has already resulted in new therapies for cancer treatments, better medical imaging, more efficient electric cars, more sensitive radiation detectors that we now use in space, and my favorite, a new way for scientists to communicate, now called the World Wide Web.

All of that and more came from work done at CERN.

We don't know what we'll come up with next.

Just imagine for a second what we could do if we had a better, deeper understanding of what gives things mass.

The future always sounds like sci-fi, until we build it.

And listen, I am not at all qualified to figure out if this specific collider is what we should build.

And there are other ideas out there, like a muon collider and a linear collider.

There's a proposal for a very powerful collider built in China.

But we won't know what's possible without spending on this kind of pure research.

And what's embarrassing is for Europe, They still spend twice as much on defense.

The US spends 10 times as much on defense.

You can argue we need to do that right now, and that can very well be true.

But we need to get to a world that's better than that.

It would be reasonable to say, hey, maybe we should spend this money on other research that would apply more directly to improving people's lives right now, today.

Fundamental research is essential to be able to do any of that applied research.

It'd be like saying, okay, we're going to have universities and maybe secondary education, but we're gonna cut out elementary school and no kindergarten.

We have come so far in our understanding of the universe, but There is so much left to learn.

Like what's all that extra stuff that we can't see?

And I think most importantly, while we're here, what we spend our time on shows who we are.

If aliens come to Earth 1 day and they look at what we have built, I would want them to see enormous monuments dedicated to knowledge.

I would want them to understand, through what we have built, that we are a species who seeks to learn and tries to do better and aches to find where we belong in a universe that we can barely understand.

I would want them to see that, yes, we are limited and yes, we have conflict And yes, we can only glimpse such a tiny slice of the full scale of reality, but man, we try so hard.

And that is something that we can all be very proud of because the effort that we put in today can lead to a world we can't even imagine.

This was 1 of my favorite scripts to write ever, but it was incredibly hard.

This is just such a complex topic, and I am not a physicist.

So the script was fact-checked by a physicist at CERN, but if you want to know more about the details of the physics here, I'll link to a couple of my favorite explainers by actual physicists on YouTube.

And if you want there to be more of this kind of optimistic science and tech journalism, subscribe to our show, Huge If True.

It means that we get to go to all of these incredible places and make more videos for you.


Speaker 0: Okay, ready?

Speaker 1: Right here, on the border between France and Switzerland, is the biggest science experiment ever built. It's this huge tunnel, over 100 meters underground and 27 kilometers

Speaker 2: long, running under nearby homes and businesses and farms. And inside that tunnel, scientists put a long blue tube big enough to crawl through. And inside that tube, they put 2 pipes

Speaker 1: that they keep colder and emptier than outer space. And down those pipes, they fire particles smaller than atoms in opposite directions, pushing them faster and faster and faster until when They're almost at the speed of light. They smash together, sending subatomic debris flying off into this massive detector. This underground particle smasher took thousands of people from over 100 different countries, $5 billion and over 30 years to plan and build. My question was, why?

Why do this? Why spend so much money and time to smash particles together in an underground tunnel? And now, why do so many people say that what we really need to do is build a bigger 1. Future circular collider. New particle accelerator.

Building a bigger 1. In Geneva, Switzerland. More than 3 times its size. And twice as deep. I'm going all the way to Switzerland, to the particle smasher itself, to understand what's really going on here, and to go on a journey that will forever change how I see myself and the world around me.

This is Huge If True. Part of this video is sponsored by Shopify.

Speaker 3: Minus 1 please, yeah.

Speaker 1: I'm in an elevator on my way down to the Giant Particle Smasher, more scientifically known as the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC. It's inside the biggest and most famous physics lab in the world, CERN. I can't believe I'm here. Getting to visit here is a really big deal. Thousands of scientists from all around the world gather here to do cutting-edge research about how the universe works.

Beyond that yellow door is 1 of the places where particles actually collide. Specifically, this 1, the Atlas detector. Oh my god. It's beautiful. This thing is huge.

To give you a sense of scale, just look at it compared to a person. Look how small they are. Those are people compared to this enormous machine.

Speaker 0: How did you put this in here?

Speaker 3: So we can see from down here that there is a shaft above us. If people have the hobby to build a ship in a bottle, it's exactly the same way of constructing. You have to lower it in and then construct it in place.

Speaker 1: I'm so amazed that people built this. This giant underground detector is where those particles finally collide after being sped up close to the speed of light around that 27km track. Where does the collision happen?

Speaker 3: So the collision happens over here. So the detector is symmetrical around the collision point, and so we're at 1 end of it.

Speaker 1: The detector is big, but the actual collider part is very small.

Speaker 3: What you can see in the center is the Large Hadron Collider, so you can really see how tiny the beam pipe is.

Speaker 1: Each pipe is about the size of your 2 hands like this or about the diameter of an orange with thousands of magnets running along it that force the particles within that pipe into a space the width of a human hair.

Speaker 0: I just accidentally pulled out 1 of my hairs in order to demonstrate this. Can you see this hair? Okay, can you see this hair compared to

Speaker 1: the scale that we're talking about right now? That's the size of the space the particles are moving through. But even a human hair is enormous compared to the particles themselves. You already know that atoms and the particles inside of them are very small. But they are so much tinier than most people think.

Look at a single strand of your hair. Now imagine that single hair is as big across as the entire Earth is wide. Now, zoom in. The size of A single cell inside of that hair would be like the distance from Paris to Rome. Now zoom in again.

A protein inside that cell would be like 6 soccer fields across. An atom inside that protein would be like 1 school bus across. The nucleus at the center of that atom would be like the width of a grain of rice. And the protons within that nucleus, they'd be like grains of salt. So a proton compared to the width of your hair is like a grain of salt compared to the entire Earth.

And that is what scientists are sending flying around inside of this machine. Protons, which are being squeezed by magnets into a space the width of a hair. It is incredible that we can do this. As humans, we experience only a tiny slice of the full scale of reality. But there's so much more.

Wait, but hang on. If they're sending these tiny little protons down a tunnel 27 kilometers long, how do they get them to actually hit each other? Just think about shooting grains of salt at each other from really, really, really far away. Seriously, think about it. How would you do that?

If you just thought, fire tons of salt, that's exactly what they do. They don't just fire a hundred or a thousand protons at each other, they fire a hundred billion in bunches in each direction. And when they do that, a hundred billion versus a hundred billion, guess how many actually collide?

Speaker 3: On average we get about 50 or 60 collisions per crossing.

Speaker 1: You heard that right. 60. 6-0 will actually collide. Which is why they'll do the whole thing over and over and over again. 30 million times per second.

There's approximately 3,000 bunches, each with over 100 billion protons, creating 1 billion collisions per second inside of this massive machine. Let me show you something, hang on. And wait for it. So I made these hats and sweatshirts as gifts for our Hugh Jif True team, and I keep getting comments about people who want to buy them. Currently trying to figure out how I would manufacture them for you, but If I did, I know how I'd sell them.

Shopify. And they're the sponsor of this video. Shopify is a commerce platform that lets anyone start and manage a business. A lot of the creator shops that you've seen are built on Shopify. And they're integrated with YouTube, so I could imagine being able to sell hats and sweatshirts for huge if true below our videos.

They also offer a bunch of AI tools that can help write better product descriptions and improve product images or emails. They call this Shopify magic. And since audiences are everywhere, they help make it easier to sell across borders with local payment methods, they help with tax compliance, stuff like that. Basically, they make selling things online easy for people like you and me. So if you want a free trial, click the link in my description.

And if you want a really cool Hugh Jiffrey sweatshirt or hat, subscribe and you'll be the first to see when we launch them. Now, back to the story. Okay, so we have thousands of scientists spending billions of dollars to smash billions of protons in an underground tunnel. But why? Why do all of this in the first place?

Well, if you look on the internet, you'll see that there are a lot of theories. From ending the world to creating black holes to it already ended the world and we're living inside a black hole to paranormal activity to new dimensions to hooded figures performing rituals to summon the devil. That last 1 was a prank by the way. No, we are not doing any of that. The truth about what is happening here is both much harder to explain, and much, much cooler.

So strap in, because it's time to break your brain. When scientists smash these protons together, we get a glimpse at what might have happened close to the start of our universe, the Big Bang. That's because the collisions release an enormous amount of energy for how small protons are. But in the grand scheme of things, each collision is still less than the total energy of a hand clap. But a very smart person figured out that energy and mass are related.

So when these protons collide at incredibly fast speeds, releasing a ton of energy, that energy can turn into physical mass. Which is crazy. And here's the kicker. If the energy is high enough, it can turn into mysterious or unknown particles, more of the building blocks of our universe. Which we really want to know about, to use that knowledge to improve the world today, or to just satisfy our own curiosity.

But those special mystery particles, they only exist for an instant, before they turn back into more everyday particles that we see all the time, that then fly outward toward sensors that record exactly where they hit. So what scientists actually see is more like a crime scene. They can see where the particles hit the sensors, but then they need to work backward using very complex physics to reverse engineer what happened at the moment of collision and what mystery particles could have been there. And if that sounds hard, Yeah, you're right. But important.

Speaker 4: We're not just doing this for fun, let's smash things together. We do like it. But we do it because we have huge, huge questions. The idea with particle physics is to try to understand the fabric of the universe. So you divide something, you divide it again, you divide it again, until you finally get to something you can't divide anymore.

The elementary particles.

Speaker 1: That's what they're studying in these collisions. Elementary particles, the building blocks of our universe. We know a lot of them already. You might recognize some, like electrons, or photons, which give us light. We know about all of these elementary particles thanks to brilliant people doing extremely complex math and decades of experimentation to prove that math actually predicts the real world.

That math looks like this. This is a beautiful description of how we as humans think the world around us works. It's called the Standard Model.

Speaker 4: We can understand a lot about our universe. Where we came from, where we're going, what we're made of. It's pure research to try to understand our universe.

Speaker 1: 1 reason that they wanted to build the Large Hadron Collider specifically is that the Standard Model predicted that there should be another particle, a mystery particle, likely present near the beginning of our universe, that no 1 had ever actually detected. They called it the Higgs boson, or more sensationally, the God particle. The standard model seemed to suggest that this God particle was of vital importance to universal existence because, and here's where my brain starts to break a little bit, it would confirm the existence of an underlying field that gives other particles mass. In other words, this god particle would help us understand why everything you and I feel exists. Basically, why stuff exists was a big mystery, and this underlying field was our best mathematical explanation.

And observing the Higgs boson, the particle related to this field, would help to prove it. The only problem was that to do that, we needed to get enough energy in 1 place to create it. Like from smashing 2 protons together at nearly the speed of light. And that is 1 big reason to build the Large Hadron Collider. So, they built it.

And after they finished, thousands of scientists spent 2 more years collecting data at 2 different detectors, until finally they were sure enough to announce to the world they did it. They reliably created the Higgs boson, something that no 1 had ever detected before, proving a truth about our universe that had before been a mystery. And that proof looked like this. Yep, it's a bump on a chart. Think about how much work went into seeing that bump on that chart.

Like, that's it? Yeah, it's awesome! Through math, scientists predicted that if the Higgs boson exists, when we smash particles together, we should see a bump. And there it

Speaker 2: is.

Speaker 3: There was literally a bump. There were more particles being produced at that energy.

Speaker 1: The math was right. This confirmation didn't immediately change the world for people like you and me, but it showed us that as a species, we're on the right track. We're never going to know the impact of discovering any single building block of reality. When Sir Isaac Newton revealed the motion of our moon and our planets, He couldn't have possibly imagined there would be humans on the moon nearly 300 years later. The same is true of our discoveries today.

That's the point of all of this. We discover the building blocks now, so that our children can build with them later, in ways that we can't possibly imagine.

Speaker 3: I don't know what understanding the Higgs boson is really going to do to change the way that we live, but in 20, 30, 50 years, the better that we understand how these particles work, the more we can create technologies that change our lives.

Speaker 1: And the Higgs boson was by no means the only thing the Large Hadron Collider has uncovered. It has shaped our understanding of the way that elementary particles interact and combine, and put our theories about the world to the test, Over and over and over again. But now, some scientists argue that we might have reached a limit on what we can learn from this collider. And there's still so much that we don't know about the universe. So, some Scientists argue that now what we need to do is build a much, much bigger 1.

That's the big debate happening right now. What is

Speaker 2: the future of matter?

Speaker 4: There's things we're looking for. The big, big holes in our understanding of the universe. We have measured really clearly that there's something out there that only acts through gravitation as far as we can tell.

Speaker 1: He's talking about dark matter.

Speaker 4: Invisible matter would have been a better name. It doesn't matter. It doesn't, you know, send anything out that we can see with our eyes, but it affects gravitationally and it makes a big difference.

Speaker 1: We know this dark matter is there because it impacts things that we can see, like the way light visibly bends as it passes galaxies. Through those effects, we can calculate dark matter accounts for 27% of our universe. Could a bigger collider help us learn about it? We don't really know.

Speaker 4: Nobody is guaranteeing it will find dark matter. It might answer something completely different. It might pose new questions. Maybe we'll find something we had no idea was there. And we need to start working on it now.

Does it have a name? It has a horrible name. It has a horrible name. It's called the FCC. The Future Circular Collider, which of course you have to change after you've built it.

Speaker 1: CERN estimates that building this new collider would cost roughly $17 billion, and instead of a 27 kilometer loop, it would be a hundred. But not everyone thinks this is worth it. They argue that the Large Hadron Collider has fallen short of what some hoped that it would achieve. On top of that, some predictions seem to suggest we'd need even more energy than this new, bigger collider would have in order to produce anything truly new. I think there's no need to overpromise.

We don't really know. But that's not a reason not to try. The byproduct of all of the pure science done at CERN has already resulted in new therapies for cancer treatments, better medical imaging, more efficient electric cars, more sensitive radiation detectors that we now use in space, and my favorite, a new way for scientists to communicate, now called the World Wide Web. All of that and more came from work done at CERN. We don't know what we'll come up with next.

Just imagine for a second what we could do if we had a better, deeper understanding of what gives things mass. The future always sounds like sci-fi, until we build it. And listen, I am not at all qualified to figure out if this specific collider is what we should build. And there are other ideas out there, like a muon collider and a linear collider. There's a proposal for a very powerful collider built in China.

But we won't know what's possible without spending on this kind of pure research.

Speaker 4: And what's embarrassing is for Europe, They still spend twice as much on defense. The US spends 10 times as much on defense. You can argue we need to do that right now, and that can very well be true. But we need to get to a world that's better than that.

Speaker 1: It would be reasonable to say, hey, maybe we should spend this money on other research that would apply more directly to improving people's lives right now, today. But is that a real choice?

Speaker 4: That's a false choice. Fundamental research is essential to be able to do any of that applied research. It'd be like saying, okay, we're going to have universities and maybe secondary education, but we're gonna cut out elementary school and no kindergarten. I feel that we're the kindergarten. We're the very, very basics.

You have to have all of it.

Speaker 1: We have come so far in our understanding of the universe, but There is so much left to learn. Like what's all that extra stuff that we can't see? And where did we come from? And what's coming next? And I think most importantly, while we're here, what we spend our time on shows who we are.

If aliens come to Earth 1 day and they look at what we have built, I would want them to see enormous monuments dedicated to knowledge. I would want them to understand, through what we have built, that we are a species who seeks to learn and tries to do better and aches to find where we belong in a universe that we can barely understand. I would want them to see that, yes, we are limited and yes, we have conflict And yes, we can only glimpse such a tiny slice of the full scale of reality, but man, we try so hard. And that is something that we can all be very proud of because the effort that we put in today can lead to a world we can't even imagine. This was 1 of my favorite scripts to write ever, but it was incredibly hard.

This is just such a complex topic, and I am not a physicist. So the script was fact-checked by a physicist at CERN, but if you want to know more about the details of the physics here, I'll link to a couple of my favorite explainers by actual physicists on YouTube. And if you want there to be more of this kind of optimistic science and tech journalism, subscribe to our show, Huge If True. It really means a lot. It means that we get to go to all of these incredible places and make more videos for you.

So it's a big deal. Thank you. See you for the next 1.

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What's Really Happening At CERN