ORF
Titel: Die Urknallmaschine
Title: The Big Bang Machine CERN – The European Organization for Nuclear Research
English adaptation and voice-over: Cattle C Studios, Kerpen
00.00 IN
00.03 Narrator Recently, this village on the French-Swiss border was host to an extraordinary scientific experiment. Sub-atomic particles were collided with an energy that had not been experienced since the big bang. The results will open up a brave new world of physics, revealing information about particles, which could explain the workings of the universe itself.
00.20 Title Insert “The Big Bang Machine”
01.28 Narrator Beneath this peaceful meadow on the French-Swiss border, the secrets of the universe are being investigated. The ‘Large Hadron Collider’ occupies a 27km circular tunnel 100 metres underground. The machine collides two beams of protons at a fraction of the speed of light. And the scientists behind the machine are confident that it will answer some of the fundamental questions of physics; making the invisible visible.
02.11 This is CERN: the European Organization for Nuclear Research. It’s one of the world’s largest and most respected laboratories, with three thousand four hundred employees and eight thousand visiting scientists from all over the world. Its business is fundamental physics- finding out what the universe is made of and how it works.
02.423.20 Since CERN was founded in 1954, it has sought to learn more about the universe by smashing particles together at colossal speeds. Gigantic machines were built to achieve this: particle accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider of today. And particle detectors, which record the results.It was a hunt for new particles to explain the mysteries of the universe. The atom, once thought to be the smallest particle in the world, was broken down into a nucleus and electrons, which was in turn broken down into protons and neutrons; quarks and W-bosons were discovered. Antiparticles with the reverse charge of usual particles were finally recorded. The antimatter evidenced every in the universe - when stars explode, or asteroids collide - was harnessed in a lab and used in brain scans. Small particles led to big successes. And Nobel Prizes were the reward.
04.10 At the end of it all they hoped that ‘The God Particle’ would reveal itself: it was an inflammatory name for a particle, necessary to support the current understanding of the universe. It was the key to explaining why matter has mass, why the universe expanded from the size of an atom during the big bang. It was a dangerous game.
04.50 Narrator “CERN is not sorcery”, say the words on this model accelerator. Yet even today people many believe that particle collision is the work of the devil. When the Large Hadron Collider was first switched on in September 2008, speculation that black holes would appear and swallow up the world, was rife. According to many newspapers, Doomsday was upon us.
05.2005:4506:1606:50 The scientists working on the Large Hadron Collider say that the energy created by the machine would never be great enough to create a black hole. Yet the sheer vastness of the underground machine has led many to fear earthquakes. The Collider is contained within a circular tunnel, with a circumference of 27 kilometres. Inside its circular vacuum pipes, two beams of subatomic particles called hadrons, travel in opposite directions. They gain energy with every lap, eventually colliding at close to the speed of light. The particles are guided by superconducting electromagnets. In order for the magnets to conduct electricity without resistance or loss of energy, they have to be chilled to a temperature colder than outer space! So they’re connected to a distribution system of liquid helium.It's been a long journey for these physicists who have been working on this project for more than 15 years. Yet more than worth the wait. Six detectors will record the results, and then it will be up to the teams of physicists from around the world to analyse the findings.As the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator, it’s hoped that the collider will provide the answers that previous machines have failed to provide.
07.27 Construction of the Large Hadron Collider began in 1999. But planning of the machine began four years earlier. the tunnels housed the collider’s predecessor, the LEP, so they had to be re-excavated. The costs came to more than three billion euros, yet donations were made from over one hundred countries around the world.The machine had to be shut down in 2008, when a badly soldered part led to an enormous helium leak. So every care was taken with the re-build. It’s dangerous work, not only in the building but in the maintenance. Although propelled by supermagnets, the microscopic particles require as much electricity as is used in the surrounding cities combined, to keep them in line.
08:26 The challenge is to keep the particles travelling in a circle and to keep the particles focused. Otherwise they will not only fail to collide, but they will escape the tubes during their journey. Thousands of magnets of different varieties and sizes are used to direct the beams around the accelerator. The blue parts are dipole magnets, which are used to bend the beams, and the silver parts are quadrupole magnets, which focus the beams. Just prior to collision, another type of magnet is used to 'squeeze' the particles closer together to increase the chances of collisions. The particles are so tiny that the task of making them collide is akin to firing needles from two positions 10 km apart with such precision that they meet halfway!
09:06 Due to the length of the tunnels, a monorail system has been fitted to transport heavy materials, such as the magnets. But for scientists who don’t fancy the 27km walk, a bicycle is advisable. Spending almost all of their time in these underground tunnels, these scientists see the world very differently to most of us. Yet although there are strong indicators that what they’re searching for exists, there is often no clear scientific proof. Very little is actually known about antimatter, or what affect the large hadron collider could have on the world. For them, proof lies in the formulae and models that they manically develop; chalked out on blackboards, just as they were in the past.
10:40 It’s a mind boggling show of intellect, and one which consumes their lives. But how does it correspond to the real world? How does one even harness microscopic hadron particles and get them into a gigantic tube in the first place?
11:48 Every journey a proton takes in the collider begins here in an old linear accelerator. It’s a piece of equipment that has been in operation for 31 years.It’s a part of the complex that is steeped in history. The place where antimatter was once successfully created. And magnificent Hollywood films like “Angels and Demons”, in which antimatter is used to threaten the Vatican, wouldn’t have been anywhere near so successful without this major achievement. But here at CERN it’s not seen as such a big deal. Compared with the very large 27-kilometre hadron collider this is a very small piece of equipment. Yet the Hadron collider includes heavy ion collisions as well as proton collisions. The Low Energy Ion Ring is needed to accelerate and store the ions before they are injected into the hadron ring. Christian Carlo co-ordinates its running.
13:19 INT: Christian Carli This accelerator was constructed in preparation for the large hadron collider. This machine is needed to produce the ion beams that are occasionally needed in the hadron collider. This machine can accumulate several impulses from the linear accelerator. Current ion sources cannot deliver a very high intensity, which is why we have to accumulate several impulses from the linear accelerator in this synchrotron until the intensity is high enough for four particle packages for the hadron collider.
14:00 Drown out presenter This accelerator only became famous as the result of a book, because it’s the accelerator in which antimatter was once produced. But according to Christian, Dan Brown’s suggestion that antimatter could be harnessed as a weapon, is more science fiction than science.
INT: Christian Carli Of course it’s completely ridiculous. The production of anti-protons is very, very inefficient. You could never produce sufficient anti-protons to produce an explosion. But it’s true, the Low Energy Antiproton Ring used to be here and its task was to provide antiprotons for experiments. At the time this machine occasionally received an antiproton package and that was then accelerated or decelerated to the correct energy and over a longer period of time a few particles were supplied for experiments. It is true that this is the place where anti-hydrogen atoms were produced for the first time.
Norbert Frischauf How many anti-hydrogen atoms were seen?
Christian Carli The team that operated this detector at the time was able to prove the existence of nine anti-hydrogen atoms.
Norbert Frischauf That’s very far away from any kind of gram or kilogram figures.
Christian Carli The team that operated this detector at the time was able to prove the existence of nine anti-hydrogen atoms. 24.01
Norbert Frischauf That’s very far away from any kind of gram or kilogram figures. 24.06
Christan Carli Of course. We still have an antiproton programme at CERN. There is the AD, which stands for Antiproton Decelerator. It still produces antiprotons and sends them to experiments. It managed to produce significantly larger quantities of anti-hydrogen protons, but still not the quantity that would be needed to produce an explosion. 24.31
Norbert Frischauf Good. So it’s pure science and not a conspiracy theory. 24.33
Christian Carli Exactly.
15:46 Narrator If the particle accelerators are the heart of CERN, the computer centre is the brain. The particle collisions trigger billions of reactions. These reactions have to be evaluated in order to understand what’s happening in the experiment. Atlas, just one of the 6 particle detector traps, produces around 20 million gigabytes of data every year. That quantity corresponds to around 27 million CD ROMs. All of the detectors of the hadron colliders combined generate data that would fill 60 million CD ROMs.
This data needs to be analyzed. But the analysis of the particle reactions is also a matter of luck. Of the ten trillion snapshots produced when particles collide only one contains usable and interesting data.
Even the capacities of a place like CERN are not enough to cope with such volumes of data. That’s why more than 100,000 individual computers are linked in the world-wide-grid. All of the participating researchers can work with this global super computer where all the calculations and data are automatically uploaded.
The central servers for the world wide web are also located here. It’s no wonder, because Tim Berners-Lee invented it here in 1989. A spin-off of particle research, a system that was originally designed to improve information exchange between scientists, the Internet has remained an end in itself, freely available to the world which it has changed.
The history of CERN is also the story of the computer. The latest and most powerful ones of their day were always to be found here. And even though in retrospect they may look like dinosaurs, they were the best of their era.
19:20 ‘Atlas’ is a figure from Greek mythology, condemned by Zeus to bear the heavens on his shoulders. A fitting name for one of the detectors in which new elementary particles will be discovered. One hundred metres below the surface of the Earth it is not capable of supporting the heavens, but it is gigantic. It has a height and diameter of seven storeys. Because tiny particles need a large net. It’s a huge, and also lonely cavern, because during experiments nobody is allowed to be in the detector.
20:16 Martin Jäkel While the large hadron collider is in operation we have radiation in this cavern. That’s exactly what the experiment is supposed to measure. As soon as the collider is switched off we wait for the short-lived isotopes to disappear. Within hours you can enter this space again. But to make sure it’s safe we have a security system, to prevent anyone from being in the cavern when the beam starts operating. 29.29
20.52 Narrator Atlas is on the Swiss side of the Large Hadron Collider. CMS, the second large particle detector, is on the French side. We already know Atlas has to support the heavens, but both detectors will be used to reach for the stars.Like Atlas, CMS will be used to hunt for the Higgs Boson, also known as the God Particle, and to investigate the nature of antimatter. The insights that are recorded in these detectors in the coming months, will change our vision of the world.But building a machine that can capture microscopic particles, is an enormous venture. Atlas may be the largest detector, but CMS is the heaviest. It weighs in at a massive 13 500 tons, as much as the Eiffel Tower. And everything had to be assembled by hovercraft.
22 Michael Hoch We have three or four more weeks during which we have to perform the final service adjustments. We have to fine-tune the detectors and connections and then the entire platform here will be removed to empty the space. All that will be left is the steel pipe and the end caps will be pushed in through this pipe. This tip behind us fits exactly into the hole and then we’ll prepare for the beam. First that is closed, then we work with cosmic radiation and then we wait for the hadron collider to supply us with the beam, during which time we will be ready for the collisions. 32.22
22.36 Norbert Frischauf You mentioned cosmic radiation. How does it get here? We’re a hundred metres below ground. 32.28
22:50 Michael Hoch It can penetrate the Earth because the particles are so high-energy that they produce the same effect there that we want to reconstruct here in the laboratory under controlled conditions. It’s the muons that are long-lived. They can penetrate through the atmosphere down into the Earth and we can measure them here a hundred metres below the surface. 32.56
23:09 Narrator Believe it or not, we are all hit by cosmic particles countless times every minute. Here they are made visible. They are significantly higher energy than those that are produced in the particle accelerator. But they have one disadvantage: their appearance is unpredictable.
23.25 Particle accelerators such as the large hadron collider are necessary if we want to understand what happens when immense quantities of energy are concentrated in a tiny spot, as they were 13.7 billion years ago when the universe was created.
23:44 Narrator According to current models the Big Bang was a kind of cosmic explosion during which not just matter but also space and time were created.
23.55 At first the universe was incredibly hot and dense. High-energy particles dominated but with the universe’s progressing expansion it cooled more and more and the particles lost more and more energy. A few billionths of a second after the Big Bang the universe suddenly dropped below a critical temperature and something extraordinary happened: the universe froze out.
24:44 It was like the transition from a water droplet to an ice block, except that this transition in the universe produced a new phenomenon: the Higgs field. The Higgs field had an enormous impact on the different elementary particles. Until then they had all been able to travel at the speed of light.
24:51 As a result of the Higgs field the particles were divided into categories. Some felt almost no effect from the field, others were significantly decelerated. It was as if some of their motion energy was transformed into a kind of compressed energy. This second type of energy is also known as “mass”.
25:11 Einstein’s famous formula proved energy could turn into mass and mass into energy. The Higgs field seems to play a special role in this process.
25:31 Electrons consist largely of energy.The muon has a bit more mass.The W-boson a bit more……and the quark consists almost exclusively of mass. It has hardly any energy.
25:4126:30 The Higgs field gives certain particles mass. But why?In quantum mechanics, all fields, including the Higgs field, are seen as an entanglement of particles known as Higgs bosons.The Higgs field is by no means static. Its fluctuations are caused by Higgs bosons that continuously appear and disappear again. A kind of boiling Higgs ocean.When an electron travels through this field it glides through the Higgs bosons without resistance.The muon finds it a little more difficult.The W-boson interacts very strongly with the Higgs field and as a result is dramatically slowed down by the Higgs bosons. The quark reacts very easily with the Higgs bosons and so a large proportion of its motion energy is transformed into mass.
27 For the moment, he Higgs field is just a hypothesis. But if it were correct scientists should be able to produce and destroy Higgs bosons in experiments. In order to do so, very high energies are needed, the likes of which are only produced in a direct collision between two protons.It’s exactly this experiment the large hadron collider in CERN is designed to investigate.
27.22 600 million collisions will take place in the collider every second. But it is estimated that only one in ten thousand billion collisions produces a really high-energy collision in which a Higgs boson could be created. That’s because it is only in one in ten thousand billion cases that two of the six quarks which the protons are made of really collide head on. Only then is enough energy set free in a small space-time point to make it possible for a Higgs boson to be created.
27.40 Although newly produced Higgs bosons decay again in a very short time, the particle pairs produced are relatively easy to detect, delivering certain proof that Higgs bosons aren’t just a hypothetical construct.
28:26 12,500 tons of machinery has been erected in order to hint down these tiny particles. Their discovery will complete the Standard Model of Physics explaining why we all have mass. The expectations were high when the large hadron collider started operation on the tenth of September 2008. The plan was for the decade-long search for the Higgs boson to finally bear fruit and to find other, more exotic particles, such as microscopic black holes. And many prophesised the apocalypse as a result. However cosmic radiation releases far more energy through its constant bombardment of the Earth’s atmosphere than the large hadron collider ever could...so the chances of the earth being swallowed by a black hole were slim. In the end both the discovery of the Higgs Boson and the coming apocalypse would have to wait. Because just ten days after the world’s biggest machine started operating, something happened which put an end to the experiments for more than a year.
29:46 Michael Hoch This is cooled with liquid helium in order to produce this superconducting effect and at this transition there was a heat loss of 15 watts. 41.43
30 Narrator One small, incorrectly welded join and all the big plans, theories and visions went out the window. Rome wasn’t built in a day, but the universe was apparently created in a billionth of a second. However even “time” is a process that hasn’t been explained yet either. It’s just one theoretical concept amongst many for scientists.
30:22 In Goethe’s Faust it says: “Who strives always to the utmost / For him there is salvation. When it is time to turn a disc into a sphere, when it is time for the old time to make way to the new, then it will happen”.
The Big Bang machine may be a triumph of technology. But the desire to understand nature or God or even ourselves is a distinctly human phenomenon. Physicists are desperate to find the Higgs Boson, to neatly tie up the Standard model of physics. But the universe doesn’t reveal itself easily. Ultimately the realities that could emerge amongst the shattered particles of the Hadron Collider, could unravel the model of physics that we’ve understood to date. The only certainty is that it will bring us closer to the mysteries of the universe, than ever before.
Credits
Titel: Die Urknallmaschine
Title: The Big Bang Machine CERN – The European Organization for Nuclear Research
English adaptation and voice-over: Cattle C Studios, Kerpen
00.00 IN
00.03 Narrator Recently, this village on the French-Swiss border was host to an extraordinary scientific experiment. Sub-atomic particles were collided with an energy that had not been experienced since the big bang. The results will open up a brave new world of physics, revealing information about particles, which could explain the workings of the universe itself.
00.20 Title Insert “The Big Bang Machine”
01.28 Narrator Beneath this peaceful meadow on the French-Swiss border, the secrets of the universe are being investigated. The ‘Large Hadron Collider’ occupies a 27km circular tunnel 100 metres underground. The machine collides two beams of protons at a fraction of the speed of light. And the scientists behind the machine are confident that it will answer some of the fundamental questions of physics; making the invisible visible.
02.11 This is CERN: the European Organization for Nuclear Research. It’s one of the world’s largest and most respected laboratories, with three thousand four hundred employees and eight thousand visiting scientists from all over the world. Its business is fundamental physics- finding out what the universe is made of and how it works.
02.423.20 Since CERN was founded in 1954, it has sought to learn more about the universe by smashing particles together at colossal speeds. Gigantic machines were built to achieve this: particle accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider of today. And particle detectors, which record the results.It was a hunt for new particles to explain the mysteries of the universe. The atom, once thought to be the smallest particle in the world, was broken down into a nucleus and electrons, which was in turn broken down into protons and neutrons; quarks and W-bosons were discovered. Antiparticles with the reverse charge of usual particles were finally recorded. The antimatter evidenced every in the universe - when stars explode, or asteroids collide - was harnessed in a lab and used in brain scans. Small particles led to big successes. And Nobel Prizes were the reward.
04.10 At the end of it all they hoped that ‘The God Particle’ would reveal itself: it was an inflammatory name for a particle, necessary to support the current understanding of the universe. It was the key to explaining why matter has mass, why the universe expanded from the size of an atom during the big bang. It was a dangerous game.
04.50 Narrator “CERN is not sorcery”, say the words on this model accelerator. Yet even today people many believe that particle collision is the work of the devil. When the Large Hadron Collider was first switched on in September 2008, speculation that black holes would appear and swallow up the world, was rife. According to many newspapers, Doomsday was upon us.
05.2005:4506:1606:50 The scientists working on the Large Hadron Collider say that the energy created by the machine would never be great enough to create a black hole. Yet the sheer vastness of the underground machine has led many to fear earthquakes. The Collider is contained within a circular tunnel, with a circumference of 27 kilometres. Inside its circular vacuum pipes, two beams of subatomic particles called hadrons, travel in opposite directions. They gain energy with every lap, eventually colliding at close to the speed of light. The particles are guided by superconducting electromagnets. In order for the magnets to conduct electricity without resistance or loss of energy, they have to be chilled to a temperature colder than outer space! So they’re connected to a distribution system of liquid helium.It's been a long journey for these physicists who have been working on this project for more than 15 years. Yet more than worth the wait. Six detectors will record the results, and then it will be up to the teams of physicists from around the world to analyse the findings.As the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator, it’s hoped that the collider will provide the answers that previous machines have failed to provide.
07.27 Construction of the Large Hadron Collider began in 1999. But planning of the machine began four years earlier. the tunnels housed the collider’s predecessor, the LEP, so they had to be re-excavated. The costs came to more than three billion euros, yet donations were made from over one hundred countries around the world.The machine had to be shut down in 2008, when a badly soldered part led to an enormous helium leak. So every care was taken with the re-build. It’s dangerous work, not only in the building but in the maintenance. Although propelled by supermagnets, the microscopic particles require as much electricity as is used in the surrounding cities combined, to keep them in line.
08:26 The challenge is to keep the particles travelling in a circle and to keep the particles focused. Otherwise they will not only fail to collide, but they will escape the tubes during their journey. Thousands of magnets of different varieties and sizes are used to direct the beams around the accelerator. The blue parts are dipole magnets, which are used to bend the beams, and the silver parts are quadrupole magnets, which focus the beams. Just prior to collision, another type of magnet is used to 'squeeze' the particles closer together to increase the chances of collisions. The particles are so tiny that the task of making them collide is akin to firing needles from two positions 10 km apart with such precision that they meet halfway!
09:06 Due to the length of the tunnels, a monorail system has been fitted to transport heavy materials, such as the magnets. But for scientists who don’t fancy the 27km walk, a bicycle is advisable. Spending almost all of their time in these underground tunnels, these scientists see the world very differently to most of us. Yet although there are strong indicators that what they’re searching for exists, there is often no clear scientific proof. Very little is actually known about antimatter, or what affect the large hadron collider could have on the world. For them, proof lies in the formulae and models that they manically develop; chalked out on blackboards, just as they were in the past.
10:40 It’s a mind boggling show of intellect, and one which consumes their lives. But how does it correspond to the real world? How does one even harness microscopic hadron particles and get them into a gigantic tube in the first place?
11:48 Every journey a proton takes in the collider begins here in an old linear accelerator. It’s a piece of equipment that has been in operation for 31 years.It’s a part of the complex that is steeped in history. The place where antimatter was once successfully created. And magnificent Hollywood films like “Angels and Demons”, in which antimatter is used to threaten the Vatican, wouldn’t have been anywhere near so successful without this major achievement. But here at CERN it’s not seen as such a big deal. Compared with the very large 27-kilometre hadron collider this is a very small piece of equipment. Yet the Hadron collider includes heavy ion collisions as well as proton collisions. The Low Energy Ion Ring is needed to accelerate and store the ions before they are injected into the hadron ring. Christian Carlo co-ordinates its running.
13:19 INT: Christian Carli This accelerator was constructed in preparation for the large hadron collider. This machine is needed to produce the ion beams that are occasionally needed in the hadron collider. This machine can accumulate several impulses from the linear accelerator. Current ion sources cannot deliver a very high intensity, which is why we have to accumulate several impulses from the linear accelerator in this synchrotron until the intensity is high enough for four particle packages for the hadron collider.
14:00 Drown out presenter This accelerator only became famous as the result of a book, because it’s the accelerator in which antimatter was once produced. But according to Christian, Dan Brown’s suggestion that antimatter could be harnessed as a weapon, is more science fiction than science.
INT: Christian Carli Of course it’s completely ridiculous. The production of anti-protons is very, very inefficient. You could never produce sufficient anti-protons to produce an explosion. But it’s true, the Low Energy Antiproton Ring used to be here and its task was to provide antiprotons for experiments. At the time this machine occasionally received an antiproton package and that was then accelerated or decelerated to the correct energy and over a longer period of time a few particles were supplied for experiments. It is true that this is the place where anti-hydrogen atoms were produced for the first time.
Norbert Frischauf How many anti-hydrogen atoms were seen?
Christian Carli The team that operated this detector at the time was able to prove the existence of nine anti-hydrogen atoms.
Norbert Frischauf That’s very far away from any kind of gram or kilogram figures.
Christian Carli The team that operated this detector at the time was able to prove the existence of nine anti-hydrogen atoms. 24.01
Norbert Frischauf That’s very far away from any kind of gram or kilogram figures. 24.06
Christan Carli Of course. We still have an antiproton programme at CERN. There is the AD, which stands for Antiproton Decelerator. It still produces antiprotons and sends them to experiments. It managed to produce significantly larger quantities of anti-hydrogen protons, but still not the quantity that would be needed to produce an explosion. 24.31
Norbert Frischauf Good. So it’s pure science and not a conspiracy theory. 24.33
Christian Carli Exactly.
15:46 Narrator If the particle accelerators are the heart of CERN, the computer centre is the brain. The particle collisions trigger billions of reactions. These reactions have to be evaluated in order to understand what’s happening in the experiment. Atlas, just one of the 6 particle detector traps, produces around 20 million gigabytes of data every year. That quantity corresponds to around 27 million CD ROMs. All of the detectors of the hadron colliders combined generate data that would fill 60 million CD ROMs.
This data needs to be analyzed. But the analysis of the particle reactions is also a matter of luck. Of the ten trillion snapshots produced when particles collide only one contains usable and interesting data.
Even the capacities of a place like CERN are not enough to cope with such volumes of data. That’s why more than 100,000 individual computers are linked in the world-wide-grid. All of the participating researchers can work with this global super computer where all the calculations and data are automatically uploaded.
The central servers for the world wide web are also located here. It’s no wonder, because Tim Berners-Lee invented it here in 1989. A spin-off of particle research, a system that was originally designed to improve information exchange between scientists, the Internet has remained an end in itself, freely available to the world which it has changed.
The history of CERN is also the story of the computer. The latest and most powerful ones of their day were always to be found here. And even though in retrospect they may look like dinosaurs, they were the best of their era.
19:20 ‘Atlas’ is a figure from Greek mythology, condemned by Zeus to bear the heavens on his shoulders. A fitting name for one of the detectors in which new elementary particles will be discovered. One hundred metres below the surface of the Earth it is not capable of supporting the heavens, but it is gigantic. It has a height and diameter of seven storeys. Because tiny particles need a large net. It’s a huge, and also lonely cavern, because during experiments nobody is allowed to be in the detector.
20:16 Martin Jäkel While the large hadron collider is in operation we have radiation in this cavern. That’s exactly what the experiment is supposed to measure. As soon as the collider is switched off we wait for the short-lived isotopes to disappear. Within hours you can enter this space again. But to make sure it’s safe we have a security system, to prevent anyone from being in the cavern when the beam starts operating. 29.29
20.52 Narrator Atlas is on the Swiss side of the Large Hadron Collider. CMS, the second large particle detector, is on the French side. We already know Atlas has to support the heavens, but both detectors will be used to reach for the stars.Like Atlas, CMS will be used to hunt for the Higgs Boson, also known as the God Particle, and to investigate the nature of antimatter. The insights that are recorded in these detectors in the coming months, will change our vision of the world.But building a machine that can capture microscopic particles, is an enormous venture. Atlas may be the largest detector, but CMS is the heaviest. It weighs in at a massive 13 500 tons, as much as the Eiffel Tower. And everything had to be assembled by hovercraft.
22 Michael Hoch We have three or four more weeks during which we have to perform the final service adjustments. We have to fine-tune the detectors and connections and then the entire platform here will be removed to empty the space. All that will be left is the steel pipe and the end caps will be pushed in through this pipe. This tip behind us fits exactly into the hole and then we’ll prepare for the beam. First that is closed, then we work with cosmic radiation and then we wait for the hadron collider to supply us with the beam, during which time we will be ready for the collisions. 32.22
22.36 Norbert Frischauf You mentioned cosmic radiation. How does it get here? We’re a hundred metres below ground. 32.28
22:50 Michael Hoch It can penetrate the Earth because the particles are so high-energy that they produce the same effect there that we want to reconstruct here in the laboratory under controlled conditions. It’s the muons that are long-lived. They can penetrate through the atmosphere down into the Earth and we can measure them here a hundred metres below the surface. 32.56
23:09 Narrator Believe it or not, we are all hit by cosmic particles countless times every minute. Here they are made visible. They are significantly higher energy than those that are produced in the particle accelerator. But they have one disadvantage: their appearance is unpredictable.
23.25 Particle accelerators such as the large hadron collider are necessary if we want to understand what happens when immense quantities of energy are concentrated in a tiny spot, as they were 13.7 billion years ago when the universe was created.
23:44 Narrator According to current models the Big Bang was a kind of cosmic explosion during which not just matter but also space and time were created.
23.55 At first the universe was incredibly hot and dense. High-energy particles dominated but with the universe’s progressing expansion it cooled more and more and the particles lost more and more energy. A few billionths of a second after the Big Bang the universe suddenly dropped below a critical temperature and something extraordinary happened: the universe froze out.
24:44 It was like the transition from a water droplet to an ice block, except that this transition in the universe produced a new phenomenon: the Higgs field. The Higgs field had an enormous impact on the different elementary particles. Until then they had all been able to travel at the speed of light.
24:51 As a result of the Higgs field the particles were divided into categories. Some felt almost no effect from the field, others were significantly decelerated. It was as if some of their motion energy was transformed into a kind of compressed energy. This second type of energy is also known as “mass”.
25:11 Einstein’s famous formula proved energy could turn into mass and mass into energy. The Higgs field seems to play a special role in this process.
25:31 Electrons consist largely of energy.The muon has a bit more mass.The W-boson a bit more……and the quark consists almost exclusively of mass. It has hardly any energy.
25:4126:30 The Higgs field gives certain particles mass. But why?In quantum mechanics, all fields, including the Higgs field, are seen as an entanglement of particles known as Higgs bosons.The Higgs field is by no means static. Its fluctuations are caused by Higgs bosons that continuously appear and disappear again. A kind of boiling Higgs ocean.When an electron travels through this field it glides through the Higgs bosons without resistance.The muon finds it a little more difficult.The W-boson interacts very strongly with the Higgs field and as a result is dramatically slowed down by the Higgs bosons. The quark reacts very easily with the Higgs bosons and so a large proportion of its motion energy is transformed into mass.
27 For the moment, he Higgs field is just a hypothesis. But if it were correct scientists should be able to produce and destroy Higgs bosons in experiments. In order to do so, very high energies are needed, the likes of which are only produced in a direct collision between two protons.It’s exactly this experiment the large hadron collider in CERN is designed to investigate.
27.22 600 million collisions will take place in the collider every second. But it is estimated that only one in ten thousand billion collisions produces a really high-energy collision in which a Higgs boson could be created. That’s because it is only in one in ten thousand billion cases that two of the six quarks which the protons are made of really collide head on. Only then is enough energy set free in a small space-time point to make it possible for a Higgs boson to be created.
27.40 Although newly produced Higgs bosons decay again in a very short time, the particle pairs produced are relatively easy to detect, delivering certain proof that Higgs bosons aren’t just a hypothetical construct.
28:26 12,500 tons of machinery has been erected in order to hint down these tiny particles. Their discovery will complete the Standard Model of Physics explaining why we all have mass. The expectations were high when the large hadron collider started operation on the tenth of September 2008. The plan was for the decade-long search for the Higgs boson to finally bear fruit and to find other, more exotic particles, such as microscopic black holes. And many prophesised the apocalypse as a result. However cosmic radiation releases far more energy through its constant bombardment of the Earth’s atmosphere than the large hadron collider ever could...so the chances of the earth being swallowed by a black hole were slim. In the end both the discovery of the Higgs Boson and the coming apocalypse would have to wait. Because just ten days after the world’s biggest machine started operating, something happened which put an end to the experiments for more than a year.
29:46 Michael Hoch This is cooled with liquid helium in order to produce this superconducting effect and at this transition there was a heat loss of 15 watts. 41.43
30 Narrator One small, incorrectly welded join and all the big plans, theories and visions went out the window. Rome wasn’t built in a day, but the universe was apparently created in a billionth of a second. However even “time” is a process that hasn’t been explained yet either. It’s just one theoretical concept amongst many for scientists.
30:22 In Goethe’s Faust it says: “Who strives always to the utmost / For him there is salvation. When it is time to turn a disc into a sphere, when it is time for the old time to make way to the new, then it will happen”.
The Big Bang machine may be a triumph of technology. But the desire to understand nature or God or even ourselves is a distinctly human phenomenon. Physicists are desperate to find the Higgs Boson, to neatly tie up the Standard model of physics. But the universe doesn’t reveal itself easily. Ultimately the realities that could emerge amongst the shattered particles of the Hadron Collider, could unravel the model of physics that we’ve understood to date. The only certainty is that it will bring us closer to the mysteries of the universe, than ever before.
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