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Could CERN Finally Discover Dark Matter? · The Quark Side - Quantum Physics Podcast

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the quark Side Quantum Physics podcast, an exploration
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: of the fundamental structure of reality where quantum laws govern matter, energy,
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: and information. Here, uncertainty is a feature, not a flaw,
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: and understanding begins at the smallest scales.
• 0:27
  Speaker 2: So on Monday, the most complex, the most energetic, and
• 0:32
  Speaker 2: expensive machine ever constructed by human hands is going to
• 0:35
  Speaker 2: do something pretty shocking.
• 0:37
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it really is.
• 0:37
  Speaker 2: It is entirely pulling the plug, like turning off. For
• 0:41
  Speaker 2: four years, this seventeen mile subterranean ring, which has basically
• 0:46
  Speaker 2: defined twenty first century physics for you and me, is
• 0:49
  Speaker 2: just going to sit in absolute silence.
• 0:50
  Speaker 3: It's black and silent, right.
• 0:52
  Speaker 2: And the reason why they're doing this might just be
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  Speaker 2: the key to unlocking the remaining ninety five percent.
• 0:57
  Speaker 3: Of the universe, which is I mean, it's just a
• 0:59
  Speaker 3: staggering thought and shutting down the Large Hadron Collider or
• 1:03
  Speaker 3: the LHC. Is this incredibly delicate, deliberate process.
• 1:08
  Speaker 2: You can't just like yank the cord out of the wall.
• 1:10
  Speaker 3: Oh, definitely not. You don't just flip a switch. We
• 1:13
  Speaker 3: are talking about a machine that operates at temperatures that
• 1:15
  Speaker 3: are actually colder than deep space.
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  Speaker 2: Wow.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, and it contains a vacuum emptier than the void
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  Speaker 3: between stars, and it's steering beams of protons at ninety
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  Speaker 3: nine point nine nine nine nine nine percent the speed
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  Speaker 3: of light.
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  Speaker 2: It's almost impossible to wrap your head around it is
• 1:31
  Speaker 2: so purposefully taking that whole system offline, warming it up,
• 1:35
  Speaker 2: opening it to the atmosphere.
• 1:37
  Speaker 3: That is a monumental engineering event all on its own.
• 1:40
  Speaker 2: Absolutely. So for you listening, if you're trying to visualize this,
• 1:42
  Speaker 2: I want you to picture the French Swiss border right
• 1:45
  Speaker 2: near Geneva. Beautiful area, yeah, gorgeous. So on the surface
• 1:49
  Speaker 2: you have these mountains, lakes, this super picturesque scenery. But
• 1:54
  Speaker 2: then you take an elevator down roughly one hundred meters,
• 1:57
  Speaker 2: so that's about three hundred and thirty feet, straight down
• 1:59
  Speaker 2: into the solid bedrock, right into the earth, and you
• 2:02
  Speaker 2: just walk into this massive circular tunnel and it is vast,
• 2:06
  Speaker 2: I mean, twenty seven kilometers are about seventeen miles of
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  Speaker 2: uninterrupted curved subterranean infrastructure. This is the home of the LHC,
• 2:15
  Speaker 2: which is operated by CERN, Europe's premiere physics lab.
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  Speaker 3: And that physical space just standing there is one inspiring
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  Speaker 3: I mean when you stand down there next to those
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  Speaker 3: giant blue cryogenic pipes, the ones that house the actual
• 2:27
  Speaker 3: beam line, you are standing next to an instrument that
• 2:29
  Speaker 3: literally recreates the conditions that existed fractions of a second
• 2:33
  Speaker 3: after the Big Bang.
• 2:33
  Speaker 2: That is just crazy to think about.
• 2:35
  Speaker 3: It really is. The lc uses, you know, thousands of
• 2:38
  Speaker 3: these massive superconducting magnets to grab hold of tiny particles,
• 2:43
  Speaker 3: usually protons, and it whips them around that massive loop
• 2:47
  Speaker 3: in opposite directions.
• 2:48
  Speaker 2: Until they're just going impossibly fast.
• 2:50
  Speaker 3: Exactly until they possess just phenomenal amounts of kinetic energy.
• 2:54
  Speaker 3: And then at four highly specific points around the ring,
• 2:58
  Speaker 3: which is where the giant detectors are located, magnetic fields
• 3:02
  Speaker 3: forced the two beams to cross.
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  Speaker 2: They just smash them right into.
• 3:05
  Speaker 3: Smash them together. The protons crash into each other, ripping
• 3:08
  Speaker 3: reality open for a microscondive fraction of a second, and
• 3:12
  Speaker 3: that allows us to see the fundamental building blocks of nature.
• 3:15
  Speaker 2: And I mean we should remind everyone this is the
• 3:18
  Speaker 2: exact machine that discovered the Higgs boson back in twenty twelve.
• 3:21
  Speaker 3: Oh. Absolutely the Higgs discovery. It fundamentally proved the standard
• 3:25
  Speaker 3: model of particle physics. It was a triumph, right.
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  Speaker 2: Which brings us to like the core tension of what
• 3:31
  Speaker 2: is happening on Monday, Because when you have an instrument
• 3:34
  Speaker 2: that is currently working perfectly, one that has already delivered
• 3:38
  Speaker 2: Nobel Prize winning results and cemented its place in history,
• 3:41
  Speaker 2: the natural impulse is just to keep running it, right, Yeah.
• 3:44
  Speaker 4: If it ain't broke, don't fix it exactly.
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  Speaker 2: But instead they are undertaking this completely blind four year
• 3:51
  Speaker 2: leap of faith to rebuild it.
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  Speaker 3: Well, it's a leap of faith, but a necessary one.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah.
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  Speaker 3: They are hitting the absolute physical limit of what the
• 3:59
  Speaker 3: materials and the curve and architecture can actually achieve.
• 4:02
  Speaker 2: So they've kind of maxed out its stats pretty much.
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  Speaker 3: We have effectively exhausted all the quote unquote easy.
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  Speaker 2: Discoveries, if you can call the Higgs Boson easy.
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  Speaker 3: Right, right, But the questions particle physicists are asking now,
• 4:15
  Speaker 3: questions about you know, dark matter, dark energy, the origins
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  Speaker 3: of the universe. Those require a level of precision and
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  Speaker 3: a sheer volume of collisions that the current LC simply
• 4:25
  Speaker 3: cannot deliver.
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  Speaker 2: It just doesn't have the juice.
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  Speaker 3: It doesn't, So they are taking a calculated risk. They
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  Speaker 3: are fundamentally tearing out a critical section of this machine,
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  Speaker 3: and when it turns back on in June of twenty thirty,
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  Speaker 3: it's going to be reborn as the High Luminosity LHC
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  Speaker 3: or the HL LHC.
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  Speaker 2: And then it's scheduled to run for what about a decade?
• 4:44
  Speaker 3: Yeah, about a decade in that entirely new configuration.
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  Speaker 2: Okay, So let's look at the sheer scale of the
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  Speaker 2: hardware involved in this upgrade, because there's this one specific
• 4:53
  Speaker 2: detail that really stands out to me. The tunnel is
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  Speaker 2: twenty seven kilometers long, right, seventeen miles, huge, sir. But
• 5:00
  Speaker 2: for this massive four year upgrade, they're only completely replacing
• 5:04
  Speaker 2: the components in about one point two kilometers of the track,
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  Speaker 2: that's right, That is just three quarters of a mile
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  Speaker 2: out of a seventeen mile machine. They are tearing out
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  Speaker 2: a remarkably small fraction.
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  Speaker 3: It sounds minor when you put it like that, right.
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  Speaker 2: Think about taking a massive, sprawling, seventeen mile NASCAR racetrack
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  Speaker 2: and deciding to just completely rebuild one highly engineered sharp turn.
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  Speaker 3: I like that analogy.
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  Speaker 2: How do swapping out such a tiny percentage of the
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  Speaker 2: track completely revolutionize the entire system.
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  Speaker 3: So in any highly complex system, whether it is a
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  Speaker 3: factory assembly line or a multi billion dollar particle accelerator,
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  Speaker 3: your maximum capability is entirely dictated by your tightest.
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  Speaker 4: Bottleneck, the weakest link.
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  Speaker 3: Exactly. You don't need to repave the wide, sweeping seventeen
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  Speaker 3: miles of the track if the straightaways are already doing
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  Speaker 3: their job perfectly well, the protons travel through those wide
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  Speaker 3: arcs of the.
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  Speaker 2: Tunnel just fine, Okay, that makes sense.
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  Speaker 3: Limitation is what happens at the interaction points, those precise
• 6:03
  Speaker 3: locations where the beams are actually forced to cross paths
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  Speaker 3: and crash into each other inside those giant detectors.
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  Speaker 2: So it's all about the pinch points, the spots where
• 6:12
  Speaker 2: the actual science happens.
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  Speaker 3: Yes, currently, the LHC relies on these twelve two hundred
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  Speaker 3: and thirty two primary dipole magnets to bend the path
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  Speaker 3: of the accelerated.
• 6:22
  Speaker 4: Protons basically just steering them right, keeping.
• 6:24
  Speaker 3: Them flying in a perfect circle, rather than just you know,
• 6:27
  Speaker 3: shooting off in a straight line into the Swiss bedrock,
• 6:29
  Speaker 3: which would be bad, very bad. But in that specific
• 6:32
  Speaker 3: one point two kilometer section they are upgrading, they're installing
• 6:36
  Speaker 3: an entirely new generation of superconducting magnets. These new ones
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  Speaker 3: are not just for steering, oh really, no, they are
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  Speaker 3: quadruple magnets, and they're designed to intensely violently concentrate and
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  Speaker 3: focus the particle beams right before they intersect.
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  Speaker 2: They're squeezing the beams tighter.
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  Speaker 3: Together, squeezing them down to a fraction of the width
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  Speaker 3: of a human hair.
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  Speaker 4: Wow.
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  Speaker 3: And to do that you need incredibly strong magnetic fields. Now,
• 7:02
  Speaker 3: the current magnets are made of this alloy called naobium titanium.
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  Speaker 2: Okay, niobium titanium.
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  Speaker 3: But they have pushed that material to its absolute theoretical limit.
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  Speaker 3: It literally cannot generate a stronger magnetic field without losing
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  Speaker 3: his superconducting state.
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  Speaker 4: And if it loses that state, it would.
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  Speaker 3: Suddenly heat up, which would be catastrophic.
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  Speaker 2: Like melt the machine. Catastrophic.
• 7:22
  Speaker 3: Oh absolutely, yeah, So they have to replace them with
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  Speaker 3: a new compound, niobium tin.
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  Speaker 2: Theobium tin, right, and.
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  Speaker 3: The obium tin can generate significantly stronger magnetic fields, which
• 7:31
  Speaker 3: allows for that much tighter squeeze on the beam.
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  Speaker 2: But there's a catch, There's always a catch.
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  Speaker 3: It is incredibly brittle. Yeah, I mean, it is almost
• 7:39
  Speaker 3: like working with glass.
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  Speaker 2: You're kidding. They're making magnets for the most powerful machine
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  Speaker 2: on earth out of a material that acts like glass.
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  Speaker 3: Exactly. The engineering required to manufacture and install these specific
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  Speaker 3: magnets without them cracking or shattering is just mind boggling,
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  Speaker 3: which is exactly why focusing on just one point two
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  Speaker 3: kilometers of track is taking them four entire years.
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  Speaker 2: That is insane. And you know, the financial cost of
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  Speaker 2: rebuilding that little three quarter mile pinch point is massive.
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  Speaker 2: The total expected cost of this upgrade is one point
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  Speaker 2: two billion Swiss.
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  Speaker 3: Francs, which is a lot of francs.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, that translates to roughly one point five billion US dollars. Now,
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  Speaker 2: I'm gonna play Devil's advocate for a moment here, go
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  Speaker 2: for it. One point five billion dollars for a hardware
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  Speaker 2: upgrade on a machine we already built and paid for.
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  Speaker 2: That sounds staggering.
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  Speaker 3: It is a massive sum for basically an engineering invoice
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  Speaker 3: on one point two kilometers of tunnel. I won't deny that,
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  Speaker 3: but we really have to valuate cost against output and
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  Speaker 3: put it in context.
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  Speaker 2: Context is key.
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  Speaker 3: Think about it. A single modern sports stadium frequently costs
• 8:44
  Speaker 3: two or three billion dollars to build, right, Oh yeah, easy,
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  Speaker 3: and that's just designed to host entertainment, you know, for
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  Speaker 3: a dozen times a year. Or look at a modern
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  Speaker 3: military aircraft carrier that can easily push past thirteen billion dollars.
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  Speaker 2: That puts it in perspective, right.
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  Speaker 3: We're ending one point five billion to unlock the fundamental
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  Speaker 3: source code of the universe.
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  Speaker 2: I mean, when you put it like that, it sounds
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  Speaker 2: like a bargain.
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  Speaker 3: I'd say so.
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  Speaker 2: And it's also worth pointing out that this one point
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  Speaker 2: five billion isn't just falling on the shoulders of one
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  Speaker 2: single nation. It is a profoundly global.
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  Speaker 4: Investment, highly collaborative.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, the funding is primarily covered by the standard SERN
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  Speaker 2: membership fees, but there are also these crucial in kind
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  Speaker 2: contributions making up about ten to fifteen percent of the
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  Speaker 2: total cost. And those in kind contributions are coming from
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  Speaker 2: this really incredible mix of nations the United States, Japan, Canada, and.
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  Speaker 3: China, which is amazing to see.
• 9:38
  Speaker 2: It is you have the US and China locked in
• 9:41
  Speaker 2: this fierce economic and technological competition on almost every other front,
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  Speaker 2: but they're completely putting aside their differences to ship highly
• 9:50
  Speaker 2: advanced hardware and resources to a European physics lab.
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  Speaker 3: Well science at this level it really transcends geopolitical borders.
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  Speaker 3: I mean, when STERN was founded back in nineteen fifties,
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  Speaker 3: right after the devastation of World War two, part of
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  Speaker 3: its explicit mission was to reunite European scientists to foster
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  Speaker 3: peace through the shared pursuit of knowledge.
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  Speaker 2: That's actually really beautiful.
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  Speaker 3: And that ethos has only expanded over the decades. When
• 10:15
  Speaker 3: you were trying to understand the fabric of the cosmos,
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  Speaker 3: the political system you happen to operate under is completely irrelevant.
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  Speaker 2: Gravity doesn't care about borders exactly.
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  Speaker 3: The math is universal, the engineering challenges are universal. The
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  Speaker 3: discoveries that will be made at the HLLHC won't belong
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  Speaker 3: to a single country or a single corporation. They belong
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  Speaker 3: to humanity as a whole. Nations chip in because they
• 10:36
  Speaker 3: recognize that no single economy can shoulder the burden of
• 10:40
  Speaker 3: pushing the absolute frontier of human knowledge entirely alone.
• 10:44
  Speaker 2: So the overarching goal driving all this international cooperation, all
• 10:48
  Speaker 2: this money, and these crazy brittle niobium tin magnets is
• 10:53
  Speaker 2: to achieve what cern calls high.
• 10:56
  Speaker 4: Luminosity high luminosity.
• 10:57
  Speaker 2: Yes, now the word luminosity is used constantly in all
• 11:00
  Speaker 2: the technical specs, but in everyday conversation, luminosity just means light, right,
• 11:06
  Speaker 2: like we talk about the luminosity of a star or
• 11:08
  Speaker 2: a light bulb or bright something is. But in particle
• 11:11
  Speaker 2: physics it seems to have a completely different definition.
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  Speaker 3: Oh, totally different. In accelerator physics, it is arguably the
• 11:18
  Speaker 3: single most important metric for a machine's performance. Luminosity is
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  Speaker 3: a measure of density and collision frequency.
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  Speaker 2: Density and collision frequency.
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  Speaker 3: It dictates the total number of collisions produced over a
• 11:29
  Speaker 3: given period of time. You can sort of think of
• 11:31
  Speaker 3: it as a measure of opportunity. The higher the luminosity,
• 11:34
  Speaker 3: the more microscopic car crashes. You basically guarantee what happen
• 11:38
  Speaker 3: when you fire two beams at each other.
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  Speaker 2: So it's about forcing the issue.
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  Speaker 3: Yes, Marcus Erlos, the chief of the hl LHC project,
• 11:46
  Speaker 3: frame the stakes of this perfectly. He said, this is
• 11:49
  Speaker 3: a very important moment. We still have lots of physics
• 11:52
  Speaker 3: questions without answers. There are still many discoveries to be made,
• 11:56
  Speaker 3: and so.
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  Speaker 2: The entire point of this massive four year show down
• 12:00
  Speaker 2: is to increase the luminosity of the machine by a
• 12:03
  Speaker 2: factor of ten compared to what the standard LHC can
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  Speaker 2: do today ten times.
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  Speaker 3: The opportunity to really understand what a tenfold increase means,
• 12:12
  Speaker 3: we have to look at the mechanics of the beam itself.
• 12:15
  Speaker 3: The protons in the LHC, they don't travel in the continuous,
• 12:18
  Speaker 3: steady stream.
• 12:19
  Speaker 2: Like water coming out of a hose.
• 12:21
  Speaker 3: No, not like a hose. They are clustered into these
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  Speaker 3: discrete bunches or packets.
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  Speaker 2: So it's more like shooting invisible bullets, but each bullet
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  Speaker 2: is actually a swarm of billions of protons.
• 12:30
  Speaker 3: That is a perfect way to visualize it. Inside the tunnel,
• 12:32
  Speaker 3: you have one beam of these packets flying clockwise and
• 12:35
  Speaker 3: another flying counterclockwise, and at the center of the giant detectors.
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  Speaker 3: The magnetic fields steer these opposing packets, so they pass
• 12:42
  Speaker 3: directly through one another.
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  Speaker 2: Okay, so they pass through each other.
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  Speaker 3: But protons are incredibly unimaginably small, and atoms are mostly
• 12:50
  Speaker 3: empty space anyway, So you can fire a packet of
• 12:53
  Speaker 3: one hundred billion protons at another packet of one hundred
• 12:57
  Speaker 3: billion protons, and almost all of them will just is
• 13:00
  Speaker 3: right past each other without making contact.
• 13:02
  Speaker 2: Just totally miss each other in the dark.
• 13:04
  Speaker 3: Exactly currently with the standard LHC, when two of these
• 13:08
  Speaker 3: massive packets cross paths inside the detectors, you only get
• 13:11
  Speaker 3: about sixty actual.
• 13:13
  Speaker 2: Collisions wait out of billions, only sixty sixty collisions per crossing.
• 13:18
  Speaker 3: The rest of the billions of protons just keep flying
• 13:21
  Speaker 3: around the ring until the next pass.
• 13:22
  Speaker 2: That feels so inefficient.
• 13:24
  Speaker 3: It is, but with the new high luminosity upgrade, because
• 13:27
  Speaker 3: those new niobium tin quadrupoles are squeezing the beams so
• 13:30
  Speaker 3: incredibly tight, they force the protons into a much denser space.
• 13:34
  Speaker 2: They cram them together.
• 13:35
  Speaker 3: Right, they are going up from sixty collisions to between
• 13:38
  Speaker 3: one hundred and forty and two hundred collisions each time
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  Speaker 3: two packets meet.
• 13:42
  Speaker 2: Okay, I think I have an analogy for this. Let
• 13:44
  Speaker 2: me see if this works.
• 13:44
  Speaker 3: Let's hear it.
• 13:45
  Speaker 2: Instead of throwing two loose handfuls of dry sand at
• 13:48
  Speaker 2: each other and just hoping a few scattered grains happen
• 13:51
  Speaker 2: to smack into each other mid air, they are taking
• 13:54
  Speaker 2: those handfuls of sand and packing them under immense pressure
• 13:57
  Speaker 2: into tight, dense snowballs.
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  Speaker 3: I love that.
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  Speaker 2: And then they're throwing those dead snowballs at each other
• 14:03
  Speaker 2: at the speed of light just to completely guarantee a
• 14:06
  Speaker 2: chaotic impact.
• 14:07
  Speaker 3: That is exactly what's happening. By packing the packet tighter,
• 14:10
  Speaker 3: you force the interaction. And we really have to multiply
• 14:13
  Speaker 3: this out to grasp the scale because these packets, they're
• 14:17
  Speaker 3: crossing each other continuously. Yeah, roughly forty million times every.
• 14:20
  Speaker 2: Single second, forty million times a second.
• 14:23
  Speaker 3: Yes, So when you jump from sixty collisions per crossing
• 14:26
  Speaker 3: to two hundred collisions per crossing at forty million crossings
• 14:30
  Speaker 3: a second, the math just compounds staggeringly fast. Zerlov noted
• 14:34
  Speaker 3: that this increased number of collisions will allow CERN to
• 14:36
  Speaker 3: collect up to one hundred times more data than they
• 14:39
  Speaker 3: did in the entire previous operational run.
• 14:42
  Speaker 2: Once this upgrade is finished in twenty thirty, the number
• 14:44
  Speaker 2: of collisions will be so unbelievably high that there will
• 14:47
  Speaker 2: be several billion collisions happening every single.
• 14:50
  Speaker 3: Second, billions every second.
• 14:52
  Speaker 2: Our brains just they didn't evolve to handle that. I mean,
• 14:55
  Speaker 2: we evolved to track a baseball flying through the air,
• 14:59
  Speaker 2: or you know, to a predator moving in the bushes.
• 15:02
  Speaker 2: We operate on a scale of seconds and minutes human scale,
• 15:05
  Speaker 2: exactly the idea of a machine meticulously orchestrating, observing, and
• 15:10
  Speaker 2: recording several billion highly explosive sub atomic car crashes in
• 15:16
  Speaker 2: a literal blink of an eye. It pushes past the
• 15:20
  Speaker 2: limits of human biology to even interact with it.
• 15:23
  Speaker 3: It really does. We have engineered a physical environment that
• 15:26
  Speaker 3: operates at a speed and density completely detached from human perception.
• 15:30
  Speaker 2: And that introduces a massive, immediate, and I imagine, incredibly
• 15:34
  Speaker 2: frustrating bottleneck. Oh, you have no idea, because it is
• 15:37
  Speaker 2: no longer just a physics problem. Suddenly it becomes a
• 15:40
  Speaker 2: massive data storage problem. Is the dreaded data bottleneck, because
• 15:44
  Speaker 2: if you have billions of collisions a second, the detectors,
• 15:47
  Speaker 2: which are basically these massive digital cameras the size of cathedrals,
• 15:50
  Speaker 2: they're taking billions of pictures a.
• 15:52
  Speaker 4: Second, high resolution pictures too right.
• 15:55
  Speaker 2: And you have to save that data to a hard
• 15:56
  Speaker 2: drive somewhere so the scientists can study it. But you
• 15:59
  Speaker 2: physic can't do it.
• 16:01
  Speaker 3: It is physically and technologically impossible. The sheer volume of
• 16:05
  Speaker 3: digital data generated by several billion sub atomic explosions per
• 16:09
  Speaker 3: second is so astronomically large that there is no server
• 16:14
  Speaker 3: farm on planet Earth, no network bandwidth capable of writing
• 16:18
  Speaker 3: it to a disc that fast. Wow. If CERN attempted
• 16:22
  Speaker 3: to record every single thing that happened inside the hl LC,
• 16:26
  Speaker 3: they would exhaust the entire world storage capacity almost instantly.
• 16:30
  Speaker 2: So what did they do?
• 16:31
  Speaker 3: They are forced into a ruthless operational reality. The vast,
• 16:35
  Speaker 3: vast majority of the data must be thrown away forever,
• 16:38
  Speaker 3: literally the very millisecond it is created.
• 16:41
  Speaker 2: They have to delete the data before they even save it.
• 16:43
  Speaker 3: Yep, gone forever.
• 16:44
  Speaker 2: Which means someone or something has to be standing at
• 16:47
  Speaker 2: the gate looking at billions of collisions a second and
• 16:49
  Speaker 2: deciding which ones are trash and which ones are the Nobel.
• 16:51
  Speaker 3: Prize exactly, And because no human could ever ever make
• 16:55
  Speaker 3: those decisions fast enough, that gatekeepers artificial intelligence.
• 16:58
  Speaker 2: Of course, it is the section of which.
• 17:00
  Speaker 3: Specific collisions should be permanently recorded will be handled in
• 17:04
  Speaker 3: real time by these incredibly advanced machine learning algorithms. These
• 17:09
  Speaker 3: AI systems will be tasked with identifying the most quote
• 17:11
  Speaker 3: promising anomalous events amidst a raging ocean of just normal
• 17:15
  Speaker 3: background noise.
• 17:16
  Speaker 2: Okay, I have to push back heavily on this concept.
• 17:19
  Speaker 2: We are spending one point five billion dollars and four
• 17:22
  Speaker 2: years of our lives to upgrade a machine specifically to
• 17:26
  Speaker 2: find unknown physics. Correct, we want to discover particles we
• 17:30
  Speaker 2: have never even seen before, But we have to program
• 17:33
  Speaker 2: an AI to decide what unknown physics looks like in
• 17:36
  Speaker 2: real time. Yes, essentially, how do you train an algorithm
• 17:39
  Speaker 2: to recognize something that human beings haven't even conceptualized yet?
• 17:43
  Speaker 2: Isn't that like hiring a bouncer to guard the door
• 17:46
  Speaker 2: to the VIP room. But the bouncer has never actually
• 17:49
  Speaker 2: seen a celebrity before. How does he know who to
• 17:51
  Speaker 2: let in and who to kick out?
• 17:53
  Speaker 3: Okay, it's a really fun analogy, but it's actually the
• 17:55
  Speaker 3: exact reverse of that. How so we aren't training the
• 17:59
  Speaker 3: bouncer to wreck ignize celebrities. We're training the bouncer to
• 18:02
  Speaker 3: perfectly recognize every single normal person on Earth.
• 18:05
  Speaker 2: Oh oh, I see right.
• 18:07
  Speaker 3: So when a creature with three heads walks up to
• 18:09
  Speaker 3: the door, the bouncer doesn't need to know its name
• 18:12
  Speaker 3: or its species to know it definitely doesn't belong in
• 18:15
  Speaker 3: the standard room. We train the AI exhaustively on the
• 18:19
  Speaker 3: mundane physics that we already understand.
• 18:21
  Speaker 4: Perfectly, which is the standard model.
• 18:23
  Speaker 3: The standard model. Yes, yeah, the vast majority of the
• 18:26
  Speaker 3: billions of collisions per second will just result in well
• 18:30
  Speaker 3: understood particle decays.
• 18:31
  Speaker 2: Just normal stuff doing normal things.
• 18:33
  Speaker 3: Right, Protons breaking apart into quarks and gluons in ways
• 18:37
  Speaker 3: we have documented and mathematically modeled millions of times over
• 18:40
  Speaker 3: the last fifty years. Okay, the AI's job is to
• 18:44
  Speaker 3: be incredibly efficient at recognizing the mundane and instantly deleting it.
• 18:48
  Speaker 3: It throws a red flag and hits save the very
• 18:52
  Speaker 3: moment it sees an energy spike or a weird particle
• 18:54
  Speaker 3: trajectory or a missing slice of momentum that directly violates
• 18:58
  Speaker 3: the neat mathematical equation of the twentieth century.
• 19:01
  Speaker 2: So we train it on the background noise and the
• 19:03
  Speaker 2: anomaly just sticks out by default decison. But man, that
• 19:06
  Speaker 2: is still an immense amount of trust to place in
• 19:09
  Speaker 2: a black box. You are trusting the algorithm not to
• 19:12
  Speaker 2: accidentally miscategorize the subtle signature of a brand new particle,
• 19:16
  Speaker 2: as say, a censor glitch, and just toss out the
• 19:19
  Speaker 2: greatest discovery of the century.
• 19:20
  Speaker 3: Oh, it is a terrifying amount of trust. And believe me,
• 19:23
  Speaker 3: physicists debate the design of these trigger algorithms constantly. It's
• 19:27
  Speaker 3: a huge point of contention, but it also clarifies the
• 19:30
  Speaker 3: human role in the loop.
• 19:31
  Speaker 2: The human element is still there, very much so.
• 19:34
  Speaker 3: Nita Alexandra Asba, she's a research physicist working at CERNS
• 19:38
  Speaker 3: Alice Experiment. She is very firm about this. She insists
• 19:42
  Speaker 3: that AI does not replace physicists. For her, it is
• 19:45
  Speaker 3: simply a powerful tool to make better use of the data.
• 19:48
  Speaker 2: And Asba actually helped discover the Higgs boson back in
• 19:50
  Speaker 2: twenty twelve using the LHC.
• 19:52
  Speaker 3: Right she did. She has been in the actual trenches
• 19:55
  Speaker 3: of historical discovery. She knows firsthand that finding a new
• 19:58
  Speaker 3: particle isn't just a computer spitting out a yes on
• 20:01
  Speaker 3: a screen.
• 20:01
  Speaker 2: So what is the physicist's actual job then, If the
• 20:04
  Speaker 2: AI is doing all the filtering, think of.
• 20:06
  Speaker 3: It like this. The AI acts as the net filtering
• 20:10
  Speaker 3: the ocean, but the physicist is the one who has
• 20:13
  Speaker 3: to pull the net up, examine what was caught, cross
• 20:16
  Speaker 3: reference it against decades of quantum field theory, argue with
• 20:19
  Speaker 3: their colleagues about it, design new physical parameters to test
• 20:23
  Speaker 3: the hypothesis and ultimately synthesize it into a new understanding
• 20:26
  Speaker 3: of reality.
• 20:27
  Speaker 2: So the AI just hands on the weird stuff, right.
• 20:30
  Speaker 3: The AI might save an unusual file to the herd drives,
• 20:33
  Speaker 3: but human intuition, skepticism, and rigor are what turned that
• 20:37
  Speaker 3: file into a discovery.
• 20:38
  Speaker 2: Okay, let's actually talk about the specific discoveries they are
• 20:41
  Speaker 2: hunting for, because the AI is filtering this avalanche of
• 20:44
  Speaker 2: data with a primary mission in mind, and it is
• 20:47
  Speaker 2: a mission that deals with what I honestly consider the
• 20:49
  Speaker 2: most humbling, almost dizzying statistic in all of science, the
• 20:53
  Speaker 2: ninety five percent problem.
• 20:55
  Speaker 3: Yes, the existential weight of the dark universe.
• 20:58
  Speaker 2: I mean, just for a second, look around, look at
• 20:59
  Speaker 2: your phone, look out the window of the trees, the clouds,
• 21:01
  Speaker 2: the sun. Think about the Earth, the Moon, and every
• 21:03
  Speaker 2: single star you can see in the night.
• 21:05
  Speaker 4: Sky, everything you can.
• 21:06
  Speaker 2: Perceive, Exactly, every single piece of matter that humanity has
• 21:11
  Speaker 2: ever seen, touched, analyzed, or interacted with, accounts for just
• 21:15
  Speaker 2: five percent of the universe.
• 21:17
  Speaker 3: Five percent. That's it.
• 21:18
  Speaker 2: It's terrifying.
• 21:19
  Speaker 3: It really is. All of biology, chemistry, history, every galaxy
• 21:23
  Speaker 3: we can observe through our biggest telescopes Yeah, it's just
• 21:26
  Speaker 3: the thin foam on top of an immensely deep, entirely
• 21:30
  Speaker 3: invisible ocean.
• 21:31
  Speaker 2: So according to our best current understanding, the rest of
• 21:34
  Speaker 2: the universe is divided into two deeply mysterious components. About
• 21:38
  Speaker 2: twenty seven percent of the universe is believed to consist
• 21:40
  Speaker 2: of dark matter, and roughly sixty eight percent is dark energy, which.
• 21:44
  Speaker 3: Leads our tiny five percent of normal matter.
• 21:47
  Speaker 2: Right and deepening our fundamental knowledge of these invisible forces.
• 21:50
  Speaker 2: Iscern's primary mission with the High Luminosity Upgrade. Philip Morgett,
• 21:54
  Speaker 2: who is the operations coordinator for CMS.
• 21:56
  Speaker 3: Which is one of the massive detectors on the LAC
• 21:58
  Speaker 3: ring right CMS.
• 22:00
  Speaker 2: He noted that CMS is explicitly designed to explore this.
• 22:03
  Speaker 2: He said, we want to look for new particles, specifically
• 22:05
  Speaker 2: focusing on the quest for dark matter particles and amazingly
• 22:08
  Speaker 2: the search for other dimensions.
• 22:10
  Speaker 3: Which sounds like science fiction but it's not. The concept
• 22:13
  Speaker 3: of dark matter dates back nearly a century, but it
• 22:17
  Speaker 3: became undeniable with the work of astronomer Via Reubin in
• 22:20
  Speaker 3: the nineteen seventies.
• 22:21
  Speaker 2: What does she find?
• 22:23
  Speaker 3: She observed how fast galaxies were spinning, and according to
• 22:26
  Speaker 3: the laws of gravity based on the amount of visible matter,
• 22:30
  Speaker 3: you know, the stars and gas. We could actually see
• 22:32
  Speaker 3: the outer edges of these galaxies were spinning way way too.
• 22:36
  Speaker 2: Fast, like they should have just flown apart exactly.
• 22:39
  Speaker 3: They should have been tearing themselves apart, literally flinging stars
• 22:42
  Speaker 3: out into deep space. But they held together perfectly.
• 22:46
  Speaker 2: So the math just didn't work.
• 22:48
  Speaker 3: The math completely failed, unless, of course, there was a
• 22:51
  Speaker 3: massive amount of invisible mass acting as a gravitational glue
• 22:55
  Speaker 3: holding the galaxies intact. We call it dark matter because
• 22:58
  Speaker 3: it does not interact with life. It doesn't commit it,
• 23:01
  Speaker 3: it doesn't reflect it, it doesn't absorb it.
• 23:03
  Speaker 2: It only interacts with gravity.
• 23:05
  Speaker 3: Right, that's its only calling card.
• 23:06
  Speaker 2: But wait, what is the actual difference between dark matter
• 23:09
  Speaker 2: and dark energy? Because they both have dark in the name,
• 23:13
  Speaker 2: they're both completely invisible and we haven't directly observed either
• 23:17
  Speaker 2: of them. Are they just placeholders for human ignorance?
• 23:20
  Speaker 3: Honestly, yes, the word dark is absolutely a placeholder for unknown.
• 23:26
  Speaker 3: They are mathematical necessities required to make our observations of
• 23:29
  Speaker 3: the macro universe make sense. But they do completely opposite things.
• 23:33
  Speaker 3: Okay opposite how well, dark matter, as we said, acts
• 23:35
  Speaker 3: like glue. It's gravity pulls things together. It allows galaxies
• 23:39
  Speaker 3: to form and hold their shape. Dark energy is the
• 23:41
  Speaker 3: exact opposite. It acts as a repulsive.
• 23:43
  Speaker 2: Force, pushing things away exactly.
• 23:45
  Speaker 3: In nineteen ninety eight, astronomers discover that the expansion of
• 23:48
  Speaker 3: the universe isn't actually slowing down, it's accelerating. Some mysterious
• 23:53
  Speaker 3: pervasive energy is stretching the very fabric of space time,
• 23:56
  Speaker 3: pushing the universe apart.
• 23:58
  Speaker 2: So dark matter pulls the universe together and dark energy
• 24:01
  Speaker 2: pushes it apart.
• 24:02
  Speaker 3: Yes, and based on the acceleration we observe, dark energy
• 24:05
  Speaker 3: is definitely winning.
• 24:06
  Speaker 2: Okay, But if dark matter doesn't interact with light, and
• 24:10
  Speaker 2: it is completely invisible to all our standard sensors, how
• 24:14
  Speaker 2: does the hl LHC actually hunt for it? I mean,
• 24:17
  Speaker 2: how do you see the invisible.
• 24:19
  Speaker 3: It's a great question. We use the most iron clad
• 24:22
  Speaker 3: law in all of physics, the conservation of momentum.
• 24:25
  Speaker 2: Okay, break that down for me.
• 24:27
  Speaker 3: Imagine a perfectly stationary billiard ball sitting on a pool table.
• 24:31
  Speaker 3: If something hits it and it shoots off to the left,
• 24:34
  Speaker 3: you know for a fact that whatever hit it must
• 24:36
  Speaker 3: have bounced off to the right. The momentum always has
• 24:38
  Speaker 3: to balance out perfectly cause and effect right in the detector.
• 24:42
  Speaker 3: If two protons collide and send a massive shower of
• 24:45
  Speaker 3: visible known particle shooting off to one side of the detector,
• 24:48
  Speaker 3: the math dictates that an equal amount of momento must
• 24:51
  Speaker 3: have shot off to the exact opposite side.
• 24:53
  Speaker 2: So the detector takes a picture and there is a
• 24:55
  Speaker 2: massive shower of particles on the left, but just absolute,
• 24:58
  Speaker 2: completely empty space on the right.
• 25:00
  Speaker 3: Then the AI flags it as missing transverse energy. The
• 25:05
  Speaker 3: momentum didn't just disappear, It was carried away by a
• 25:08
  Speaker 3: particle that our sensor simply cannot see, an invisible particle.
• 25:12
  Speaker 2: Oh wow.
• 25:13
  Speaker 3: Yeah. If we can consistently produce collisions with specific amounts
• 25:18
  Speaker 3: of missing transverse energy, we can start to calculate the
• 25:21
  Speaker 3: exact mass and properties of the invisible particle that escaped.
• 25:25
  Speaker 3: We can effectively outline the shadow of dark matter.
• 25:28
  Speaker 2: That is brilliant. It's hunting for ghosts by looking for
• 25:31
  Speaker 2: their shadows. And Morgan also mentions searching for other dimensions,
• 25:35
  Speaker 2: which frankly sounds purely like science fiction. How do you
• 25:38
  Speaker 2: smash two protons together and find a hidden dimension of reality?
• 25:42
  Speaker 3: So they connect directly to one of the most glaring
• 25:45
  Speaker 3: inconsistencies in all of physics, the weakness of gravity.
• 25:49
  Speaker 2: Gravity is weak. It feels pretty strong when you fall down.
• 25:51
  Speaker 3: It feels strong to us. But gravity is incredibly, almost
• 25:55
  Speaker 3: comically weak compared to the other fundamental forces. Think about it.
• 25:58
  Speaker 3: A tiny, cheap, little magnet on your refrigerator easily overcomes
• 26:01
  Speaker 3: the gravitational pull of the entire planet Earth just to
• 26:04
  Speaker 3: hold up a piece of paper.
• 26:05
  Speaker 2: I never thought about it like that. The electromagnetic force
• 26:08
  Speaker 2: is just vastly stronger than gravity.
• 26:10
  Speaker 3: Exponentially stronger.
• 26:11
  Speaker 2: Why is that.
• 26:12
  Speaker 1: Well.
• 26:13
  Speaker 3: One prominent theoretical framework, which is heavily rooted in string theory,
• 26:18
  Speaker 3: suggests that gravity isn't actually weak, It just appears weak
• 26:22
  Speaker 3: to us because it is not confined to our three
• 26:24
  Speaker 3: spatial dimensions. Whoa yeah. The theory posits that gravity is
• 26:28
  Speaker 3: actually leaking out of our universe and bleeding into other
• 26:33
  Speaker 3: tightly curled up hidden dimensions that we simply cannot perceive.
• 26:37
  Speaker 2: So if gravity is leaking out into another dimension, how
• 26:40
  Speaker 2: does a particle accelerator prove that.
• 26:42
  Speaker 3: Similar to the dark matter hunt, we look for missing energy,
• 26:45
  Speaker 3: but with a very different signature. When we smash protons
• 26:49
  Speaker 3: together at the newly upgraded, unimaginably high energies of the
• 26:52
  Speaker 3: hl LHC, we might create a theoretical particle called a
• 26:56
  Speaker 3: gravitons a graviton right, And if gravitons can truly try
• 27:00
  Speaker 3: travel between dimensions, we might see a collision where a
• 27:02
  Speaker 3: significant spike of energy is created and then instantly vanishes
• 27:06
  Speaker 3: from our three D detectors in a very specific mathematical pattern.
• 27:09
  Speaker 2: So the math would show that the missing energy didn't
• 27:12
  Speaker 2: just dissipate normally into our space.
• 27:14
  Speaker 3: Exactly, it would show that it literally escaped our geometric
• 27:17
  Speaker 3: plane of existence entirely.
• 27:18
  Speaker 2: Okay, my mind is completely blown. It is literally hunting
• 27:22
  Speaker 2: for ghosts. It is looking for the missing pieces of
• 27:25
  Speaker 2: the puzzle that make up ninety five percent of our
• 27:27
  Speaker 2: reality by studying the exact shape of the shadows they
• 27:30
  Speaker 2: leave behind.
• 27:31
  Speaker 3: It's beautiful in a way.
• 27:32
  Speaker 2: But while dark matter and extra dimensions represent the terrifying
• 27:35
  Speaker 2: unknown frontier, the hl LHC is also designed to meticulously
• 27:40
  Speaker 2: master the one massive historical mystery that CERN has already solved.
• 27:46
  Speaker 2: It is basically the sequel to the god particle Higgs boson.
• 27:49
  Speaker 3: Yes, this is where the mission of the upgrade sort
• 27:52
  Speaker 3: of transitions from casting a wide net into the dark
• 27:55
  Speaker 3: to achieving microscopic razor sharp refinement of the known universe.
• 27:59
  Speaker 2: So back in twenty twelve, the LHC made global headlines.
• 28:02
  Speaker 2: It proved the existence of the Higgs boson. It was
• 28:04
  Speaker 2: the missing puzzle piece of the standard model. It explained
• 28:07
  Speaker 2: how particles acquire mass, and the discovery was so monumental
• 28:11
  Speaker 2: that it earned Peter Higgs and front Swine Glier the
• 28:13
  Speaker 2: twenty thirteen Nobel Prize in physics.
• 28:16
  Speaker 3: It was the crowning achievement of modern experimental physics. Without
• 28:19
  Speaker 3: a doubt, the theory proposed that there is this invisible
• 28:21
  Speaker 3: energy field permeating the entire universe, called the Higgs field.
• 28:25
  Speaker 2: How does that work?
• 28:26
  Speaker 3: You can think of it kind of like a cosmic
• 28:27
  Speaker 3: molasses molasses, okay. As fundamental particles move through this field,
• 28:31
  Speaker 3: they interact with it. The more strongly they interact with
• 28:34
  Speaker 3: the molasses, the more it sticks to them, the more
• 28:37
  Speaker 3: mass they gain. So a top quark slugs through it heavily,
• 28:41
  Speaker 3: so it is massive. But a photon, a particle of light,
• 28:45
  Speaker 3: glides through without interacting at all, so it has zero mass.
• 28:49
  Speaker 2: So without the Higgs field, particles would just zip around
• 28:51
  Speaker 2: at the speed of light and never clumping together exactly.
• 28:54
  Speaker 2: There would be no atoms, no stars, no planets, no biology,
• 28:57
  Speaker 2: no us, nothing.
• 28:59
  Speaker 3: And Higgs boson itself is just a localized ripple, a
• 29:02
  Speaker 3: physical manifestation of that underlying field. Proving the boson existed,
• 29:06
  Speaker 3: prove the field existed.
• 29:07
  Speaker 2: Okay, So, since operations began in two thousand and eight,
• 29:10
  Speaker 2: CERN has found about fifty five million Higgs bosones. But
• 29:13
  Speaker 2: with this new upgrade, the hl LHC is expected to
• 29:16
  Speaker 2: produce around three hundred and eighty million Higgs bosons over
• 29:19
  Speaker 2: its lifespan.
• 29:20
  Speaker 3: A massive leap in production.
• 29:22
  Speaker 2: Now, again from the perspective of an outsider, looking at
• 29:25
  Speaker 2: the budget, we already found it. We handed out the
• 29:28
  Speaker 2: Nobel Prize over a decade ago. Why spend billions of
• 29:32
  Speaker 2: dollars and ten years to manufacture three hundred million more
• 29:35
  Speaker 2: of a particle we already proved exists.
• 29:37
  Speaker 3: Because discovery is never the end of the scientific process.
• 29:41
  Speaker 3: It is merely the opening of a completely new chapter.
• 29:45
  Speaker 3: Finding the first Higgs boson confirm the particle exists. Yes,
• 29:49
  Speaker 3: but we still do not fully understand the intricate mechanics
• 29:52
  Speaker 3: of how it functions or how it interacts with other particles.
• 29:56
  Speaker 2: So it's about studying it, not just finding it exactly.
• 29:58
  Speaker 3: Producing three hundred and eighty million of them isn't about
• 30:01
  Speaker 3: hoarding a collection. It is about gathering an immense statistical
• 30:05
  Speaker 3: data set to study their properties with extreme precision.
• 30:08
  Speaker 2: So finding the first Higgs was like discovering a completely
• 30:11
  Speaker 2: new exotic animal deep in the jungle. You snap a
• 30:14
  Speaker 2: blurry photograph, you prove it exists, and the scientific community
• 30:17
  Speaker 2: throws a huge.
• 30:18
  Speaker 3: Party right the discovery phase.
• 30:20
  Speaker 2: But you aren't satisfied with a blurry picture. You want
• 30:23
  Speaker 2: to catch three hundred and eighty million of them so
• 30:25
  Speaker 2: you can study their genetics, their behavior, how they move,
• 30:29
  Speaker 2: how they react to their environment, and more importantly, you
• 30:31
  Speaker 2: want to put two of them in a room together
• 30:33
  Speaker 2: and see how they interact with each other.
• 30:35
  Speaker 3: Now you're hitting on the real target. That brings us
• 30:38
  Speaker 3: to what Nata Alexandra Asbod described as the lab's main hope.
• 30:43
  Speaker 3: It is the ultimate holy grail for the hl LHC.
• 30:47
  Speaker 3: The goal is no longer just producing one Higgs poson
• 30:49
  Speaker 3: at a time.
• 30:50
  Speaker 2: What is it?
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: Then?
• 30:51
  Speaker 3: The objective is to produce two Higgs bosons simultaneously in
• 30:55
  Speaker 3: the exact same collision.
• 30:56
  Speaker 2: A double Higgs event.
• 30:57
  Speaker 3: It would be a complete first. Currently, creating even a
• 31:00
  Speaker 3: single Higgs boson requires an immense amount of energy. Creating
• 31:04
  Speaker 3: two of them in the exact same microscopic collision at
• 31:07
  Speaker 3: the exact same fraction of a millisecond is exponentially more difficult.
• 31:11
  Speaker 2: Which is why they need the upgrade.
• 31:12
  Speaker 3: Exactly. It requires the immense luminosity those incredibly dense, tightly
• 31:17
  Speaker 3: packed proton bunches that only the upgraded Niobian tin magnets
• 31:20
  Speaker 3: can provide.
• 31:21
  Speaker 2: So why is seeing two of them together so critical?
• 31:24
  Speaker 2: What does that actually tell us?
• 31:26
  Speaker 3: We need to measure what is called the Higgs self coupling.
• 31:29
  Speaker 3: We want to see exactly how the Higgs field interacts
• 31:32
  Speaker 3: with itself. According to theoretical physics, measuring that self interaction
• 31:37
  Speaker 3: provides profound, groundbreaking clues about the structure of the universe
• 31:42
  Speaker 3: at the very dawn of time.
• 31:44
  Speaker 2: So it's looking back in time.
• 31:45
  Speaker 3: Yes, Asbah noted that observing this interaction may provide critical
• 31:50
  Speaker 3: clues about how our universe evolved shortly after the Big Bang.
• 31:54
  Speaker 2: Because right after the Big Bang, the universe was unfathomably
• 31:57
  Speaker 2: hot and dense, right the fundamental mental forces were behaving differently.
• 32:02
  Speaker 2: By forcing two of these particles into existence right next
• 32:05
  Speaker 2: to each other, we're basically creating a microscopic, split second
• 32:09
  Speaker 2: diorama of the birth of the universe.
• 32:11
  Speaker 3: That's a beautiful way to put it. We are trying
• 32:13
  Speaker 3: to map the exact shape of the universe's potential energy.
• 32:17
  Speaker 3: In the earliest moments of the cosmos, the Higgs field
• 32:19
  Speaker 3: was at a zero value. Nothing had mass, nothing at all. Nothing.
• 32:23
  Speaker 3: But as the universe rapidly expanded and cooled, the field
• 32:26
  Speaker 3: underwent a phase transition. It suddenly turned on and gave
• 32:29
  Speaker 3: mass to everything, solidifying the rules of reality as we
• 32:32
  Speaker 3: experienced them today. By studying the double Higgs interaction, we're
• 32:35
  Speaker 3: looking back in time trying to understand the exact mechanics
• 32:38
  Speaker 3: of that phase transition. It helps us understand whether the
• 32:42
  Speaker 3: universe we live in is completely stable, or if it
• 32:44
  Speaker 3: might eventually undergo another phase transition billions of years from now.
• 32:47
  Speaker 2: Well, this entire conversation completely reframes what Monday's shut down
• 32:52
  Speaker 2: actually means. I mean, it is not just a machine
• 32:54
  Speaker 2: being switched off for routine maintenance.
• 32:56
  Speaker 3: Far from it.
• 32:57
  Speaker 2: It is a deep breath. It is an incredible, complex, multinational,
• 33:02
  Speaker 2: billion dollar inhale before an unprecedented exhale in twenty thirty.
• 33:06
  Speaker 2: We are looking at a ten year journey ahead, four
• 33:09
  Speaker 2: years of absolute silence in that tunnel, four years of
• 33:12
  Speaker 2: meticulous engineering tearing out one point two kilometers of the
• 33:15
  Speaker 2: most advanced technology on Earth and pushing the boundaries of
• 33:18
  Speaker 2: material science even further with Niobian tin, and then starting
• 33:22
  Speaker 2: in June twenty thirty, a decade of operations that will
• 33:25
  Speaker 2: fundamentally redefine our entire understanding of reality.
• 33:28
  Speaker 3: It perfectly captures the duality of modern physics. I think,
• 33:32
  Speaker 3: on one hand, we are seeking extreme rigorous precision, manufacturing
• 33:36
  Speaker 3: hundreds of millions of Higgs bosons just to measure their
• 33:39
  Speaker 3: interactions down to the billions of a decimal place to map.
• 33:42
  Speaker 4: The early universe, the known universe, right.
• 33:45
  Speaker 3: But on the other hand, we are casting a massive,
• 33:47
  Speaker 3: highly speculative net into the dark, relying on anomaly detection
• 33:52
  Speaker 3: to catch a fleeting glimpse of extra dimensions or the
• 33:54
  Speaker 3: invisible dark matter that dictates the movement of the stars.
• 33:58
  Speaker 3: It is a unified mission of both microscopic refinement and
• 34:01
  Speaker 3: cosmic exploration.
• 34:02
  Speaker 2: And the success of that entire mission relies on a
• 34:05
  Speaker 2: gamble that feels honestly incredibly poetic to me, because consider
• 34:09
  Speaker 2: what is actually going to happen deep underground starting in
• 34:12
  Speaker 2: twenty thirty. The universe as we experience it through our
• 34:16
  Speaker 2: biology and our telescopes is ninety five percent invisible to us.
• 34:19
  Speaker 2: It is this vast dark ocean. To illuminate that darkness,
• 34:23
  Speaker 2: human beings have built a seventeen mile machine that will
• 34:26
  Speaker 2: create several billion microscopic big bangs every single second. But
• 34:31
  Speaker 2: because the human mind and our technological infrastructure physically cannot
• 34:35
  Speaker 2: process that much reality at once, an artificial intelligence will
• 34:38
  Speaker 2: be standing at the gate, the KI bouncer, the AI bouncer.
• 34:42
  Speaker 2: It will have milliseconds to decide which fragments of data
• 34:45
  Speaker 2: to save and which fragments to permanently delete into the void.
• 34:49
  Speaker 2: The greatest discovery in the history of human civilization, the
• 34:52
  Speaker 2: ultimate key to unlocking the invisible universe, might ultimately depend
• 34:56
  Speaker 2: entirely on a split second algorithmic choice. Does that machine
• 35:00
  Speaker 2: recognize the dark matter when it finally sees the shadow,
• 35:03
  Speaker 2: or will it throw it away? It is a leap
• 35:05
  Speaker 2: of faith into the dark, and I just cannot wait
• 35:07
  Speaker 2: to see what they find when they turn the lights
• 35:09
  Speaker 2: back on.