Okay ready? Right here on the border between France and Switzerland is the biggest science experiment ever built. It's this huge tunnel over 100 m underground and 27 km long running under nearby homes and businesses and farms and inside that tunnel scientists put a long blue tube big enough to crawl through and inside that tube they put two pipes that they keep colder and emptier than outer space and down those pipes they fire particles smaller than atoms in opposite directions pushing them faster and faster and faster until when they're almost at the speed of light they smash together, sending subatomic debris flying off into this massive detector.
This underground particle smasher took thousands of people from over a hundred different countries $5 billion and over 30 years to plan and build. My question was. .
. why? Why do this?
Why spend so much money and time to smash particles together in an underground tunnel? And now. .
. why do so many people say that what we really need to do is build. .
. a bigger one? "Future Circular Collider" "new particle accelerator" "building a bigger one" "in Geneva, Switzerland" "more than 3 times the size and twice as deep" I'm going all the way to Switzerland to the particle smasher itself to understand what's really going on here and to go on a journey that will forever change how I see myself and the world around me.
. . This is Huge If True.
Part of this video is sponsored by Shopify. "Minus one, please. " I'm in an elevator on my way down to the giant particle smasher, more scientifically known as the Large Hadron Collider or LHC.
It's inside the biggest and most famous physics lab in the world: CERN. I can't believe I'm here. Getting to visit here is a really big deal.
Thousands of scientists from all around the world gather here to do cutting edge research about how the universe works. We're in a tunnel now! Beyond that yellow door is one of the places where particles actually collide.
Specifically this one, the Atlas detector. Oh. .
. . my.
. . god.
It's beautiful! This thing is HUGE. To give you a sense of scale, just look at it compared to a person.
Took how small they are! Those are people compared to this enormous machine. How did you put this in here?
"So we can see from down here that there is a a shaft above us. If people have the hobby to build a ship in a bottle, it's exactly the same way of constructing: You have to lower it in and then construct it in place. " I'm so amazed that people built this.
This giant underground detector is where those particles finally collide after being sped up close to the speed of light around that 27 km track. Where does the collision happen? "So the collision happens over here.
The detector is symmetrical around the collision point and so we're at one end of it. " The detector is big but the actual collider part is very small. "What you can see in the center is the Large Hadron Collider, so you can really see how tiny the beam pipe is.
" Each pipe is about the size of your two hands like this or about the diameter of an orange with thousands of magnets running along it that force the particles within that pipe into a space the width of a human hair. I just accidentally pulled out one of my hairs in order to demonstrate this. Can you see this hair?
Okay. Can you see this hair compared to the scale that we're talking about right now? That's the size of the space the particles are moving through.
But even a human hair is enormous compared to the particles themselves. You already know that atoms and the particles inside of them are very small but they are so much tinier than most people think. Look at a single strand of your hair.
Now imagine that single hair is as big across as the entire Earth is wide. Now zoom in. The size of a single cell inside of that hair would be like the distance from Paris to Rome.
Now zoom in again. A protein inside that cell would be like six soccer fields across. An atom inside that protein would be like one school bus across.
The nucleus at the center of that atom would be like the width of a grain of rice. And the protons within that nucleus they'd be like grains of salt. So a proton compared to the width of your hair is like a grain of salt compared compared to THE ENTIRE EARTH.
And that is what scientists are sending flying around inside of this machine. Protons. Which are being squeezed by magnets into a space the width of a hair.
It is incredible that we can do this. As humans we experience only a tiny slice of the full scale of reality, but there's so much more. Wait but hang on.
If they're sending these tiny little protons down a tunnel 27 km long how do they get them to actually hit each other? ? Just think about shooting grains of salt at each other from really really really far away.
Seriously, think about it! How would you do that? If you just thought "fire tons of salt".
. . that's exactly what they do.
They don't just fire a 100 or a thousand protons at each other. They fire a 100 billion in bunches in each direction and when they do that, 100 billion versus 100 billion, guess how many actually collide. .
. "On average we get about 50 or 60 collisions per crossing. " You heard that right.
SIXTY. . .
60. . .
will actually collide, which is why they'll do the whole thing over and over and over again, 30 million times per second. There's approximately 3,000 bunches each with over 100 billion protons creating 1 billion collisions per second inside of this massive machine. Let me show you something hang on.
And wait for it. . .
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Okay so we have thousands of scientists spending billions of dollars to smash billions of protons in an underground tunnel but why? Why do all of this in the first place? Well if you look on the internet you'll see that there are a lot of.
. . theories.
From ending the world to creating black holes to it already ended the world and we're living inside a black hole to paranormal activity to new dimensions to hooded figures performing rituals to summon the devil. . .
that last one was a prank by the way. No. We are not doing any of that.
The truth about what is happening here is both much harder to explain and much much cooler. So strap in 'cause it's time to break your brain. When scientists smash these protons together, we get a glimpse at what might have happened close to the start of our universe, the Big Bang.
That's because the collisions release an enormous amount of energy for how small protons are, but in the grand scheme of things each collision is still less than the total energy of a hand clap. But a very smart person figured out that energy and mass are related so when these protons collide at incredibly fast speeds releasing a ton of energy that energy can turn into physical mass. .
. which is crazy! And here's the kicker: If the energy is high enough it can turn into mysterious or unknown particles, more of the building blocks of our universe, which we really want to know about to use that knowledge to improve the world today or to just satisfy our own curiosity.
But those special mystery particles they only exist for an instant, before they turn back into more everyday particles that we see all the time, that then fly outward towards sensors that record exactly where they hit. So what scientists actually see is more like a crime scene. They can see where the particles hit the sensors but then they need to work backward using very complex physics to reverse engineer what happened at the moment of collision and what mystery particles could have been there.
And if that sounds hard. . .
yeah! You're right. But important!
"We're not just doing this for fun, let smash things together, though we do like it. We do it because we have huge, huge questions. The idea with particle physics is to try to understand the fabric of the universe, so you know you divide something, you divide it again, you divide it again, until you finally get to something you can't divide anymore.
The elementary particles. " That's what they're studying in these collisions. Elementary particles, the building blocks of our universe.
We know a lot of them already. You might recognize some like electrons or photons which give us light. We know about all of these elementary particles thanks to brilliant people doing extremely complex math and decades of experimentation to prove that math actually predicts the real world.
That math looks like this. This is a beautiful description of how we as humans think the world around us works. It's called The Standard Model.
"We can understand a lot about our universe, where we came from, where we're going, what we're made of. It's pure research to try to understand our universe. " One reason that they wanted to build the Large Hadron Collider specifically is that the Standard Model predicted that there should be another particle.
. . a mystery particle.
. . likely present near the beginning of our universe that no one had ever actually detected.
They called it the Higgs Boson, or more sensationally the "God Particle. " The standard model seemed to suggest that this God Particle was of "vital importance to universal existence" because - and here's where my brain starts to break a little bit - it would confirm the existence of an underlying field that gives other particles mass. In other words, this God Particle would help us understand why everything you and I feel exists.
Basically "why stuff exists" was a big mystery and this underlying field was our best mathematical explanation and observing the Higgs Boson, the particle related to this field, would help to prove it. The only problem was that to do that we needed to get enough energy in one place to create it. .
. like from smashing two protons together at nearly the speed of light and that is one big reason to build the Large Hadron Collider. PHEW.
So they built it! And after they finished, thousands of scientists spent two more years collecting data at two different detectors until finally they were sure enough to announce to the world. .
. they did it. They reliably created the Higgs Boson, something that no one had ever detected before, proving a truth about our universe that had before been a mystery and that proof looked like.
. . this.
Yep it's a bump on a chart. Think about how much work went into seeing that bump on that chart. Like.
. . that's it?
Yeah! It's awesome! Through math, scientists predicted that if the Higgs Boson exists, when we smash particles together, we should see a bump, and there it is.
"There was literally a bump. There were more particles being produced at that energy. " The math was right.
This confirmation didn't immediately change the world for people like you and me, but it showed us that as a species, we're on the right track. We're never going to know the impact of discovering any single building block of reality. When Sir Isaac Newton revealed the motion of our moon and our planets, he couldn't have possibly imagined there would be humans on the moon nearly 300 years later.
The same is true of our discoveries today. That's the point of all of this. We discover the building blocks now so that our children can build with them later in ways that we can't possibly imagine.
"I don't know what understanding the Higgs Boson is really going to do to change the way that we live but in 20, 30, 50 years, the better that we understand how these particles work, the more we can create technologies that change our lives. " And the Higgs Boson was by no means the only thing the Large Hadron Collider has uncovered. It has shaped our understanding of the way that elementary particles interact and combine and put our theories about the world to the test over and over and over again.
But now, some scientists argue that we might have reached a limit on what we can learn from this collider and there's still so much that we don't know about the universe. So some scientists argue that now what we need to do is build a much much bigger one. That's the big debate happening right now.
"There's things we're looking for. The big, big holes in our understanding of the universe. We have measured really clearly that there's something out there that only acts through gravitation as far as we can tell.
" He's talking about dark matter. "Invisible matter would have been a better name, doesn't matter, it doesn't send anything out that we can see with our eyes but it affects gravitationally and it makes a big difference. " We know this dark matter is there because it impacts things that we can see, like the way light visibly bends as it passes galaxies.
Through those effects we can calculate dark matter accounts for 27% of our universe. Could a bigger collider help us learn about it? We don't really know!
"Nobody is guaranteeing it will find dark matter. It might answer something completely different. It might pose new questions maybe will find something we had no idea was there.
And we need to start working on it now. " Does it have a name? "It has a horrible name!
It has a horrible name. It's called the FCC, the Future Circular Collider, which of course you have to change after you've built it. " CERN estimates that building this new collider would cost roughly $17 billion and instead of a 27 km loop it would be a 100.
But not everyone thinks that this is worth it. They argue that the Large Hadron Collider has fallen short of what some hoped that it would achieve. On top of that, some predictions seem to suggest we'd need even more energy than this new bigger collider would have in order to produce anything truly new.
I think there's no need to overpromise. We don't really know. But that's not a reason not to try.
The byproduct of all of the pure science done at CERN has already resulted in new therapies for cancer treatments, better medical imaging, more efficient electric cars, more sensitive radiation detectors that we now use in space, and my favorite. . .
a new way for scientists to communicate now called the World Wide Web. All of that and more came from work done at CERN. We don't know what we'll come up with next.
Just imagine for a second what we could do if we had a better deeper understanding of what gives things mass! The future always sounds like sci-fi until we build it. And listen, I am not at all qualified to figure out if this specific collider is what we should build and there are other ideas out there like a muon collider and a linear collider.
There's a proposal for a very powerful collider built in China but we won't know what's possible without spending on this kind of pure research. "And what's embarrassing is for Europe they still spend twice as much on defense. The US spends 10 times as much on defense.
You can argue we need to do that right now and that can very well be true but we need to get to a world that's better than that. " It would be reasonable to say, hey maybe we should spend this money on other research that would apply more directly to improving people's lives right now today but is that a real choice? "That's a false choice.
Fundamental research is essential to be able to do any of that applied research. It' be like saying, okay we're going to have universities and maybe secondary education but we're going to cut out elementary school and no kindergarten. I feel that we're the kindergarten.
We are the very very basics. You have to have all of it. " We have come so far in our understanding of the universe but there is so much left to learn.
Like, what's all that extra stuff that we can't see? And where did we come from? And what's coming next?
And I think most importantly, while we're here, what we spend our time on shows who we are. If aliens come to Earth one day and they look at what we have built, I would want them to see enormous monuments dedicated to knowledge. I would want them to understand through what we have built that we are a species who seeks to learn and tries to do better and aches to understand where we belong in a universe that we can barely understand.
I would want them to see that yes we are limited and yes we have conflict and yes we can only glimpse such a tiny slice of the full scale of reality. . .
but man, we try so hard. And that is something that we can all be very proud of, because the effort that we put in today can lead to a world we can't even imagine. This was one of my favorite scripts to write ever but it was incredibly hard.
This is just such a complex topic and I am not a physicist so the script was fact checked by a physicist at CERN but if you want to know more about the details of the physics here, I'll link to a couple of my favorite explainers by actual physicists on YouTube. And if you want there to be more of this kind of optimistic science and tech journalism, subscribe to our show Huge If True, it really means a lot. It means that we get to go to all of these incredible places and make more videos for you.
It's a big deal, thank you. See you for the next one. .
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