Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Is the Higgs Boson useful?

Episode Date: September 25, 2018

What is the Higgs Boson and why do we care? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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It's very natural in physics to describe the unknown in terms of the known. And so we understand like grains of sand and tiny rocks and this stuff. so when we think of particles we like to think of them as tiny little balls of stuff but they're not balls of stuff because they have no space to them so then if they don't have space to them how can they have stuff to them because we think of mass as being stuff right like I'm made up of all the particles in me and I have mass because of all those particles having mass I'm like the sum of all those particles Hi, I'm Jorge.

And I'm Daniel. Welcome to Daniel and Jorge, explain the universe. Explain the universe. Explain the universe. The whole universe, people. That's the topic of this podcast. Today we're going to be asking the question, What is the Higgs boson?

What is the Higgs boson after all? Yeah, it turns out it's a really important particle, right, Daniel? That's right. It cost us $10 billion to build the LHC and find the Higgs boson. Good thing we found it. Good thing we found it. And actually, I was kind of disappointed when we found it, but we can get into that later. But the Higgs boson is a big discovery.

Yeah, and it's very important because it's like what keeps everything together. We wouldn't be here without the Higgs boson. That's right. We wouldn't be here without photons or W's or Zs or Higgs boson. It all comes together in the beautiful symphony of particles that make up our universe. But it's sort of the most recently discovered particle. And in lots of ways, the weirdest. So we thought it would be fun to talk about and actually break it down.

Like, what is the Higgs boson after all? But before we jump into it, I thought it'd be cool to talk about how this is, the Higgs boson is actually sort of how we started working together. That's right. That was our first date, right. Let's talk about the Higgs boson. That's right. We met on physics Tinder.

Physics plus cartoonist Tinder. Yeah. No, but you're right. It's unusual for physicists and cartoonists to spend this much time talking about science. So let's tell them how that started. Yeah. So I'm a cartoonist. I draw something called Ph.D.

comics. and I've been doing that for a long time on the internet. And then one day I just get this email from this physicist at the University of California at Irvine saying, Hey, Jorge, I would like to pay you and commission you to draw some comics about the Higgs boson. And is that the first time a physicist had ever cold emailed you? That was the first time a physicist has offered to pay me, to be honest.

So I was like, what? You want to pay me? What is that about? But I thought that was pretty cool. It seemed that it's kind of something that was unique. And, you know, I had been seeing a lot of the buzz about the Higgs boson and the search for the Higgs boson a few years ago. And so I was really intrigued about what it was. I wanted to learn more about it. And so I said, yeah, let's make something that explains what the Higgs boson is.

Yeah. And I'd been reading all the buzz about the Higgs boson. And I thought, man, this is all buzz and no reality. You know, there's so much writing about the Higgs boson that just, like, throws together a bunch of important sounding words, but doesn't actually explain it. And I felt like there was this gap where we weren't really digging into it and communicating with the public what it was actually like. And I was hoping, you know, something visual would work.

Yeah, it's like people were sort of afraid of getting too far into it, right? Like, nobody wanted to touch kind of the serious mechanics and how it was how you guys were looking for it. Yeah, and a lot of it was sort of poetic writing, you know, things like in the New York Times when they say that scientists have revealed the deepest layer of reality humans have ever proved. And like, I mean, this is my field. I don't even know what that means. Like, what is that guy smoking and where can I get some? You're like, poetry, bah.

So you were actually one of the scientists who worked on a pretty like you're like a one of a couple thousand physicists that work on the large Hadron Collider at CERN. That's right. Yeah, there's several thousand of us all collaborating at this collider. and the detector is surrounding the collision points. And we all work together to make this project happen. All right. So you reach out to me, and so we created this video called The Higgs Boson Explain. The Higgs theory starts with this.

Imagine a field that permeates the entire universe. And every particle feels this field is affected by this field in different amounts. So some particles are really slowed down by interaction of this field, like swimming through molasses, and other particles hardly feel it. So the ones that hardly feel it, they have a small mass. The ones that are really affected by it, they couple strongly to this field are slowed down a lot. They have large mass.

So you've turned the question of why do particles have different masses into a different question. Why do particles feel the Higgs feel differently? But there is, one manifestation of the field, is the existence of this particle. Yeah, that's right. You were at CERN, and we sat down at the cafeteria and just talked about physics for hours and hours,

and you recorded it. and it recorded like hours of conversation, then edited down to a few minutes to make me sound really sharp. Thanks for that, by the way. I was trying to make you sound poetic. So, yeah, so then we put it out there and it was super popular,

and then they discovered the expose on, actually, and then the video went viral, like millions and millions of people saw this video, and it was amazing. It was great. And people were saying, like, the New York Times and CBS News, all these places were saying, And this is the clearest and easiest to understand explanation of what the Higgs boson was. And so you might ask, since we put out that video, has everybody, now does everybody understand the Higgs boson?

How well have we succeeded in explaining the Higgs boson people in that short video? Well, I think the video is up to like 3 million views or something. So we've reached at least 3 million people. That's right. Well, I went out on campus and asked random people I walked into, what is the Higgs boson? Do you know what it is? Do you care about it? What do you understand about it?

And here's what they had to say. Have you heard of the Higgs boson? Yes, it's a particle. I have no idea. No. It's a subatomic particle. All right. So it sort of seems like maybe everyone has sort of heard about it.

Everyone has heard about the Higgs boson. That's right. The buzz has succeeded in at least convincing people that the Higgs is a thing. Good brand management there. It's a good brand. Exactly. if we could only copyright that or something. Yeah, so people know the Higgs

is a thing. Some people say it's a particle, but that's really about it. That's like the level of knowledge that's penetrated sort of the cultural zeitgeist and into people's minds. The Higgs is a particle. People have found it. That's about it. It's a thing. Right. It's a thing. Nobody seemed to know what it was

or what it was for. Yeah, nobody said anything about how it's responsible for giving particles mass or the meaning of the discovery or why it's significant or anything like that. So from that point of view, I think science has done a good job in telling people what they've found, but I'm not sure that we've really succeeded in explaining what is the Higgs boson. Why is it interesting? So that's why we thought it would be a good episode for this podcast. So it's like

you've done a good job of telling people that you're doing your job and the job is important, but don't really ask us what's going on. That's right. That's about as far as we've gone. No, I'm happy to talk to people about it. That's why we're here. Yeah, that's right. That's So tell us, what is the Higgs boson? What is it for? What is it for? Well, the Higgs boson is a particle, right? And we're familiar with lots of particles, you know, electrons and quarks and other larger particles like protons and neutrons. And most of the particles in our everyday world are the things that make up matter. You know, electrons and these quarks make up the stuff that we're made out of.

Yeah. Like the stuff we're made out of stuff. And one mystery we always wondered about was like, how did these particles have mass? How do these particles weigh anything? You know, how do these particles have any stuff to them? What do you mean? Like, why do they have mass? What does that even mean?

Just wonder if something has mass? Well, it's interesting because you think about these particles and mathematically we think of these particles as just points in space, like dots, like zero volume. Like how big is the electron? People have some fuzzy ways to calculate electron size, you know, the electron radius using like the photons that's surrounded. But at its core, the electron. the electron itself is a zero volume point in space. And I always thought that's weird.

So it's not like a basketball. Like a basketball, you can put it down and it goes from like here to here and it has a surface to it, right? It's a basketball. Yeah, it has an extent. Exactly. A basketball has an extent. One side of it is not the same place as the other side of it, right? You can measure its length and its width and its height.

Exactly. It has a volume. But electrons and point particles are not like that. They're not like that. Two different particles can have different masses, but they're both the same size, right? So if you're thinking, oh, are these particles all made out of some sort of like basic universe stuff and one of them is a bigger spoonful than the other one? Well, no, they're both zero size spoonfuls. So that doesn't can't explain why one has more mass than the other.

But it can't explain why either one has any mass because there's no room for stuff in there anyway. Right. There's no like there's no more. of something in one of them and more less of something in the other. There's just no thing. There's nothing there's no stuff to it. And so that was a big mystery. That was a big mystery.

Like, how did these particles get mass? Exactly. Yeah, let's talk about that. But first, let's take a quick break. rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order criminal justice system is back.

In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspect. Well, wait a minute, Sam, maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her.

Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor, and they're the same age. And it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him?

Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable.

These are the coldest of cold cases. But everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught.

And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, got you. On America's crime lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors. and you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum, the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. I think it's in the end more natural to think about the mass of these particles, Not as the amount of tiny universe stuff in them, but just like a label, right? Like you think about the electron. You know the electron is negative charge, but you don't worry, like, where in the electron is that negative charge? Is there room to put that charge in the electron? You don't think about that or worry about that.

The same way you should think about mass. Mass is just a label for particles. We don't understand really what these particles things are, but we think of them as points in space with a set of labels. Spin, mass, charge, all sorts of other interactions. And that's basically it. And so mass isn't like amount of stuff. It's just another label. And it's a label that affects how these particles move, right?

Mass means inertia. It means it's harder for it to speed up and harder for it to slow down. Just like maybe like the electron has negative one electrical charge and maybe like I want to say a proton, but I know protons are made out of quarks. But like one of the quarks has plus one third electrical charge. That's just like something that is inherent. in it. That's right.

In 100 years, we might have an explanation for that. We might have sub quarks, which are made out of something else and add up to have the minus one-third charge or the plus two-thirds charge or whatever. We might someday have an explanation for that. But currently we don't. And so we just think of them as these point particles. And the Higgs boson explains that that was the mystery, right? How can particles have mass? What is this thing we call mass for a particle?

How does that even make sense? And the Higgs boson is part of this larger idea called the Higgs mechanism. which includes also this Higgs field. And the Higgs field is something which permeates all of space. It's just like, you know, the way like electromagnetic fields can, you know, fill space also. They theorized this particle a long time ago, like in the 60s. They said, well, we have this mystery about why some particles have mass. Why did they have mass?

So we think we have this theory. And this was done in the 60s. Yeah, yeah. And so just to make sure we finish. the explanation of what the actually Higgs boson is, right? It's this field that fills space and particles feel this field. And if they feel it really strongly, then it prevents them from speeding up and slowing down. And that's the same thing as having mass. That is what having mass means. That means you have inertia. An inertia is the property of things to resist being slowed down and the property

to resist being sped up. So interacting with the Higgs field is the same thing as having mass. So what do you mean like a field? Like it's just like this thing, this is it like a mathematical concept that's surrounding us or is it like actually a thing? It's actually a thing. The field is actually a thing. Like the way an electric field is, right?

Electric field is a mathematical concept, but it's also a physical thing. You can measure it. You put an electron, an electric field, it'll move so you can see it, right? You line up magnetic shavings on a table. You can see magnetic fields. Like your compass sees a magnetic field, right?

So Higgs field is just like another field, like a magnetic field or electric field. Right. But usually in an electromechanic field, there's a source, right? Like there's a magnet or there's like a charge or there's a battery or something like that. But what is like this Higgs field is just there? Yeah. And that's one of the fascinating things about it is that without any particular localized source, it has some energy to it, some value to it all the way through the universe. And that's why these particles get mass. It's called a vacuum expectation value, which is a technical term. I probably shouldn't have. mentioned, but it's a really weird thing about this field is that it fills the universe and without any particular source, it has some strength to it. And the effect of that is to give all particles inertia, which is basically the same as mass. So when you say that like particle A has this much mass, it means that when it tries to move around, it feels the Higgs field that much. Yeah, if you have particle

A and then you give it a push, right? Well, acceleration, F equals MA, right? So a little push, should give you acceleration, but the amount of acceleration you get from the push depends on the M part of F equals MA, right? The larger your force, the more your acceleration, but the larger your mass, the less your acceleration. So you need a really big push to accelerate the Earth, for example, and a really little push to accelerate, you know, a grain of sand. And so you would say that that's because the Earth is interacting more strongly with

the Higgs field, whereas the little grain of salt is like almost ignored. by the Higgs field. Yeah, in comparison, exactly. And so really massive particles interact with the Higgs field a lot, and mass-less particles or particles that have almost no mass hardly interact with the Higgs field at all. It's rarely easy to accelerate or to slow down, have almost no inertia. So it's kind of like you're in the ocean, you're underwater, and if you are really massive, then maybe you have kind of like an odd shape, and so it's really hard to move in the water.

but maybe if you have a sleek shape, then it's really easy for you to move around in the water. And so that sort of shapeness is maybe what mass would be. Yeah, people try really hard to come up with like intuitive analogies for the Higgs field. And almost all of them are roughly right in that they give you the sense that the Higgs field is a thing that makes it hard to move through space. But they're technically almost all not correct because the thing you describe, which is like friction from water is,

different from inertia. Friction from water is always going to slow you down. inertia makes it hard to slow down. So something that's moving really, really fast, it's hard to slow down because it has inertia. So it's just some sort of field that affects how easily you can change in speed, right? Whether it's speeding up or slowing down. So we should just stop at that and not try to make any molasses or politicians in a crowd analogy. That's right. Exactly. deep poetic statements about the meaning of the universe. Exactly right. But yeah, and you were saying earlier, people came on this idea decades ago, right? Yeah. So it took him that long and $13 billion to find it. Yeah, even more than $13 billion. But it's fun. It's a cool story

because it's an idea that came sort of out of a search for beauty or poetry actually. I shouldn't have dog poetry earlier on this podcast. That was a huge mistake. I didn't mean poetry in a negative sense of an empty poetry, right? Right, right. Poetry without mathematical references. That's right. We just lost the huge poetry-loving audience segment of this audience. Let's get him back. Let's get him

back. Prepare, turn on poetry now. So people were thinking about the particles we've seen and how they work, and they were wondering about patterns there. And the short version of story is that they noticed a pattern and the patterns seem to be missing

something. It's like they looked at the list of particles we had and the forces, and they said, hmm, this would be so much prettier. This would be so much more elegant if there was one more piece here, one thing that tied it all together, you know, like the rug that tied Lobowski's room together. Like the equation seemed out of balance, right? Like they had an equation and it was just kind of imbalance. Is that what you mean by beauty? Yeah. And in particular, people were trying to unify forces. There's a long history in physics of trying to bring everything together into a single equation.

Like, can we describe all of physics in a single equation? And, you know, for a long time, we've had different, we've talked about different phenomena, like magnetism and electricity. And one of some of the great advances in physics have been in unifying those forces, like showing electricity and magnetism are actually part of the same force. It's called electromagnetism. And the things that we think of as magnetic and the things we think of are electric are just two sides of the same coin. So there's a great tradition there.

It's like simplifying things, bringing them together. And so people were trying to do that one more time. They're saying, can we bring the weak force, the thing that's responsible for like radioactive decay? Can we bring that together with electromagnetism? One problem is that the weak force is really, really, really weak as compared to electromagnetism. And the reason the weak force is so weak is because the particles that carry it, the W and the Z boson, are really heavy. They have huge amounts of mass, whereas the photon for electromagnetism is really light. So one reason that electromagnetism is so powerful, such a strong force,

is that the photon, the thing that carries it, can go really far. It has no mass. Whereas the W and the Z bosons have so much mass, it makes it a very short-range force. So the question they were trying to understand is, how do we bring these two things together? Why do the W and Z bosons have mass and the photon doesn't? So that's the equation they were trying to make more elegant. So it was weird that some particles would have mass and some others would not.

That was like theoretically, mathematically weird. And so they came up with this idea of the Higgs field to patch it up. That's right. That's right. The Higgs field and the Higgs particle together in this thing called the Higgs mechanism. And if you add the Higgs mechanism to the theory, then boom, it explains it. It connects the weak force with electromagnetism and it explains why the W and the Z have mass and the photon doesn't. Right. And so that was really beautiful. People were like, wow, that really makes sense. That's pretty. You know, there's like an elegance to that theory. And people were hoping that it's also true. You know, nature doesn't have to come up with, nature doesn't have to reveal that the universe is beautiful. And sometimes as human physicists, we use like aesthetic sense, like sense. What is nature's solution? Like, how should things work? And we want things to be pretty. It doesn't always work out that way. This history is literally.

with, like, beautiful theories that turned out to be wrong. Well, this is a perfect point to take a break. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic scene.

In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and order, criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. that's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious.

Well, wait a minute, Sam, maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging. He's hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy?

That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor, and they're the same age. And it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught, and I just looked at my computer screen.

I was just like, ah, gotcha. On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors, and you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum, the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases, to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So, but back to the story of the Higgs boson. Yeah. After all that, they found it, right? How did they find the Higgs boson?

Yeah, well, they were looking for it for a long time. And people thought there was a collider in Geneva. Before the Large Hadron Collider, there was one called the Large Electron Pository. Collider, LEP, LEP, LEP. And people built that one, and they really were hoping to find the Higgs boson there. I like how the name has the word large in it, you know? Like, what if you build a bigger one? What is that one going to call?

Very large. Very large. Yes, V-L-H-C is the plan for the next one. Super large. Uber large. Hyper-large. Super-duper-large. Anyways, so there was one before the LHC.

But that they didn't find. it. So they built the bigger one. They didn't find it, but they thought they did, actually. So it ran until the early 2000s, and they had a very short window to run it in because they had to turn it off because they were building the large Hadron Collider in the same tunnel. One scheme for making the Hadron Collider cheaper was to reuse the existing tunnel. So they had to turn off the Electron Positron Collider so they could build the Hadron Collider. But in the last few weeks of running the electron positron collider, people started seeing hints of the Higgs boson. They were smashing these particles together and they started to see collisions that looked just like what you would expect from a Higgs

boson. The thing is we didn't know how heavy the Higgs boson was. That's one thing the theory didn't predict. Is it really, really light? Is it kind of heavy? Is it medium heavy? Is it super duber heavy? So we didn't know exactly where to look for it. And right on the edge of where the large electron positron Collider could have seen it, it started to pop up just in the last few weeks. But then they said, but no, we just got $13 billion to make a very one. Don't find it yet. Exactly, exactly. Is that really what happened?

There was a huge argument in the community, like should we put off building the LHC and keep running this one because we might be like on the verge of a discovery? Or should we say, look, we have a plan, let's shut this thing down, build the next one, and find it there for sure. And the problem was that across the pond outside Chicago, the Americans were working on their collider, which is the Tevatron at Fermilab. And it was going to run

sort of in the gap there between the large electron positron collider and the Hadron Collider at CERN. And the Europeans were really worried that if they gave this opportunity up, if they turned off their collider, that the Americans would discover the Higgs boson while they were busy building the Hadron Collider. That was their fear. suspiciously the Americans were like no yeah shut it down

shut it down so CERN decided to shut it down they were like we see this evidence it's interesting it's not compelling enough for us to change our entire program it's kind of like when my son has to go to dinner but he doesn't want to turn off the video game he's playing

that's right they were like so the Europeans saved their game while they were building the next collider and the the Americans turned on their collider and they looked for it And they didn't find it. I mean, they saw a few things, hints here and there. So they wouldn't have even found anything then.

The LEP would not have found anything. Turns out the Higgs was not where they thought it was. Yeah. What they were seeing was just a fluctuation. So that was a good call. And Higgs was a little bit heavier than that. So, okay. So what does the large Hattern Collider actually do?

And specifically, how does it do that? What did it do to find, what did it do to find the Higgs boson? So what we do is we smash protons together. And protons are really high energy. And protons inside them have little particles called quarks and also particles called gluons. And when we smash protons together, it's really the corks and the gluons inside the proton that do the smashing. Think of protons as like little bags of particles and the corks and the gluons smash together. And then sometimes, like one in a trisillion times, those cork and gluons will smash together to make a Higgs boson.

We run this thing every 25 nanoseconds because most of the time when we smush particles together, boring particles come out. articles we've seen over and over again. So the rare, the interesting stuff is really rare, which is why we have to run it really often to spot the rare ones. Right. And so it's like one in a trillion times a Higgs boson appears. It doesn't live for very long. The thing I think people should understand is that you can don't make a Higgs boson and then you have it.

It's not like you can fill a glass jar with Higgs bosons that we've made at the LHC. They exist for like 10 to the negative 20 something seconds and then they decay. They turn into other stuff. They, like, evaporate kind of... Yeah, they're like heavy and unstable. And so they... They break up. Yeah, exactly.

Into other stuff that we can see. Like, one of the most common things they do is turn into two bottom quarks, for example. And so how do we actually see the Higgs boson? Well, one way we do it is we look for events with two bottom corks in them. Problem is there's lots of other ways to make events with two bottom corks in them. Lots of times when we collide protons, we get events with two bottom corks in them that wasn't from the Higgs boson. So you have to figure out which of the stuff that you see might have come from Higgs boson that existed for a really short amount of time. That's right. And so it's like visiting

the scene of a car crash and trying to figure out what happened. All you can see is the debris afterwards. You don't get to see the car crash itself. And you have to be like, all right, I think from the debris that it was two yellow Volkswagens that crashed onto each other. That's right. I think the Higgs boson was driving and it veered off the bridge. So then that's why it caused so much. You had to run this thing. It was huge. It needed a lot of energy. That's right. And it had to run for a long time. And so then you found enough observations of the debris to know, okay, I think in there, we can definitely say that there was a Higgs boson that popped into existence for a brief amount of time. That's right. What we do is we take the energy

of those two bottom corks and we add them up and we say how much energy was there. And if it was a Higgs boson, then the energy of those two bottom corks is going to mostly add up to be the mass of that Higgs boson. So you do that a bunch of bunch of times and then you add them all up. And if the Higgs boson was there, you'll see a little bump. You'll say you make a plot for example. Yeah, bump at the data. If you make a plot for example of like how much energy was in the two bottom quarks versus how often you see it, you'll see a bunch of collisions that all have the same energy in the two bottom quarks and that'll be at the mass of the Higgs boson. So we were bump hunting. We didn't know where we might see it. bump hunting, that should be the next show

in the Discovery Channel, physicists, bump hunters. I think there's probably some easy, salacious misunderstanding of bump hunting, yeah. So they found it, right? And this was, I think, what was it, 2013,

14 that they founded? It was sort of slow. Like, we started to see hints of it. We saw little bumps, and then they would go away. And then we finally started to see more significant bumps that just grew and grew and grew. And so the actual discovery of the Higgs wasn't like an aha moment, like one day, like, boom, here it is. We found it. There it is. You can all see it. It was a slow accumulation of data. It's sort of like, you know, the water draining out of the ocean. And you can, in revealing things on the sea floor, like very gradually, we saw this bump rising out of the data. It's like you saw a little shadow of it here, a little shadowed it or there. And then suddenly you had the confident to say, I think all of these things say that the Higgs boson is a thing.

That's right. And it gradually accumulated. So it was sort of a slow burn. And at some point, it passes some threshold where statisticians say we're allowed to say we've discovered the Higgs boson. And so huge fanfare, lots of excitement, lots of news coverage in the media. Why do you think it was such a media frenzy this Higgs boson? Like, you know, scientists discover stuff every day all the time. Why do you think people got so excited about discovery of this particle?

That's a great question. I wish I understood how the whole science journalism world worked, why they all get excited about something sometimes and other times you just can't get them interested at all. I don't know. I think that CERN has a great PR team and that they really built their argument about why CERN is exciting based on this goal. Let's discover the Higgs boson. And that has positives and negatives, like the positive. it are, if you spend several years hyping this up, then when you actually are ready to deliver

your discovery, people are hyped up. Oh, I see. So part of it was just like the, the size of the project, people were really hyped up about it. Yeah. And CERN is organized and they know how to do PR and they have been priming science journalists for a long time. But it's sort of important because it's kind of a, it closed the gap, right? It sort of like put the little button on this theory of the universe that physics had, right? It was kind of like this piece of people had been theorizing for a long time. And so now here it is. Here was the evidence that this theory was right.

Yeah. And a lot of people look at that positively. I actually think it's kind of a negative story. I mean, people sold the LHC is like, here's we're going to discover the Higgs boson. And that's going to be the answer to this decades-long question. And after that, the standard model is finished. And it's certainly true that we've been looking for a long time

and that we found it. And it validated this idea, this beautiful math, mathematical idea, which came, you know, just from like this aesthetic sense of mathematical beauty. That's awesome. That's an awesome story. And it was the missing piece of the standard model, the piece we didn't have. And so now we have a theory which is complete in the sense that it works, right? There's no obvious missing piece. But it doesn't mean that there aren't questions remaining. And I think one downside of saying the LHC was about discovering the Higgs is that people think, oh, we're done. Like, well, we've finished this theory and now it's over. And like, why are you

still running the LHC. And the other thing is that some of us were hoping we wouldn't find the Higgs. I mean, the Higgs is sort of like a nice wrap-up to that story, but there were other ideas out there, ideas that might have been more exciting. And so in some ways, finding something that wasn't the Higgs, something weird and strange and unexpected, something that wasn't predicted by the theory, something where we didn't have like a mental slot for it already, that would have been much more exciting, something totally unexpected than I cracked open particle physics.

and let us understand things about why particles get different masses or what is dark matter. You know, what are the patterns of the particles? There's a lot of questions we don't have the answers to just because we found the Higgs. I can see a politician being like, all right, guys, so you're telling me that you were totally wrong and you misspent all this money. But it turns out that luckily, it's actually good news. That's right. Well, for me, the most exciting thing is the exploration. Like, I want to build that $3 trillion collider because it less.

is explore the universe at a scale we've never seen before. And I'm excited for unexpected discoveries, much more than I'm excited for expected discoveries. You know, it's like if somebody told you exactly where to find a special little rock, it'd be cool to go there and see, like, oh, look, they found this little rock. It would be much cooler to find something you didn't expect. December 29th, December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport.

The holiday rush. Parents hauling luggage. kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System

on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate.

Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's Honey German, and I'm back with season two of my podcast. Grazias, come again. We got you when it comes to the latest in music and entertainment with interviews with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't audition in, like, over 25 years.

Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah. We'll talk about all that's viral and trending, with a little bit of cheesement and a whole lot of laughs. And, of course, the great bevras you've come to expect. Listen to the new season of Grasasas Come Again on the eye heart.

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