cc  >> All right.  I would like to welcome everyone  here to the physics building,  Chamberlain Hall, I'd like to  wish everybody a happy Star Wars  day.  May the fourth be with you.  It's my privilege to introduce  our speaker tonight, Professor  Wesley Smith.  Professor Wesley Smith came from  Columbia University to the  University of Wisconsin in 1988.  At that time he was leading the  research program that measured  the charge and the number of  quarks in the proton.  At Wisconsin Professor Smith led  the US group at HERA, the  electron-proton collider in  Hamburg, Germany.  This experiment changed our  understanding of the strong  force.  The force that binds together  the quarks and the gluons inside  the proton.  For the past 16 years Professor  Smith has been a senior leader  of the CMS program, CMS is one  of the two experiments of the  large hadron collider, or LHC,  which figures prominently in the  movie "Angels and Demons."  In this role, Professor Smith  is responsible for all of the  data taken by CMS and kept for  off-line analysis. 

 Professor Smith has been a  National Science Foundation  presidential young investigator  and a Department of Energy  outstanding junior investigator.  He is a fellow of the American  Physical Society and in 2006 was  named the Bjorn Vike University  of Wisconsin Professor of  Physics.  Ladies and gentlemen, I would  like to introduce Professor  Wesley Smith!  (applause)  >> Well, I want to thank you,  Jim, for that rousing  introduction and you for coming  tonight on a late evening, and  spending some of your evening  with me.  And I would like to tell you a  little bit about "Angels and  Demons" the movie, mostly I'd  like to tell you about physics.  But if you can't hear me for any  reason or if the sound doesn't  show up, please wave your hand  and I'll try to do something  about it.  Like yell.  Okay, let's start.  In case you don't know or  haven't been watching your  television set recently, this  gives you a little idea of what  this is all about.  >> (movie trailer): Thousands  are gathered in St. Peter's  square.  The new pope has yet to be  selected. 

 (girl screams)  >> We are under  attack from an old enemy.  Find Professor Langdon.  >> He exposed one of the  greatest cover-ups in human  history.  But what terrifying discovery  would make the Vatican turn to  him?  >> It's Illuminati.  The Illuminati were a secret  society dedicated to scientific  truth.  The Catholic church ordered a  brutal massacre to silence them  forever.  They've come for their revenge.  There's a hidden trail through  Rome itself.  I need access to the Vatican  archives.  >> Access to the archives is  only by written decree by the  Holy Father. 

 >> Fellas.  You called me.  This is the first sign.  >> What sort of sign?  >> Earth.  Air.  Fire.  Water.  And the fifth sign.  >> May God forgive you for what  you have done.  >> Father, if God has issues,  they won't be with what you've  done. 

 They'll be with what we're  about to do.  >> Our church is at war.  >> Hey!  This is the first marker.  The path is a lie.  You're talking about the moment  of creation.  >> Open the doors and tell the  world the truth.  >> It has to be here!  This is it.  This is the truth.  >> Angels and Demons.  >> All right. 

 Galileo never had it that good,  I'll tell you.  (laughter)  So what's the deal  here?  The deal is here's the plot.  I'm not gonna say it as  excitedly as you just heard it,  nor can I deliver it in such an  absolutely wonderful way with  that wonderful voice.  But the deal here is that they  steal antimatter from the CERN  large hadron collider and they  hide it in Vatican City.  And then a countdown to Vatican  annihilation begins.  And then you race through Rome  to avert death and destruction.  Okay?  And the movie ends.  Okay.  (laughter)  Sorry I ruined the plot  for you.  Let's go on with the idea of  comparing the plot of the movie  with the reality or the movie  with the reality. 

 So in that vein, this is  Hollywood's version of CERN.  That's actually one of the  control rooms at one of the two  experiments, this is our  competitor experiment, Atlas, in  which the University of  Wisconsin is also involved.  And they actually made an entire  control room as a set, and  that's what it looks like.  That's the real CERN, okay?  And it's not a top-secret lab or  anything like that.  It looks like a college campus,  a mixture of a college campus  and industrial facility  basically.  It sits on the border between  Switzerland and France and it  has the Jura mountains on one  side and the Alps on the other  side.  Geneva's over there.  It's about 15 minutes away from  downtown Geneva, depending on  the traffic.  So that is the lab.  The lab itself is the European  Laboratory for Particle Physics. 

 It was founded in 1954.  It is the model for the European  Union.  It was the first time the  European countries after World  War II came together, formed a  treaty, made agreements, and the  European Union was actually  modeled after how this was put  together.  It now has 20 member countries  and a bunch of associated  countries, United States is an  associated country.  There are more than 9,000  scientists who are at any one  time are affiliated with it,  though they're not all there at  one time.  I'll tell you, that would cram  the cafeteria to bursting.  But they're from more than 100  nationalities, and more than  1,000 members of US universities  and labs are participating in  the science at CERN.  So that's the real CERN.  Now here is a picture of the  control room of the large hadron  collider and there are several  things wrong with this.  Number one, we don't have these  big glass windows with movie  cameras looking in. 

 Number two, Ron Howard doesn't  visit the control room very  often, although he did once.  But nevertheless, this is  Hollywood's picture of things  and also, none of us wear lab  coats, either.  (laughter)  You were a lab coat  to avoid getting chemicals on  yourself.  What's gonna spill on you here?  Just a bunch of computer keys.  So there's no point, but anyway,  that's Hollywood's large hadron  collider.  And then here's the real hadron  collider.  It's the world's most powerful  particle accelerator.  It's 16. 8 miles around,  it's 330 feet underground.  It's a huge undertaking.  As I will explain in a little  while, each of those magnets is  a super-conducting magnet filled  with liquid helium, so I'll  explain more about that. 

 When the beams in the machine  collide, they collide at  detectors and when they smash  into each other, this is a  picture of the Atlas detector,  which is a little bigger than  CMS, but there's a person to  give you an idea of the scale.  There's the floor way down  there.  Remember, this is 330 feet  underground.  And those are all detectors and  next to it is the experiment I  work on, CMS, which is a little  smaller but nevertheless this is  a fish-eye lens, and you can see  these are the floors.  That's ground floor, first  floor, second floor, third  floor.  And then there's the top of the  cavern.  And these are all the detectors  around.  I'll explain a little bit more  about this experiment.  The idea is we smash the  particles into each other, and  the idea is we're gonna solve  some of the universe's biggest  mysteries.  I'll try to explain some of  them. 

 Now let's get to the, I've  talked about CERN, but I haven't  yet talk about antimatter.  So I thought I'd let Hollywood  weigh in on that subject one  more time.  It takes a second for this film  clip to start because it's not a  trailer, it's actually a clip  from the movie.  >> (movie clip): Where is the  canister number 86?  >> It's wireless.  If it were stolen it could be  anywhere inside the Vatican  walls.  >> That canister contains  extremely combustible substance  called antimatter, we need to  locate it immediately.  Or evacuate Vatican City.  >> I'm quite familiar with  incendiaries, Ms. Vetra.  I've never head of antimatter  being used as such.  >> Well, it's never been  generated in significant  quantities before. 

 It's a way of studying the  origins of the universe.  To try to isolate what some  people call the "God particle."  There are implications for  energy research.  >> God particle?  >> What we call it isn't  important.  It's what gives all matter  mass, the thing without which  we could not exist.  >> You're talking about the  moment of creation.  >> Yes.  In a way, I am.  The antimatter is suspended  there.  In an airtight nano -- with  electromagnets on each end.  But if it were to fall out of  suspension and come in contact  with matter near the bottom of  the canister, then the two  imposing forces would  annihilate one another  violently. 

 >> What might cause it to fall  out of suspension?  >> The battery going dead.  Which it will.  In six hours.  >> What kind of annihilation?  How violent?  >> A cataclysmic event.  A blinding explosion equivalent  to about 5 kilotons.  >> Vatican City would be  consumed.  >> Okay.  (laughter)  So it's sort of like,  you come home, "Honey where did  we put the antimatter?  I know we put it somewhere!  Is it in the closet?"  You know, it's not quite like  that, it's a little more  difficult to hold together  antimatter.  Let me explain what antimatter  really is.  First of all, it is real. 

 It doesn't come in containers  that look like that.  But it is real.  And it is produced at the large  hadron collider and it's true  that enough of it could destroy  Rome.  So what is it?  Before I tell you about  antimatter, I have to tell you  about matter so we understand  what antimatter is.  So what is antimatter?  I have to explain what matter  is.  Matter is composed of particles  in various combinations.  And what we have that makes up  the particles are objects called  quarks, and they have funny  names because physicists have a  sense of humor.  Up and down, charm and strange,  top and bottom.  They all have different  properties.  The other things that make up  matter are the leptons. 

 And they are called electrons,  muons and taos.  These are basically fat  electrons.  And then each of them has a  corresponding neutrino, which  basically doesn't have any of  the nice things that these have  like charge and mass.  But nevertheless, there's one  for each one of them, and those  are the particles that make up  matter.  So how do they make up matter?  Well, you take an up and a down  quark, and you then combine them  into a proton.  And they have charges, so that  in this case, this one is charge  2/3, charge 2/3, minus 1/3, so  that makes a proton 'cause it's  got a positive charge.  And this is a charge here 2/3,  then minus 1/3, minus 1/3, so  that's zero.  So that's a neutron.  Neutron's no charge.  So you take those two and you  hold them together, they're held  together by the strong nuclear  force. 

 And then you take an electron  and you orbit them around, and  voila, hydrogen.  That's matter.  That's how matter's made up.  You start with one atom, then  you build your way up, and  eventually you build a universe.  You multiply by billions and  billions, and you end up with a  universe, even bigger universe.  That's matter, in short.  So now we've built our universe,  what's the deal with antimatter?  Well, for every particle that  exists, there's an antiparticle,  so for every up and down quark,  or electron, electron neutrino,  there is an anti-up quark, and  anti-down quark, a positron and  an anti-electron neutrino or  positron neutrino.  For every particle there is an  antiparticle.  That's antimatter.  For every particle we have,  there is an antiparticle. 

 So do we make antimatter?  Yes.  And the key to remember here is  particles and antiparticles have  opposite electric charge.  So they attract each other.  Opposites attract.  So particles and antiparticles  have opposite electric charge,  if they have any, and therefore  they attract each other.  All right, can we make  antimatter?  We can, and we do.  On a daily basis.  We make it in particle  accelerators, for example.  This is a particle accelerator  at Stanford, that's one at  Fermilab, about a hundred miles  south of here in Batavia,  Illinois.  All the time, make antimatter. 

 Nature can make antimatter in  cosmic rays.  Cosmic rays are extraterrestrial  particles that collide with our  atmosphere and shower and  produce thousands and thousands  of particles passing through you  every minute, don't worry, it  doesn't hurt, it's been  happening to you your entire  lives.  So nature can, and it's fine.  So what happens when matter and  antimatter come together?  Well, for example, if there were  an anti-Tom Hanks...  (laughter)  He would look very  much like Tom Hanks.  Well how would you know?  If they came together, if they  were to meet...  BOOM!  And you'd get a lot of energy  coming out, okay?  So there is a problem if a lot  of antimatter meets a lot of  matter.  Let me explain a little more.  So in the movie, let's go back  to the movie, the stars of the  movie claim that they have 1/4  gram of antimatter.  That's about the weight of a  quarter of a dollar bill. 

 Dollar bill's about a gram.  So an annihilation of 1/4 gram  of matter plus 1/4 gram of  antimatter would be 10,000  kilotons of TNT.  More than enough to destroy the  Vatican and take out most of  Rome.  That is correct.  The atomic device that fell on  Nagasaki was 20,000 tons of TNT.  The Hiroshima bomb was 14,000.  So on this scale, this is pretty  catastrophic.  So should we be worried?  Well, the deal is, we make very  little antimatter.  That's the first problem.  A particle accelerator like  Fermilab, which is, until the  large hadron collider turns on  its --, is the most powerful  accelerator in the world,  creates two nanograms, that's  two billionths of a gram of  antimatter per year. 

 And that's the best we can do.  We'd like to make more, 'cause  we'd like to do more physics  with it.  But two billionths of a gram,  okay?  Thus it would take 109 million  years to make 1/4 gram.  If you were gonna try to destroy  something, I think you would,  even for Hollywood, you would  probably not use this method.  But it sounds real cool, and  gets you interested in coming  here and I can talk to you about  physics, so that's the catch.  Now not only can't you make  enough of it, but it's not  portable.  It does not come in some little  cooler like you'd take to lunch,  okay?  Or in a backpack.  If you look at where some tiny  fractions of a billionth of a  gram of antimatter would be  circulating, it's in huge  underground facilities like  that.  And there's no such thing as a  battery pack to keep it going,  either.  Why?  Because the power to make a  single antiparticle is much more  than the energy you get out of  it. 

 So you put much more energy in  than you get out.  So there's more energy that goes  in than produced, it's not even  useful for spaceships.  So all those space operas which  have the antimatter drive-up,  get some more antimatter, like  you throw coal into a steam  engine, it's not gonna work,  because in order to make the  antimatter, it takes way too  much energy.  So what is it good for?  It's not good for blowing things  up, it's not good for  spaceships, not good for power,  but it is good for many things.  For example, is positron  emissions tomography.  PET scans.  They use positrons for that  purpose.  It's much better to use  positively charged particles for  these scans, which are extremely  valuable in detecting cancers  and doing diagnostics.  So that's an example.  All right. 

 Now, antimatter can be used by  scientists, besides PET scans  and medicine.  It can be used to solve some of  the biggest mysteries in  science, some of the biggest  mysteries have to do with  antimatter.  Let me try to explain.  The big mystery, the reason why  scientists start, is the  question we all start by asking.  Why are we here?  So.  Why do we have mass, and what is  most of the universe made of?  Those are sort of basic  questions, and we don't know the  answers to any one of these.  I'm sorry, if you want to leave  now, you can.  But I don't know the answers.  Why do we exist?  This is a real problem.  I don't understand why we exist. 

 Let me explain why.  We exist because there's almost  no antimatter around.  It wasn't always that way.  All the matter and antimatter  collided with each other and  annihilated.  So if you start with energy, and  you end up with matter and  antimatter, you have it in equal  amounts.  If all the antimatter and matter  attract each other, they collide  and poof!  Everything's gone, and there's  no matter left.  There's no antimatter left,  there's nothing left.  But it doesn't work that way.  14 billion years ago, the Big  Bang, there's equal amounts of  matter and antimatter.  Not quite, okay?  Not quite. 

 Everything should've been  annihilated.  Not quite.  Instead everything annihilated,  but we were left, and we get to  call ourselves matter because  the victors write history.  We didn't call ourselves  antimatter, we called ourselves  matter.  But one out of trillions and  trillions of atoms of matter  survived and that's all we have.  That's what the universe is made  of, the survivors.  Everyone else was off the  island.  (laughter)  So afterward, what  happens to all the antimatter?  How did this work out?  Why are we here?  Why aren't we just energy?  IT turns out that some particles  don't behave exactly like their  mirror reflection antiparticles.  There's tiny little differences.  And those tiny little  differences, that's what we've  made our world out of. 

 So some particles behave  differently from their  antiparticles and that  difference is why, it's very  slight.  The problem is, it's not enough  to explain why the amount of  matter we have around us is  here.  Something is missing.  There must be another  explanation.  But this is one of the  mysteries, one of the mysteries  we're trying to solve with the  large hadron collider.  So that's one mystery.  Let's talk about another  mystery.  We talked about, why do we  exist?  Couldn't explain that one.  The second question is, as I  warned you, why do we have mass?  And one possibility is what's  called the "Higg's field."  This is the thing that she  referred to as the "God  particle."  I don't think that's the right  name for it, but anyway.  It was predicted back in 1964,  still unconfirmed and the  question is can we prove it by  finding the Higgs boson. 

 The Higgs boson, if it's found,  would show us that the Higgs  field exists, which gives mass  to everything, that's the theory  of how it works.  So I would call this one of the  angels of the large hadron  collider.  I'll get to the demons in a  while.  I always like to start with the  positive.  How does the Higgs particle give  mass to other particles?  Well, one of the analogies that  I like to use is, suppose you  start in a hall, and Einstein or  someone dressed up looking like  him, a cartoon character, comes  into the hall, or someone  famous.  Someone that you really would  like to talk to.  So the people in the hall  represent the Higgs field.  Now suppose Einstein enters the  room and the people cluster  around him.  As Einstein makes his way  through the room he gathers  hangers-on while others drop  off.  So the people around Einstein  represent the mass he gains  while he's in the Higgs field. 

 It's like, if you see someone  famous try to walk across a  room, surrounded by paparazzi  and all that.  There's a lot of resistance to  them moving across the room.  That is the way the Higgs field  gives mass to particles.  The people around Einstein  represent the mass he gains  while he's in the Higgs field.  Let's take the same room, and  suppose a rumor passes through  the room.  As the rumor spreads, people  cluster together, some in  stationary huddles, other roving  around.  Just as the clustered people  gave mass to Einstein when he  was on the scene, they also give  mass to themselves.  So this field which exists  around is the Higgs field and  the sign of it will be the  discovery of the Higgs boson.  So this is the effect that gives  mass to particles.  In a way, I also like to use the  analogy when you stand at the  ocean and the tide goes out and  you feel the water drawing  between your feet as the water  pulls out before it comes back  in again, there's a pull on you  as you travel through, as  particles travel through the  Higgs field, and that is their  mass. 

 That's how they acquire mass.  If we find it, theory's good.  We haven't found it yet, so I  can't perfectly sell this to  you.  What about some other mysteries?  One of the most fascinating ones  is the mystery of dark matter.  There are a number of problems.  When you take something and  whirl it around your head on the  end of a string, you feel a  certain amount of pull, the  string with the stone on the  end, is pulling on your hand.  And the faster you move the  stone, the more it pulls on your  hand.  Similarly, the galaxies, if you  look at the stars in them, are  all circling around a central  point, you can look at how many  stars there are in a galaxy,  count the points of light, and  you can see how much mass there  is, and that mass is the  gravitational force that keeps  the stars in order around the  center of the galaxy.  And then you look at how fast  the stars are moving around the  galaxy, and there's no way that  mass could hold a galaxy  together.  So there's some unaccounted  mass, and we call that "dark  matter."  Well, you might suppose your  theory of gravitation is wrong,  you don't know what you're  doing, etc. 

 But there's other signs.  And this is one of my favorite  ones.  The deal here is that mass warps  space.  This is not just a theory, this  is actually a fundamentally  verified fact, I'll explain how  it's verified in a few minutes.  If you look at light, and light  travels always in a straight  line, and since mass warps  space, a lot of heavy mass will  warp space, and if that happens,  an image of star that's far  away, you will then see a  doubled image of a star.  And what this is a picture of,  is that you can actually figure  out how much mass is missing by  looking at doubled images of  stars and the blue and the red  shows concentrations of visible  matter, and the blue shows dark  matter inferred by this effect  of double images of light  produced by mass.  I've described the problem, that  the universe is full of matter,  we can't see it, we don't know  what it is, we can't measure it.  But what could it be?  Well, there's one theory which  is quite popular with a number  of particle physicists called  "super symmetry."  Maybe this is one of the other  angels.  And this says, for all I've told  you about the basic particles of  physics, I have to tell you that  actually there's an entire  mirror world, or shadow world of  particles which are all heavier  and all have related but  slightly different properties  and have not been discovered  yet.  Now why would you do something  so bad except to sell extra  pages in textbooks when you have  to write out this part of  particle physics?  The reason is that the very  theories of physics that we have  that work so well to describe  all of particle physics break  down. 

 And one of the cleanest ways to  solve them is by making this  proposition, or theory.  And also, it's convenient that  these particles have the right  behavior to be the candidates  for dark matter.  So the LHC could be, since it is  the place where our theories  break down, if these particles  were to manifest themselves, it  would be the things that would  save our theories from breaking  down.  So it's very possible that we  might see them at the LHC.  What other things could there be  at the LHC?  Well, another interesting thing  is the idea of extra dimensions.  Now, extra dimensions are an  interesting idea because what  happens is, the problem that we  face in understanding our  universe is the attractive force  of gravity, and why does it have  the strength it does?  But what if the force of gravity  were spread among many  dimensions, each of them had to  fill each dimension with this  force, and thereby, it spreads  itself to thin, trying to cover  too many dimensions at once.  Can't multitask.  So what happens is that gravity  ends up being a weak force.  And it is weak.  When you have an electrical  force between two things, it's  much more powerful between two  objects that have an electrical  force than two objects that have  a gravitational force, even  though we're all stuck here by  gravity. 

 But that's because there's a lot  more earth.  So one of the things that could  help us explain, you might say,  where are all those dimensions?  Well, they're all rolled up, we  can't see them.  Well, the theories that predict  that gravity has more  dimensions, these theories work  only in ten or 11 space-time  dimensions, but we don't see  them.  Suppose they're curled up.  By curled up, I mean, suppose  we're tightrope walkers, not  something I'd recommend, but if  we were tightrope walkers, we  would see only the one dimension  of the tightrope, going back and  forth.  But an ant on the tightrope  would have a different  perspective on things.  An ant would say, wait a  minute, I can go either forward  or backward on the tightrope, or  go around the tightrope.  Because it is small enough to  see those extra dimensions.  So to sense any of the extra  dimensions, the size of the  probe we use must be about the  size of the radius, or smaller,  of the extra dimensions that are  curled up.  If gravity operates on all  dimensions, we can explain its  weak coupling in four dimensions  if these extra dimensions exist  and these extra dimensions  become large at the energies of  the LHC because the size of the  probe is proportional to, the  distances you're probing, get  smaller as the energy goes up. 

 So this is another possibility.  So we have extra dimensions, we  have super symmetry, we have the  Higgs mass.  These are the reasons.  Why use the LHC to explore them?  Well, let's ask some more  questions.  If you look out at the clusters  of galaxies in outer space,  there's a clumpy-ness to it.  There's something called a  "Great Attractor."  It corresponds to the pull of  about 10 to the 16 suns.  And again, only 10% of this can  be counted for in the visible  stars and galaxies.  So we're looking for new forces,  hidden dimensions, dark matter,  all these things.  I'll give one more reason.  There's even another reason. 

 If you look at the temperature  of the universe, this is the  heat radiation left over from  the original Big Bang.  It's clumpy.  There's actually variations of  temperature in the universe as  we look out.  Instead of being uniform from  the Big Bang, that explosion  just shifted so many billions of  years later, we actually see the  radiation is clumpy and because  of that, there must have been  something like a phase  transition, like ice melting  into water, that happened in the  universe to cause this.  So we are gonna be studying the  phase transition when particles  shifted from massless to massive  if we find the Higgs boson.  Because before the Higgs boson  was created, they didn't have  mass.  So this leads me to the big  question.  This is an embarrassing question  to ask a physicist.  This is why some students  probably want a tuition refund  after they finish their  introductory physics class.  The reason is that we don't  understand all the matter in the  universe. 

 As I've been explaining, we  understand what?  We understand about 5% of the  universe.  We don't know what dark matter  is, I just explained that.  The other problem is the  universe is accelerating.  When the Big Bang happened, you  have the gravitational pull of  all the matter.  And eventually, one would think  that that gravitational pull  would slow down the explosive  debris that's being spread out  by gravitational attraction, and  slow it down.  But, in fact, something's  accelerating an expansion of the  universe.  So that's called "dark energy,"  and in order to look at the  expansion of the universe going  at the speed it is, which is  really an astounding discovery,  we'd have to have about 72% of  our universe made out of dark  energy.  So this is really getting  mysterious.  It could be a new force field  particle like the Higgs, or it  could be something else.  We don't know what it is, but  these are the reasons we're  motivated to put together this  large experiment. 

 So why is this experiment the  right one?  Well, the things we see that are  strange out there are in our  universe today.  We know they were caused by  events back at the point of  creation of the universe and so  at the LHC, the particles will  be at an equivalent temperature  of 10 to the 16 degrees Kelvin.  And at that time, that's the  equivalent temperature of the  universe at 10 to the -10  seconds after the Big Bang, or a  tenth of a nanosecond after the  Big Bang.  We're going that early into the  creation of the universe, so  that is one thing, at least,  that Tom Hanks said that was  sort of correct.  We are looking at the moment of  creation, or maybe the moment of  creation plus a tenth of a  nanosecond.  At that point, we believe, these  quantum fluctuations we saw in  the temperature of the universe  were being created, which were  then seen by this satellite  experiment today.  So we're looking back about  13. 7 billion years plus, to the  very moment of creation.  So this is why we want to run  the experiment at the LHC.  Now what is the experiment?  We collide protons with protons.  Now I just finished explaining  that the protons aren't purely  made out of protons, they're  made out of quarks and so we are  actually colliding the quarks  and the protons with each other. 

 And those quarks share the  energy, so some of them are  moving at different speeds, and  with different energy.  They all together carry the  momentum and energy and mass of  the protons as they collide.  And those are what we call  partons, those are the quarks  and gluons inside them.  Where do we do this?  This is another picture of the  LHC superimposed on the map.  If you look, this is the main  campus of CERN, there's our  competing experiment Atlas, and  then a 20-minute drive through  the French countryside over to  CMS.  This is the border between  Switzerland and France running  along here.  This is the Geneva airport where  I spend too much time, and this  is the main control room, and  these are two other experiments.  So this is the area where the  experiment happens.  As you can see, the -- ring is  indeed huge.  About 16. 8 miles around. 

 And it's all located underneath  the surface, about 100 meters or  330 feet below the surface, and  the experiments all have large  shafts leading to the surface  where the equipment is brought  down.  A particle accelerator is  composed, like the large hadron  collider, composed of three  things.  First, you need something to  accelerate it.  That's called a radio frequency  cavity, it puts particles  through a voltage difference.  And they see the voltage  difference, and if a proton sees  a minus electric charge, it's  sucked towards it.  So that's what you're doing in a  radio frequency cavity.  The next things you need to do  is to keep hitting it again and  again, go around and kick it  again, go around and kick it  again, kick it.  In order to get it to go around,  you have to bend its path, and  charged particles bend in a  magnetic field.  Now they tend to bend all over  the place, you need also  focusing magnets to keep them on  their path.  Those are the three elements. 

 Bending magnets, focusing  magnets, and radio frequency  cavities.  That's what makes up the large  hadron collider.  Now here are the bending  magnets.  As far as you can see, slowly  you see the radius as it turns  around, each one is encased in  this big blue pipe.  Now the magnets are truly  amazing things.  They're huge, this is just one  of them.  You can see it there.  They have two beam pipes in  them, it was a novel design.  And there are 1,232 of them.  Each is 15 meters long. 

 They have lots of connections,  lots of feeds, and they have  liquid helium flowing through  them to keep them  super-conducting.  So how do they work?  They each have the magnetic  field inside, the beams are  counter-rotating, and they're  bent by the magnetic field.  There are about 11,500 amps of  current without resistance  because it's super-conducting,  which generates a field that's  200,000 times the earth's field  to bend the magnets because  there's so much energy.  The beam energy, by the way, at  full power, is equivalent to 80  kilograms of TNT, so we have to  be careful.  Just to show you how we get the  magnets in, they're lowered down  the shaft, here's one, there are  about 8,000 total magnets, there  are correction coils and other  coils that are put in.  Here's a radio frequency cavity,  just to give you an idea of how  big these things are.  It's 5 million volts per meter.  It runs at a frequency of 400  megahertz.  What is going on here?  Let's talk about something we do  understand, car batteries.  Imagine I have a car battery of  12 volts and I want to use that  to accelerate a proton. 

 The proton would gain an energy  of charge times voltage, so  that's one electron charge times  12 volts, 12 electron-volts.  So now I've gotta give you some  physicist abbreviations, we use  Greek.  So 1,000 electron-volts, is kilo  electron-volts, a million is  MeV, a billion is GeV, and a  trillion is a TeV.  So the LHC accelerates protons  to 7 TeV on 7 TeV, which would  require about 1. 2 trillion  car batteries.  That's the energy we put into  the protons.  Now we've put these elements  together, and what do we end up  with?  We end up with one of the  fastest racetracks on the  planet, several thousand billion  protons traveling at  99.99999991% of the speed  of light travel around the  27 km ring, 11,000 times a  second, 100 meters underground.  So those are the pictures.  It's one of the emptiest places  in the solar system.  To accelerate the protons to  almost the speed of light, we  need a vacuum similar to  interplanetary space.  The pressure in the beam pipes  of the LHC is about ten times  lower than that on the moon. 

 So we have an incredibly pure  vacuum.  That's because if these protons  hit anything, at all, even each  other it's a big interaction,  but if they hit gas molecules,  it's a big problem.  Okay.  It's also one of the coldest  places in the universe.  Temperature on the magnets when  they're fully cold is -271  degrees Celsius, International  Falls eat your heart out.  1. 9 degrees  above absolute zero,  it's colder than interstellar  space, which is about 4 degrees.  It's also one of the hottest  places in the galaxy because  when the two protons collide,  they generate in a tiny volume,  admittedly a tiny volume,  temperatures more than a billion  times those in the very heart of  the sun.  Now, it takes a lot of people to  do this.  Here's the distribution of CERN  users from all over the world.  In this particular list, there  are about 6,000 from the member  states in Europe, there are  about 2,600 from the observer  states, which include the United  States and Russia. 

 And then are other states which  are involved, and there are 632.  So you see all the blue are the  member states, the green are the  observer states, and the other  states are the ones in red.  So it's truly an international  project.  What happened?  Well, the LHC was cold in  August, I was very excited and  then we actually got beams  circulating immediately almost.  So this is the CERN director  general at that time and that's  a -- machine, charges the  machine, and you see a  fluorescent screen where the  beam can hit and make a little  image, we see it's circulating  around, so in fact, the beam was  circulating and then there were  problems and we had some  malfunctions and we're fixing it  now and it's almost fixed.  And we will be starting up in  the fall.  So this is also, once we get the  beams to collide, remember these  beams are very small.  An entire bunch of these protons  are gathered in something that's  20 microns across.  So that's about the width of a  fifth of a human hair.  We circulate them 17 miles  around and they have to be no  wider than the width of a fifth  of a human hair and then we  collide them with each other. 

 We've got to have good aim.  It's harder than firing two  needles at each other from  opposite shores of Lake Monona,  making sure that they hit  head-on.  It's more precise than doing  that.  So that's one problem.  Now when we do this, we have the  collisions themselves, are from  these proton beams which collide  with each other and when they  collide, we have to observe  their collisions, and this is  tough.  I'll explain why.  The bunches cross each other  every 25 billionths of a second,  or 40 million times a second.  They cross.  And when they cross, on average,  about 25 collisions happen, so  there are a billion  proton-proton collisions per  second.  One billion. 

 And of course, these are  collisions of the partons inside  the protons, not really the  protons themselves.  And then we get new particles  produced, but new particles  aren't produced every second,  they're produced about one every  100,000 seconds.  They actually get something that  could be very exciting.  So that's not very often and we  have to select those events.  You get about one of those  golden events per day.  So you're talking about sifting  and winnowing here, this is the  mother of all sifting and  winnowing jobs.  Actually, as Jim mentioned, that  is my personal responsibility.  My job is to make sure I select  the correct crossings to be  written to data tapes of these  billion per second.  So I worry a lot.  (laughter)  If I miss them, I'm  in trouble. 

 Okay, so these are the demons of  these things.  We have a high interaction rate.  There are a billion  proton-proton interactions per  second.  When they do collide, there are  very large particle fluxes,  thousands of tracks stream into  the detector every 25  nanoseconds, 40 million times a  second.  Large number of channels of  detectors so they don't overlap  each other.  And there are high radiation  levels in the actual area where  the beams collide.  So we can't even go in there to  touch anything.  In fact when they shut it off,  we have to wait about 24 hours  for them to clean the air.  So all of our electronics  inside, in the collision has to  be radiation hard or tolerant,  which is also a big demand.  You can't go down to Radio Shack  and buy some chips and put  something together. 

 It'll just melt.  So we have an area behind a  seven-meter-long shielding wall  where we can actually put  electronics that don't have to  have any special capabilities.  So let's put the experiment  together.  So here's where we started.  About four years ago, we had an  empty collision hall, there you  can see the people, someone  going up the steps.  All ready.  There's the shaft going up 330  feet to the surface.  There's the collision point,  right now it's in the air.  Remember this, now we're going  to build the experiment.  We built the experiment actually  upstairs. 

 This is the experiment in  cartoon fashion because it's  almost impossible to get a  picture of it.  So here's the experiment, it is  built like you see onion rings  of different detectors, each  detector has a different  function and they tell you  different things about the  particles as they exit.  Most of them don't exit, it's  the Hotel California, they check  into various rooms here and they  never leave.  So what you have here is all  these different detector  elements, and notice the person  there.  I will say, Wisconsin is  responsible for designing and  building all of these end-cap  disks that you see here.  I'll show you some more  pictures.  Okay.  I mentioned it's like an onion  skin, so what happens is, you  look at the particles bending in  a magnetic field, and then you  say, enough bending out of you,  we're gonna just have you blow  up.  So here some of the particles  get taken out by 76,000 lead  tungsten crystals, the heaviest  crystal known to man, it's  heavier than most metals.  And produces a lot of light when  particles go through it. 

 Then we have brass mixed with  plastic that gives off light  when it goes through it.  Then we have the world's largest  super-conducting solenoid,  enough to -- an entire hospital.  And then you have, after that,  for the particles that survive,  which are mostly muons, you have  additional detectors that detect  the muons going through and more  steel to try to stop all the  others.  So that's effectively how the  detector's built up.  So let's see it for real.  This is a picture of the  solenoid in its vacuum tank  being inserted.  It's the outer part of the  vacuum tank since it's at  super-conducing temperature full  of liquid helium, you need a  vacuum, a big thermos bottle for  this thing, so this is our  thermos bottle.  And this iron is so that the  return field of this solenoid is  actually brought back through  the steel, and it's used to bend  particles, they also bend  outside here.  And this is a lot of energy  stored in this magnet, 2,000 MJ,  that's enough to melt solid  gold.  So when the thing is normally  conducting, we have a whole  system, it's very tricky, of  making sure we take the energy  out in a safe and understood  way. 

 And don't lose all the liquid  helium.  So now that we've built it,  after we built it we have to  lower it, this was scary.  We had to lower it down the  shaft after we built it.  We had to lower it 330 feet  down, a lot of television  cameras came in.  They were hoping for disaster or  something, but BBC news was  there, they were watching us  lower it, and we were all there,  could hardly breathe.  So they lowered, this is one  section of it, there it goes,  had about ten centimeters to  spare on either side.  There are only a couple of  companies in the world that can  do this, lowering 2,000 tons is  not something you call your  local crane rental company up  for.  There you are, it landed safely,  I'm pleased to tell you, and  there it is being lowered down,  and that's the arrival of the  solenoid in the cavern.  And here's just some of the  cabling we have to do to then  instrument the rest of the  detector after, the solenoid's  inside there now, it's all  cabled to the detectors inside.   These are the end-cap disks that  Wisconsin was responsible for. 

 And we did not build these  chambers, it was our  responsibility to have them  built, but they were built at  Fermilab, and other sites and  tested at other sites around the  country, but they were then  plastered on here, and this  picture ended up on the front of  the European Newsweek saying,  "European science comes to the  fore."  (laughter)  We were not amused.  So anyway, to give them credit,  this was built by a contract  with University of Wisconsin.  The steel itself, by the way,  each of these disks is 700 tons,  was built in Kawasaki Industries  in Japan and the feet were built  at Udong shipyard in China, and  this is all designed by a  physical sciences lab out of  Stoughton and yes, that was a  purchase order.  We ordered it through the  University of Wisconsin  purchasing department just like  you would your pencils!  (laughter)  Not quite, but we  took care of it.  So, not only did we have to  calculate exactly the lift  point, which is outside the main  volume here, the center of  gravity, and the company  required us to do it to .2%, we  did it to .1%.  So if the lowering is off, the  crane cannot go up, by the way,  it only goes down.  So you can't make a mistake.  All right.  Here it is, on the ground, ready  to install and be put together.  And then we put it together, we  inserted the final piece which  consists of 220 square meters of  silicon, like you have inside  chips, which are special  detectors, what we call our  silicon tracker. 

 And there it's being inserted.  These little dots are what we  use for photogrammetry.  They're used to measure exact  locations of things.  And here's the detector put  together.  The tracker that I showed you,  the electromagnetic calorimeter  with the crystals, the brass  insulator, the super-conducting  solenoid and all the muon  chambers around it.  Here we are, closing it up, it's  almost together, and there it's  closed.  So there we were, we had to  clean everything up, it's really  neat and clean in there.  Why?  Because any metal object when  the field turns on becomes a  missile.  I can tell you because I had to  lift things in the magnetic  field a couple times, and the  force is very strong.  Okay, another problem is, after  we got the thing together we had  to do something with the data. 

 Essentially, one second of  running produces a data volume  equivalent to 10,000  Encyclopedia Britannicas.  The data rate that's handled by  the system that puts together  the events in computer memory  has a switch in there, it's the  mother of all Telecom switches,  the amount of traffic going  through it is equal to the data  currently exchanged by the  world's Telecom networks.  And the total number of  processors in the computer --  then processes this after the  initial selection, is about  4,000 workstations.  At the moment we have installed  900 dual quad cores, the best  Dell has to offer.  Okay.  After that, we're not done,  because you have to get the data  out of there.  So we stream the data out of the  experiment to a central storage  and processing area, and then we  are not done yet, because we  stream it out.  It's a huge volume of data  that's produced, 15 Petabytes a  year, that's about 15 million  CDs of data each year, it's a  pile of CDs about 15 km high,  1.5 times the height of Mt.  Everest, it would take you 40  million years to watch all the  movies and I don't care what  extended warranty you bought,  your DVD player wouldn't last  that long anyway.  Then we stream the data out all  over the world because we don't  have enough computers at CERN so  we stream it all over the world,  including here in Wisconsin, one  of the leading sites on the  worldwide grid of computers  where we do data analysis. 

 So the job is really a  collaborative effort of  computing that goes on  everywhere to produce this.  I've described the path of the  data from inside the detector  out to the computers which even  sit in this building and over at  Comp Sci, and all over campus  because we group the computers  together.  I've hopefully posited some  interesting questions, and why  we're trying to solve this and  why this experiment's being  done, but you might ask, what  good is it for society?  Or something like that.  Well, just a few words.  Einstein came up with his theory  of relativity.  And he said that space is warped  by the power of gravity, the  strength of gravity, he said  that as you move faster and  faster, time changes.  Time slows down.  And what does that mean to you?  Well, if they didn't make  corrections in the GPS  satellites that you use in your  GPS device to tell you where  you're going, you would be lost.  They have to adjust.  If the theory of relativity  weren't established at the  moment they launched those  satellites into orbit, it would  have to be -- at that point  because you have to literally  correct the frequency of  oscillation inside those  satellites to compensate for the  fact that you're moving in large  orbital velocity at the end of  the gravitational field of the  earth. 

 So that already, you'd have a  position error of ten meters  after just five minutes of  travel time if those corrections  were not made in those  satellites.  So general relativity really is  something we have to deal with  today.  What about electromagnetism?  James Maxwell came up with, he  did some equations, which showed  there were things like radio  waves.  This is an incredible thing!  He actually said, there will be  radio waves.  You just go out there and find  them.  They were in his equations.  It's like before man discovered  fire someone did some chemical  calculations and said, you put  this together, do this, you get  fire!  And then fire came out.  So all of the telephones,  television, beepers, pagers, all  those things you love are all  the result of Maxwell's  theories.  All the broadcasts, all wireless  transmission.  He predicted it and there it was  found exactly as he predicted  it. 

 He predicted it before there was  ever an experiment to observe  it.  So, what about other things that  happen?  That's general physics, what  about particle physics?  Well, the accelerators developed  in physics labs are used in  hospitals.  About 9,000 of the 17,000  accelerators operating in the  world today are used for  medicine, almost all of them are  used for industrial  applications, only a small  number of them are used for pure  research.  But this science came out of  particle physics.  Of course, as I mentioned,  medical diagnostics use particle  physics technology heavily.  Positron emission tomography is  very important, I'm sure you've  heard of PET scans.  They are used for localizing and  studying certain types of  cancer.  And it uses antimatter, for that  matter.  Other benefits.  Well, exactly 20 years ago and a  few months, a guy named,  not Al Gore, a guy named Tim  Berners-Lee handed a document to  his supervisor, Mike Sendall  entitled "Information  Management: A Proposal."  And his supervisor described  it as "vague but exciting."  And said, go ahead, let's see  if it works. 

 And that was the worldwide web.  And I can remember using it.  Why did he come up with it?  Because scientists from all over  the world were at CERN and at  other particle physics labs and  we had to have each look at each  other's designs before we  brought the things to actually  be put together or else they  wouldn't be put together, and we  would have a major problem.  So the way we had to look at  each other's designs, we would  use something called the  worldwide web.  It wasn't pretty, it had a bunch  of text links, it was all sort  of type-written things on the  screen, but the hyper links and  all the features were there  which we all use.  So it has been an incredible  impact of scientific research on  the world.  Okay.  In fact, no one said it better  than President Obama did last  week, I'll just leave the quote  up there for a second.  "No one can predict when new  applications will be born of  basic research: new treatments  in our hospitals, new sources of  efficient energy; new building  materials, new kinds of crops  more resistant to heat and  drought.  It was basic research in the    photoelectric effect that would  one day lead to solar panels. 

 It was basic research in physics  that would eventually produce  the CAT scan.  The calculations of GPS  satellites-" he knows this!  "The calculations of GPS  satellites are based on the  equations that Einstein put to  paper more than a century ago."  So, I'll leave you with that  thought and reach my conclusions  now.  I've shown you that the LHC is  the world's largest and most  complex scientific instrument  ever.  As I mentioned, the first  collisions are expected this  fall.  It promises to open up hitherto  unreachable areas of particle  physics and our hope is just as  Einstein revolutionized physics  100 years ago in 1908, we could  be at the threshold of a new  revolution of understanding of  the universe with the LHC.  I can't assure you, but I sure  hope that.  Thank you.  (applause)