Scientific progress is One Shining achievement of the human race, but what happens when scientists
discover something that the rest of the population isn’t quite ready for?
The European Council for Nuclear Research better known by their acronym, CERN has been carrying
out experiments since the organization first formed in the mid-50s we are in a very special
place here with Steve Myers we're standing on top of the first Hadron Collider ever built
and operated during this time they've come into the spotlight on numerous occasions for good and
their experiments have sparked fear of the possible creation of
black holes Rifts in our reality and a plethora of other theories
due to the size of the organization's funding and the nature of their research one of their most
famous and controversial achievements came with the construction of the Large Hadron Collider the
biggest particle accelerator in the world spanning over 27 kilometers in circumference and cost over
four and a half billion dollars but many would argue that this money was well spent as the LHC
has led to some of the most groundbreaking discoveries of the past few decades like
discovery of the Higgs boson and many other never before seen particles this massive machine is
capable of accelerating various particles round and around the loop until they're traveling near
the speed of light and completing over 11 000 laps every second they accomplished this with a series
of incredibly powerful electromagnetics that create a magnetic field within the
accelerator that's more than one thousand times stronger than the field that surrounds the Earth
there have been some that have been wary of the effects that generating a magnetic field of this
strength could have on electronics in the local area and even its effect on the Earth's Own field
once these particles reach their top speed
99.999991 the speed of light particles traveling
in opposite directions are forced to collide into one another in a powerful
Collision in order to release massive energy and an assortment of particles
when the particle collision happens the result is a shower of particles whizzing out in every
direction most of which only stay in existence for fractions of a second before decaying out
of existence varying the types of particles helps researchers discover new particles in
these flurries specially designed super sensitive detectors are placed around the Collision sites to
capture all the information from each and every collision and this amount of information really
adds up and requires a huge amount of time and manpower to sift through experiments at the LHC
create more than 15 petabytes of raw data from these collisions every year which then need to be
meticulously combed through to sort out the data the researchers are looking for back in 2017 the
LHC surpassed a major Milestone when they had put out over 200 petabytes of data permanently
into its tape libraries to put this amount of data into perspective one petabyte of data
is equivalent to around 250 000 movies but what are they looking for in all of this data any way
they noticed something going on with a particular kind of Quark quarks are the building blocks of
all matter and come in a variety of types that physicists call flavor some of these flavors of
quarks are incredibly unstable and will Decay into other particles in the blink of an eye
the beauty Quark which has an average lifespan of one and a half trillionths of a second was
the subject of this particular anomaly when its Decay pattern was different than what scientists
predicted based on the standard model according to their predictions when a beauty Quark decays
it should be influenced by the weak force and transform into a set of lighter particles
called leptons either an electron or a muon with the standard model predicting about a
50 50 chance for both particles but with the data from the LHC was showing was that these
quarks were decaying into muons only 70 as often as they were decaying into electrons
the only way that this discrepancy could occur is if a new type of particle that's never been
seen before gets involved with this process this has led some researchers to speculate
that some new type of physics could be at play a new Force carrying particle would mean brand new
physics that could expand the standard model and answer a plethora of unanswered questions
currently our best guess on how the Strange World of particles behaves comes in the theory of the
standard model this scientific framework describes everything we know about the building blocks of
the physical world with extreme accuracy but even with this level of accuracy physicists know the
standard model can currently describe only three of the fundamental forces the electromagnetic
force the strong force and the weak Force as of yet it cannot describe the force of gravity
and had no explanation for the dominant form of matter found in the universe Dark Matter during
recent experiments researchers noticed an anomaly within the data they were analyzing that felt
Square outside what is known within the standard model and while it's not massively uncommon to
find results outside this model with a sheer amount of data that the LHC puts out something
this time caught the eyes of scientists that knew that they needed to take a closer look
to try and explain this unexpected Discovery the researchers consider that there may be a
new fundamental particle they called Z Prime which is in essence a brand new force-carrying particle
this force is more than likely extremely weak due to the fact that there have been no signs of
it until now according to the researchers this force would interact with electrons and muons
differently but the extent of its interactions with the particles of the standard model remains
a mystery for now if in fact they did find a new Force this would be a breakthrough the physics has
been waiting decades for physicists are hopeful that if this discovery is confirmed it could help
unlock established Mysteries of the universe like what dark matter is or the full picture of the
Higgs boson's role in creating a reality some are even theorizing that this unknown Force may help
achieve one of the biggest goals physics has had for the past Century the unification of
the fundamental forces of nature what will CERN uncover next and what will it mean for
the future of science thanks for watching if you enjoyed this video be sure to check
out our other content taking a closer look at the universe and many of the Mysteries
it contains like 'The Amazing Quantum Discovery That May Solve Why We Exist'