Hey there, Sir Nerds Trace here, and I am one of you.
A few weeks back I made a set of short documentaries
about the ongoing zen goings on at the European Organization
for Nuclear Research while they were on their long
shut down too.
You probably remember them.
But if not, there are links in the description
to watch them both.
I think they're both fantastic.
They're like my children, I don't have a favorite.
But outside of the physical physics phenomena refurbishment
being finagled at this festival of quantum familiarization,
these humans are also experts at what they do.
And as such, they have a lot of interesting knowledge stored
inside of their meat jelly brains.
I asked after I made those two first episodes if people
out there wanted more.
And you all said yes, so here we are.
Here's a bit more about what their work is really
like at CERN.
OK, so accelerator physics.
What exactly do you do, say, day to day?
So we do the studies to make sure
that the machine is running smoothly,
but also to try to make it run better.
So like with the simulations of the particles,
we have simulated the whole machine with all of the magnets
and then we see all of the different effects
that the protons have among each other.
And we try just to optimize the machine as much as we can.
OK, so Andrea, she's like a mechanic.
Accelerator physicists build particle accelerators
and maintain them optimally.
This is what they do.
Which means, when we're talking about making beam, that
is like all Andrea thinks about all day at work
everyday-- making a stable usable beam, which ain't easy.
Her job is to make sure the 2,556 bunches of protons that
create the beam are consistent.
Because if they're not, the science isn't solid.
Imagine trying to run an experiment and the beam--
inconsistent, or moves around, or it
doesn't collide as often as you need it to in order
to get the data that you're looking for.
That would be bad.
So, let's make it good.
Physicists like her have to make sure a superconducting
super collider so large that it spans two countries
does its job flawlessly.
Which is hard, because it was built by humans.
And I don't know if you noticed, we ain't perfect.
I can tell you something that I find pretty cool.
Yeah.
So when I was working operations one of my main jobs
was to measure the machine resonances.
So what a resonance is-- this is a very cool concept.
When I learned it, I really liked it.
A bunch of protons when they travel around the machine--
I'm sure that everybody pictures it going just like this.
But it oscillates.
So it oscillates in the horizontal plane
and in the vertical plane all the time.
And the number of oscillations-- we call it the tune.
That's a technicality.
The thing is that the machine has magnets,
and these magnets are not perfect.
Just because we cannot build perfect things.
They have magnet imperfections.
And this means that sometimes there's a little error.
For example, you have an integer tune, which
means imagine that the bunch starts here,
goes around the ring, and it does
let's say ten oscillations.
If it's exactly ten, and there are errors in the machine,
instead of finishing at the point-- at zero,
let's say, it will be up.
A little bit up.
And if it does this a million times,
these imperfections are going to accumulate.
And then at some point we're going to loose the beam.
The LHC has resonance.
That's amazing, right?
That sounds like something out of a Dan Brown novel.
It's not nefarious, it's just a science problem
that needs to be solved.
But what we can do-- just put correctors on.
Let's say this magnet that gives us these imperfections,
then we're going to put this other magnet that's
going to compensate for it.
When it's running, the LHC is flooded
with super stable helium, and the magnets
are cooled to 1.9 kelvin.
Colder than the temperature of outer space.
The coldest place in the known universe-- the coldest.
This makes the magnets superconducting.
But again, they're handmade.
And I visited the magnet factory on the CERN campus.
Because nothing in the world is perfect--
So in the end what we do it's like we
changed the tune so the number of oscillations of the beam--
because this can be changed with the magnets, the magnet
strength, and the magnet fields.
Right.
And we test all of the different combinations of tunes
and then we see where we lose it.
Yeah.
And this gives us a map of how our magnets in the machine are.
A team of CERN physicists had to make a resonance
map of the magnetic fields inside of the LHC
so that the beam wouldn't crash out
of the machine due to the tiny flaws in the magnets which
would create the resonance.
And that would be bad.
Because that's expensive-- I don't know it's bad,
just trust it's bad.
Yeah.
And this is, for example, what accelerator physicists do.
If we don't do this, we loose the beam- we cannot operate.
Yeah, wow.
And it's very difficult. Like, it's super difficult
to make this beam stable.
If everything is not tuned to perfection, like, we lose it.
Yeah.
Like even in the LHC to ramp it up
and in order to not lose it due to instabilities,
we have to pump up our octopoles maximum.
So it's, like, it's highly unstable.
Yeah, but that's awesome.
But we make it work, it's super cool.
Oh, gosh so cool.
I love learning new things about stuff.
So I was so lucky to get to visit CERN,
but I'd love to visit more places.
And to do that I need your help.
Click the Subscribe button.
Tell someone about the channel.
I can't grow this thing without you and other great nerds
like you.
We're all in this together.
So thanks.
OK, another story.
Even though we colloquially call these things massive,
you know, machines--
we call them that.
But we also call them atom smashers, or even
Hadron Colliders.
But they don't actually collide or smash anything.
It still seems like brute force.
Smash stuff together and see what comes out.
The beauty of it is that we've gotten really,
really more and more precise.
So us sort of cro-magnon and smashing things
together-- that's use, the experimentalists.
We smash the things.
In fact particles don't ever, ever collide.
When you smash things together you
have a picture in your mind-- a car
and all the parts falling out.
Right.
In fact, not really like you're taking
a proton-- another proton and you're smashing them apart
into their components.
It's actually just that the components of those particles
got close enough to each other at a high enough energy
that they interacted.
It's not really a collision.
What you're doing is, you're taking a whole bunch--
and to give you an idea, we have a 100 billion protons here,
and 100 million protons here.
And we bring them through each other, which
is 40 million times a second.
OK, lets just look at one of these.
100 billion, 100 billion.
Just like Andromeda and the Milky Way coming together.
Now with Andromeda and the Milky Way
which is going to happen in--
I forget how many billion years.
8 billion or 4 billion, I don't know.
I think we don't have to worry too much about it.
But when it happens, none of the stars
are actually going to hit because there's a lot of space
there.
Well, turns out the same thing for these guys.
So the protons-- we have to squeeze them and really
squeeze 100 billion and 100 billion
in order to get, like, 50 to actually go through each other.
I'm going to stay away from the word collide.
What happens is it means that 50 will pass through each other.
Now for most of these, they will just do that.
They'll pass through each other and it
might be that the electromagnetic forces will
make them scatter--
they'll just sort of move in different directions.
And that happens most the time.
In fact, only one--
like I said before, I think, like, one in a million or one
in 10 million of these.
The quarks or the gluons--
that are the force particles going between the quarks
will actually come close enough to interact.
When they interact, they can form--
they can do something.
And the standard model is actually not
just the particles, but it's a set of rules which
tells us how they can interact.
I'll give you an example.
The higgs boson-- when the higgs boson into being it's
because a couple of the gluons from these two protons
interacted.
And when they interacted, they interacted through a top quark,
which was a virtual top quark.
OK?
It's not even one that exists-- that you'll ever see--
this stuff that's happening on the inside.
And then boom, out of that came the higgs boson.
Which will then split into a couple tops, again, top bar.
And we'll do the same sort of thing
and then they can shoot off a couple photons.
So it's really kind of a strange interaction.
But this is all in the standard model.
So it predicts how often this can happen.
And then we look for them.
We try to measure that and we can see
how these interactions happen.
And they form something else, and that other thing typically
will then decay--
it will transform into other particles.
That will just happen.
We call those decays, but decay is a bad word.
A particle-- fundamental particle,
it's not made up of anything-- can magically
transform into another particle that's
less massive plus energy.
[INAUDIBLE] like something bigger
is breaking into its parts.
Instead a more massive particle transforms to a lighter
particle and some energy.
Alternatively, if we want to study these particles
we take some energy into a less massive particle
and then that can produce more mass of particles.
And that's what we're doing here at the LHC.
So it's a little--
we're not--
CERN is populated by thousands of engineers and makers
and builders and designers and applied physicists
and theorists and every type of scientist you can think of.
But it's also a living campus of cafeterias and dormitories
and logistical staff like the public affairs
person who showed me around in 2016 and 2019.
When you walk around CERN you meet so many people
doing so many different things.
When strangers meet each other they tell you what they do
and when they are scheduled to depart.
For example, you would say, like, hey, I'm Trace.
I work in video production.
I'm here till the end of the month.
The reason they do this is because most
of these specialists are at CERN temporarily.
Maybe they're studying something specific
or they're on a contract for a set amount of time
from their school or their government--
and they're going to run out of funding eventually.
The world of science might like to think of itself
as an ivory tower, but it's really more like people
in a hotel and some of them live there and some of them
visit but they all have a budget.
If you want to support science, make
sure you tell people you love it.
Not just your mom or your friend or your cat or your Twitter
follower, but your city council members, your state
legislators, your Congress people.
Tell your scout leaders, your professors.
Tell people you value this stuff,
because the return on these investments
isn't always tangible.
But science begets more understanding and more science.
There are millions of micro discoveries
that come from giant science experiments
like the Large Hadron Collider and its associate experiments.
Like Atlas and LHCB and the Antimatter factory.
When CERN pushes the boundaries of what science and engineering
needs to be able to do, that informs biomedical sciences,
aerospace engineering, data processing and storage.
And those technologies are not intangible.
We end up using them every day in some cases.
Crazy engineering like learning the resonance of a particle
accelerator might seem far out right now.
But you'll never know what that knowledge might
be used for in the future.
Let me give you an example.
The concept of the digital camera
was invented in the 1960s at JPL.
It was a way for satellites to create images
without film using photo receptors to pick up light.
But before that, spy satellites would
drop canisters of undeveloped film
that had to be caught by planes-- seriously it's crazy.
But today, we cannot imagine a world without the digital
camera.
It wasn't even built till 1975 for the first time.
And even then, they didn't really
know what it would be for.
They used cassette tapes and they only got so many photos.
Like 30 photos at a time because,
like, who needs more than 30 photos.
I have a hundred and some thousand photos
in my camera roll.
Digital cameras, they changed the world.
And something else we cannot not imagine the world without is
the humble password.
And while it's not as complicated
as particle physics, your passwords--
need some help.
Humans literally cannot remember the hundreds of passwords that
have to be random and secure and required for all
of the different websites that we visit.
Computers can crack millions and passwords
in just seconds or minutes.
Which is why you need a password manager like Dashlane.
Dashlane is an encrypted secure password manager
that will create super secure passwords for you,
store them safely, and fill them on sites
you visit whether you're on your phone, tablet,
or your computer.
I spent a week resetting all of my passwords all over the web
and moving them all into a password
manager and the feeling of cozy security--
I just cannot even describe.
It's so, so, so nice to not have to remember
all of those things.
Ugh.
Now they're all in one place, they're all different,
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Dashlane also take steps to keep you safe
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Just try it.
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Dashlane is free to use, but for the first 200
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Just use the code "trace" or go to Dashlane.com/trace to sign
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There's a link in the description.
It supports your digital safety and directly supports
the making of stories just like this.
If we don't challenge ourselves, if we don't push ourselves
to achieve what seems like unachievable goals, then
what are we even doing here?
What's the point?
What's one scientific discovery that you
love that came from something completely unrelated?
Let me know down in the comments.
If you're subscribed and you've shared my videos with friends
and you still just want to help, click over to my Patreon.
Because I use that money to grow this channel directly.
Every little bit helps.
Thanks to Simon, Dustin, Jim, Steampunk,
and everyone else who asked for more CERN videos
when I called it out last time.
I hope you all learn something because I listened to you
and I made this video.
So thank you.
I am Trace, thanks again for watching
and I will see you in the future.
I know why I nodded so much, that was weird.