MICHAEL TUTS: Probably the
largest scientific instrument
that's ever been created.
MILES O'BRIEN: At the CERN lab
in Switzerland, huge tools are
needed to detect tiny particles.
MICHAEL TUTS: But the real
action happens underground in a
cavern attached to the 17-mile
circumference ring. Three
thousand physicists working on
this huge detector. This
detector is 80 feet tall, 140
feet long. So, imagine that.
MILES O'BRIEN: With support
from the National Science
Foundation, physicist Michael
Tuts at Columbia and Kyle
Cranmer at New York University
are among the 21st Century
explorers who have been
searching for the mysterious
Higgs boson. It's a subatomic
particle that gives other
particles, like quarks and
electrons, mass. So tiny, yet
where would we be without it?
KYLE CRANMER: The universe
would be a fundamentally
different place. There would be
no life. There'd be no stars.
MILES O'BRIEN: Inside the
world's biggest atom smasher,
the ATLAS detector works like a
huge digital camera. It records
the collisions of hundreds of
billions of protons at nearly
the speed of light.
MICHAEL TUTS: Our digital
camera takes 40 million
pictures per second.
MILES O'BRIEN: Thousands of
computers, like these at New
York's Brookhaven National Lab,
filter the images of those
collisions, looking for
traces of the Higgs boson,
which decays quickly.
MICHAEL TUTS: And the trick is
not so much throwing stuff away,
but making sure that you don't
throw away the good stuff.
MILES O'BRIEN: In July 2012,
scientists celebrated.
ROLF-DIETER HEUER: We
have discovered a new
particle, a boson.
MICHAEL TUTS: We've seen
something, and that something
looks like a Higgs boson.
KYLE CRANMER: Now that we have
this new particle, we need to
study it like crazy. We need to
measure all of its properties.
MILES O'BRIEN: The elusive
Higgs, also known as the God
particle, has captured the
imagination of non-scientists,
too. It even has its own music
video.
[music playing]
KYLE CRANMER: This is a triumph
of human curiosity. It's really
key to our understanding of the
universe.
MILES O'BRIEN: Tuts and Cranmer
say that at CERN, the Higgs is
only the beginning. More exotic
mysteries lie ahead, from
figuring out what happened after
the Big Bang to discovering
extra dimensions of
time and space.
For Science Nation,
I'm Miles O'Brien.
