What's Really Happening At CERN

a limit on

what

we can learn from this collider and that there is still a lot we don't know about the universe. Therefore, some scientists maintain that now

what

we have to do is build a much larger one. That's the big debate that's

happening

right now. "There are things we are looking for. Big holes in our understanding of the universe. We have measured very clearly that there is something out there that only acts through gravitation, as far as we know." He is talking about dark matter. "Invisible matter would have been a better name, it doesn't matter, it doesn't send anything we can see with our eyes, but it affects gravitationally and makes a big difference." We know this dark matter is there because it affects things we can see, like the way light visibly bends as it passes through galaxies.

Through these effects we can calculate that dark matter represents 27% of our universe. Could a larger collider help us learn about this? We

really

don't know! "No one guarantees that you will find dark matter. It could answer something completely different. It could raise new questions, maybe it will find something we didn't know was there. And we have to start working on it now." Does it have a name? "It has a horrible name! It has a horrible name. It's called FCC, Future Circular Collider, and of course you have to change it after you've built it." CERN estimates that building this new collider would cost approximately $17 billion and instead of a 27-kilometer circuit it would be one of 100.

But not everyone thinks this is worth it. They maintain that the Large Hadron Collider has not achieved what some hoped it would achieve. On top of that, some predictions seem to suggest that we would need even more energy than this new, larger collider would have to produce something truly new. I think there is no need to promise too much. We

really

don't know. But that's no reason not to try. The byproduct of all the pure science done at CERN has already resulted in new therapies for cancer treatments, better medical imaging, more efficient electric cars, more sensitive radiation detectors that we now use in space, and my favorite... a new way. for scientists to communicate is now called the World Wide Web.

All of that and more came from work done at CERN. We don't know what we will come up with next. Imagine for a second what we could do if we had a deeper understanding of what gives things mass! The future always sounds like science fiction until we build it. And listen, I am not at all qualified to determine whether this specific collider is what we should build and there are other ideas out there, such as a muon collider and a linear collider. There is a proposal for a very powerful collider built in China, but we won't know what is possible without spending on this type of pure research. "And what's embarrassing is that for Europe they still spend twice as much on defense.

The United States spends 10 times more on defense. You can argue that we have to do it right now and that may very well be true, but we have to come to an agreement ". world that's better than that." It would be reasonable to say, Hey, maybe we should spend this money on other research that would be more directly applied to improving people's lives right now, but is that a real option? "That's a false choice. Fundamental research is essential to be able to carry out all that applied research. It's like saying, okay, we're going to have universities and maybe secondary education, but we're going to eliminate elementary school and there's no kindergarten.

I feel like we are kindergarten. We have the most basic. You have to have it all." We've come so far in our understanding of the universe, but there's still a lot to learn. What are all those extra things we can't see? And where do we come from? And what comes next? And I think The most important thing, while we are here, is that what we spend our time on shows who we are. If someday aliens come to Earth and look at what we have built, I would like them to see huge monuments dedicated to knowledge. I would like them to understand, through what we have built, that we are a species that seeks to learn and tries to do better and that aches to understand where we belong in a universe that we can barely understand that yes, we are limited and yes, we have conflicts. and yes, we can only glimpse such a small portion of the full scale of reality... but man, we tried hard.

And that's something we can all be very proud of, because the effort we put in today can lead to a. world we can't even imagine. This was one of my favorite scripts, but it was incredibly difficult. This is a very complex topic and I'm not a physicist, so a physicist at CERN checked the script, but if you want to know more about the details of the physics here, I'll link you to a couple of my favorite explainers. by real physicists on YouTube. And if you want more of this kind of optimistic science and technology journalism, subscribe to our Huge If True program, it really means a lot.

It means we can go to all these amazing places and make more videos for you. It's a big problem, thank you. See you next time...