Bang the Machine

13.7 billion years after it all began,

we're about to go back to the beginning of time.

'With the largest and most complex scientific experiment ever attempted.

'The Large Hadron Collider, or LHC,

'has just one simple but audacious aim -

'to recreate the conditions of the Big Bang...

'.. in an attempt to answer the most profound questions about our universe. '

The goal of particle physics is to understand the universe in which we live.

We want to know why things are the way they are, how they work, what everything is...

we want to understand.

If you're going to go for the big questions then you have to go for it.

There is no point in sort of messing around if you really want to understand how the universe ticks.

The LHC is what you need.

When the switch is thrown, this could be either the beginning of the end,

when we find that our theories of what existed just after the Big Bang are right,

or it could be the end of the beginning where we discover that the universe is more mysterious

and more beautiful than we could possibly have imagined.

The Large Hadron Collider spans the French/Swiss border just outside Geneva.

It's the largest particle accelerator ever constructed.

I'm Brian Cox and I've been helping build it,

along with thousands of other scientists at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research.

This is the experiment, if you like, Q1, Q2, Q3.

One of the scientists overseeing the launch

of the biggest experiment since NASA sent men to the moon is Paul Collier.

It's going to be a like a moon shot where you see CAPCOM - "Go, go!"

There's going to be a bank of experts saying, "Mine is all right. " Probably yes.

You must get asked this all the time. Is there a button? Who's going to press it?

There is not at the moment a button, but I'm considering buying one,

but the LHC is not like... it's not like a rocket.

There will not be a countdown, there will not be a button to press,

unfortunately. The buttons we have are all computer sequences

which we have to go through to prepare the machine.

It'll be standing room only

as the world's most eminent particle physicists

gather to watch this remarkable machine spring to life.

What's the scene going to be like on the day that the first beam goes around LHC?

What's it going to feel like in this control room?

Yeah, it's going to be an interesting time and quite exciting.

The first thing I should say is there will be two people on duty here,

one physicist and one technical engineer,

so, if you like, two people will be doing the work, and then probably 200 people will be watching them work.

And of course we will have to... we will have to keep control of that.

It's brilliant, actually, it's fascinating.

All of us who work at CERN hope that this will become the world's most renowned Big Bang laboratory.

That here we'll discover something so fundamental that it will change our understanding of the cosmos.

Because right now even the brightest minds and the best theories

all fall short of explaining what occurred as the universe burst into existence.

Physics is stuck and the only thing left to do is recreate the universe

as it was a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, and that's what the LHC's designed to do,

to smash bits of matter together at energies never before achieved

so we can stare at the face of creation.

Every civilisation has its own creation story.

The ancient Chinese, Indian mystics and Christian theologians

all place a divine creator at the heart of their creation stories.

Science too has an elaborate story that describes the universe's genesis.

It tells us how the fundamental constituents of the cosmos took on their form.

The difference with this story is that we can test it.

We can find out if it's true by tearing matter apart and looking at the pieces.

All you need is a machine powerful enough to restage the first moments after creation.

In the beginning there was nothing.

No space, no time, just endless nothing.

Then, 13.7 billion years ago, from nothing...

.. came everything.

The universe exploded into existence.

From that fireball of energy emerged the simplest building blocks of matter.

Finding experimental evidence of these fundamental entities has become the holy grail of physics.

Well, the universe is an object that is not stable.

It is expanding and cooling, it's doing things.

It was therefore different in the past and will be in the future.

It has a history, it has a life, it has an evolution.

As the early universe grew, its mysterious primeval constituents

transformed themselves into atoms, then molecules and eventually stars and planets.

Now, billions of years on from the Big Bang, the universe is so complex

that all traces of the enigmatic building blocks are lost.

Understanding the evolution of the universe requires understanding what it is made of.

As it turns out, most of that of which the universe is made

are things that we do not understand at all.

But we hope that the LHC is about to bridge this profound gap in our knowledge

by peering further back in time than ever before.

The LHC is truly colossal.

Its accelerator ring is 27 kilometres long,

big enough to encircle a small city.

And around it we've built four enormous experiments

that will investigate the Big Bang in exquisite new detail.

This is my experiment, the experiment that I work on, Atlas,

and what you can see is just the surface buildings.

The experiment is actually 100 metres below the ground which is where the LHC is,

and basically this is just a building that covers cranes where we winch everything down.

And it's pretty much the last time

that not only TV crews, but me and the people who built it will be able to go down

because once it starts operating, the whole area becomes a radiation area, it becomes mildly radioactive.

You've always got to be worried when you see those things.

One of the most expensive bits of Atlas, if not the most, was digging the cavern.

We even have iris scanners, so a little bit of science fiction.

It's down here in caverns brimming with the latest technology that the Big Bangs will be made.

We just take little bits of matter, little bits of this stuff and accelerate them to as close

to the speed of light as we can get and then smash them together right in the middle of that detector

to recreate the conditions that were present back at the beginning of time.

The bits of matter we're going to fire around the LHC are called protons.

They come from a family of particles that give the collider its name, the Hadrons.

Protons are going to fly around here so close to the speed of light

that they go round this 27km tunnel 11,000 times a second.

The ring has two barrels that will shoot beams of protons around in opposite directions.

When they collide, they'll have the energy equivalent to an aircraft carrier steaming at 30 knots.

All this energy will be focused into a space just a fraction of the width of a human hair.

The resulting explosion will be so intense that no-one's quite sure what will happen.

This machine really is a leap into the unknown.

I mean it's often said with scientific experiments but I think in this case it's absolutely right.

We're, we're a step, something like a factor of ten in energy so it's a huge jump up in energy.

It's a huge jump up in the number of times we can smash particles together per second.

It collides protons together so often that your chances of seeing something incredibly interesting

and profound are increased way beyond anything that we've had before

and I can think of no better place to be actually at the moment.

This is exciting.

The dream of understanding the building blocks from which the universe is constructed

has inspired the greatest minds for over two millennia.

People have wanted to understand the universe and the stuff around them

ever since they began to think about it.

People have always been making theories about what matter is made of.

But the universe like everybody else is made of little pieces which

need to be understood in order to understand how the universe works.

The earliest reference to this concept of the world being made up

of tiny indivisible pieces dates back to ancient India in the sixth century BC.

Two centuries on, the ancient Greeks were the first to call these pieces, atoms, which means uncuttable.

But incredibly it was only in the early 20th century that the concept of the solid atom was shattered...

.. and the modern version of atomic theory was born.

This new theory described the atom as being made up of a number of even smaller pieces.

Around the particles which form the nucleus of the atom,

other electrically charged particles called electrons constantly revolve like planets around the sun.

This new sub-atomic theory inspired the great experimental physicist

Ernest Rutherford to invent the art of particle colliding.

And ever since, we've peeled away the atomic layers.

Far from being uncuttable, the atom appeared to be more and more like a Russian doll.

Today particle physicists are busy dreaming up ever more elaborate ways

to torture matter.

It almost seems like a paradox that the smaller the thing you are looking for,

the bigger the instrument you need.

This is Fermilab and I used to work here for three years.

It's a beautiful piece of midwestern prairie.

The reason I worked here is because over there

is the biggest particle accelerator that's operating in the world today.

'I served my apprenticeship on a machine here called the Tevatron. '

Under that lake there, there's a tube that carries a beam of protons one way

and anti-matter protons the other way and we accelerate them round 50,000 times a second.

Imagine that!

It's as close to the speed of light as we can get and then we smash them together, two places actually,

that red building there, which is called CDF and that blue building over there which is called D zero.

And their job is to just simply take a picture of those collisions.

Fermilab has been colliding particles for over 40 years.

Probing the atom's secrets.

Leading the way into this sub-atomic frontier was the renowned particle hunter, Leon Lederman.

We didn't know anything about these particles.

We knew about atoms, but we had no idea of the complexity of matter.

What puzzled Lederman was that the more they looked inside the atom,

the more fundamental particles they found.

The moment of discovery is really a series of moments.

The experiment has worked.

We think it's OK, and then finally, "Hey, look at that, there's an event!"

Eventually get enough data to say we're beginning to see a class of particles...

that must have a very important role in the evolution of the universe.

Because of the work of Lederman and other pioneers, scores of particles completely new to science emerged.

The up quark, the down quark,

the electron, the electron neutrino,

the W-plus and the W-minus.

As scientists made their discoveries they began to name these fundamental particles.

The charm quark, the strange quark, the muon, the mu neutrino.

With these building blocks they came to a remarkable understanding of the world.

The top quark, the bottom quark,

the tao and the tao neutrino,

the Z particle and the photon.

Now they could explain what anything and everything is made of.

That's the Standard Model... Oh, no! The gluon, mustn't forget the gluon.

The Standard Model has gone on to become the basis for all modern particle physics.

So this was a model that was developed in the 1960s.

The first experimental breakthroughs

showing that it might be true came in the 1970s and I would say,

was really established by experiments at CERN in the 1980s and the 1990s.

Experimental science has shown that the nature of matter is more complex than anyone had foreseen.

Rather than a single atom, it turns out that nature uses 16 different fundamental particles

to make everything we see in the cosmos.

The Standard Model itself is a triumph. We have not only

the particles but the mathematics that gives a huge coherence