Through the Wormhole

50 years ago in Scotland,

one man had a brilliant idea --

an idea that today pits science detectives in Europe and America

against each other

in a $10 billion race to solve the riddle

of what you, me, and everything around us

is really made of.

It's a journey into the heart of matter,

plunging into the core of our physical being

and of the physical world itself.

But will this journey into the subatomic Universe

revolutionize our understanding of nature,

or will it reveal just how little we really know

about who we are and what we're made of?

Space, time, life itself.

The secrets of the cosmos lie through the wormhole.

What are we really made of --

you, me, everything around us?

That simple question has kept people guessing

for thousands of years.

In ancient times, the answer was easy --

everything in creation was made

from one or more of the four elements --

Earth...

Air...

Fire...

and Water.

When I was a kid, in not quite so ancient times,

we were told that everything is made out of atoms.

But in the last few decades,

scientists have looked inside the atom

and found that things are a lot more complicated.

Despite all of our knowledge,

we still don't understand the true nature of matter.

But right now,

thousands of investigators are following hunches,

tracking down suspects,

and getting closer than ever

to learning how we and everything around us

fits together.

And they're doing it by breaking things apart.

When I was 6 years old,

my father gave me his old pocket watch --

a time keeper.

"How does this work?" I wondered.

I decided to find out.

Taking it apart was a lot easier than putting it back together,

but I learned a little about what makes things tick.

And that's pretty much what particle physicists do today.

They smash things up and look at the debris

through extremely powerful microscopes.

We do what kids do.

We smash things, and we look to see what comes out.

And so, to do that,

we need to smash things harder and harder and harder

to see what's smaller and smaller and smaller.

At Chicago's Argon National Laboratory,

Bob Stanek builds machines that peer into the subatomic world.

So, this is our advanced photon source --

a microscope that's about a half a mile around,

and it contains 33 stations

where 33 individual experiments can go on

measuring tiny structures

of whatever these guys feel happy measuring.

If you remember way back in High School,

when you looked through the microscope

and you said, "wow, look at all that stuff -- how neat it is,"

it's amazing that ordinary light and optics

can bring you to such a detailed level.

However, for a lot of things nowadays,

you need more than just that ordinary light.

You need to get smaller and smaller and smaller.

With the A.P.S., we can see things much smaller

than we could see with our standard microscope.

We could see things a factor of 10 smaller,

a factor of 1,000 smaller, a factor of 10,000 smaller.

In fact, we can see things that are 10 to the 10th smaller

than what we could see with ordinary light.

We can see molecules.

We can see viruses.

We can almost see the structur of life.

The ability to take pictures of molecules and atoms

is an incredible thing, because only 100 years ago,

the atom was just a theory.

At the dawn of the 20th century,

it was believed that if atoms existed at all,

they were either empty shells or solid little balls.

Then one investigation changed everything.

It was the brainchild of Ernest Rutherford,

the Sherlock Holmes of particle physics.

Steve Nahn is a Professor at M.I.T.

and a team leader on the world's biggest Particle Accelerator,

the Large Hadron Collider in Europe.

Steve is going to reproduce

one of the most important experiments

in the history of science --

Rutherford's probe into the structure of the atom.

This experiment is the same as Rutherford's experiment.

We use the same kind of gold foils

and send millions of particles through these gold foils.

Rutherford thought that all the particles

would essentially go straight through and not deflect at all,

but that's not what happened.

The Rutherford experiment

is like firing bullets at a haystack.

The particle are like bullets,

and the atoms in the gold foil are like haystacks.

If the haystack is empty, the bullets go straight through.

If the haystack is packed with cannonballs,

all the bullets bounce back.

If there are a few cannonballs in the center,

some of the bullets will bounce back.

And that's what happened.

When Rutherford fired his particles,

most went straight through,

but some sharply bounced back from the center of the target,

upending the conceived wisdom of the time.

Something small and hard was down in there,

deep inside the Shell of the atom.

This is the evidence for a very heavy, very small object

at the core of the atom --

the high-density nucleus

surrounded by a vastness of empty space.

In fact,

the nucleus of an atom is 100,000 times smaller

than its radius.

It's equivalent to the head of a pin

in the middle of a football stadium.

After Rutherford, physicists probed further into the atom.

They found that it is built out of three parts --

the protons and neutrons that form the nucleus

and the electrons that form the Shell around it.

Between them, they make up atoms.

Atoms stick together and form molecules.

Out of the molecules,

we get more complex shapes, from a strand of DNA...

...Up to the 7,000 trillion, trillion atoms

that form a human body.

For a time, the atomic theory of the Universe

seemed to explain most everything,

but then physicists started breaking atoms apart,

and they discovered a slew of mysterious new particles

that turned their theories upside down.

The most frightening was called antimatter --

matter's evil twin.

If just this much touches ordinary matter,

it will level a city.

So, why are scientists trying so hard to make it?

Turns out it may hold the secret to the mystery of matter.

When scientists first smashed atoms apart,

they uncovered their essential building blocks --

protons, neutrons, and electrons.

Next, they built machines

that let them smash these tiny pieces together,

and out came strange, new particles.

Perhaps the strangest is the stuff we call antimatter --

matter's polar opposite.

It's the most explosive substance in the Universe.

When matter and antimatter touch,

they violently cancel each other out.

Physicists say, they annihilate each other.

It triggers an enormous explosion.

How big of an explosion?

Less than half a gram of antimatter rice

would produce a 13-kiloton blast

as big as the Hiroshima bomb.

Professor Frank Close is a theoretical physicist

at Oxford University.

Antimatter is a perfect opposite to matter.

If I was made of antimatter,

I would look exactly the same as I do today.

If you looked at the atoms that I'm made of,

they would look exactly the same if I was made of antiatoms.

It's only when you get inside the atoms

that you see the difference.

That's the atoms that we're made of

have little negatively charged electrons

whirling around a big, bulky, positive nucleus.

And the antiatoms?

Ask this man --

Joel Fajans,

an antimatter investigator

at the University of California, Berkeley.

Antimatter is everywhere in the Universe.

For instance, this banana contains potassium 40,

an isotope of potassium which emits positrons.

Positrons and other forms of antimatter

are difficult to study, however, and that's my job.

That's what I do, is to study antimatter.

I was partially inspired to do this

by this experiment over here --

the Bevatron Accelerator

at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The Bevatron was the first giant Particle Accelerator.

It's being torn apart now, but back in the '50s,

it was the center of the world for physics research.

The same techniques that were used in the Bevatron

to accelerate particles

are now used in the enormous Particle Accelerators

that are throughout the world.