Original subtitles

Freeman: Scientists have been hunting it for 40 years,

the key that will unlock the secrets of the universe.

And now they've found it.

Can the Higgs boson really tell us

how all creation came into being?

Do we owe our existence to

something so elusive yet so powerful?

Is there a God particle?

Space, time, life itself.

The secrets of the cosmos lie through the wormhole.

Subtital By RA_One

How did we get to be here in this universe?

Scientists say our universe began as a burst of pure energy,

but somehow, that energy transformed itself into matter

which eventually became stars, planets,

and the stuff that makes up you and me.

Instead of being

a fleeting fireball gone in an instant,

our universe has stuck around for billions of years.

Physicists have long suspected there must be

some invisible force field spread across the universe

mysteriously turning energy into solid matter.

Now scientists have at last proven

that this theoretical force field is real.

They have produced from it

a subatomic particle known as the Higgs boson,

the so-called God particle.

Can it explain the mystery of our creation?

Have you ever watched a spinning top?

As a kid, I remember being mesmerized

watching the painted shapes spinning on mine.

The pattern became a ghostly blur.

Looked like I could stick my finger right through it.

But once it stopped moving, the pattern became solid again.

The solid nature of matter has long puzzled physicists.

Over the last four decades,

they have wondered if matter is solid

because of the Higgs boson,

the so-called God particle.

You know what they really wanted to call it, right?

They wanted to call it the God [bleep] particle...

You probably can't put that on TV though.

...given the amount of time and money we've spent

looking for this thing.

And we've missed it.

"Oh [bleep] damn. Where is that particle?"

Dan Hooper and Patrick Fox are theoretical physicists

at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory

just outside of Chicago.

Like thousands of physicists, they have spent their careers

waiting for the Higgs boson to reveal itself

in high-speed particle-collision experiments.

It's something we've been looking for for a long time.

The universe would be very different

if it weren't for the God particle.

Physicists believe, in fact, that there was a brief moment

when the universe lived without the God particle.

It was at the beginning of time itself,

long before there were physicists and arcades.

Imagine this air hockey table is the entire universe.

When it was born in the big bang,

physicists think there were only

massless particles of pure energy.

So, what you can see here is that

all the particles are moving around at the same speed,

at the speed of light.

They're all essentially massless in the whole universe.

But the universe did not remain that way for very long.

After only a fraction of a second,

something changed.

Almost like someone pulled a lever

that made many of the particles grind to a halt.

At some point, the Higgs field turned on,

and that made some of the particles acquire a mass,

which meant they stopped traveling at the speed of light.

The photons, the yellow ones,

are zipping around at the speed of light,

whereas the red and the green have acquired a mass

thanks to the Higgs mechanism

and travel more slowly.

Physicists believe that right after the Big Bang,

the universe began to cool, and the Higgs field turned on.

Some particles began to interact with the field

and acquired mass.

Other particles remained massless bundles of energy.

In the decades for which

scientists have been smashing together particles

to probe the subatomic world,

they have found two basic types of particles.

There are fermions,

a group of massive particles that carry matter,

and there are bosons,

massless particles that carry force.

Without the existence of the Higgs,

all particles would be massless.

So, if there was no Higgs field,

you would have had these other force carriers.

They would have been massless,

and therefore, like the particles of light,

they would move at the speed of light.

And without these masses, you can never have

atoms or chemistry or any of the interesting stuff

we find in our universe.

The things that you and I are made up of

wouldn't be able to clump and coalesce

and slow down.

No structure, no life. Right.

Boredom. Yep.

Thanks to the Higgs,

our universe hung around long enough

for complex structures likes human life to form.

But why did the matter-creating Higgs field turn on?

Many scientists, including Dan and Patrick,

think the sheer violence of the Big Bang

jostled the field into action.

So, up until now, I've been

turning the Higgs mechanism on and off by hand.

But of course, in the early universe,

it didn't happen that way.

And just like water freezes all on its own

when you cool it,

the Higgs mechanism will turn on all by itself

as the universe cools.

So, this pool cue is supposed to represent

how unstable the Higgs mechanism was all by itself.

And as you can see...

Voilà. ...It just falls over.

Scientists think the Higgs field,

the force that turned a ball of energy

into our physical universe,

turned on all by itself.

But some will say that it was no accident,

and it must have been turned on by a creator.

That mystery of creation may be answered

if we learn more about the Higgs field.

Scientists have been trying to disturb the field enough

to make it produce a Higgs boson so they can study it.

It's an effort that has made physicists construct

the most powerful machine in the history of science,

the Large Hadron Collider, or the LHC.

Lyn Evans has been responsible for building

every particle accelerator at CERN in Geneva

for the past four decades.

All the machines he created are still working.

In fact, they all work together in stages.

Each older one is now responsible for

giving the particles an incremental push,

packing them with more and more energy,

and eventually feeding them into the giant,

17-mile-long ring that is the LHC.

Evans: I came to CERN in 1969.

My first job was working on what is called

the dual plasmatron ion source,

which is actually the source of the protons.

And then, they are accelerated.

From the linear accelerator,

they go into a booster to get higher energy

and then into the super proton synchrotron,

which I worked on in the '70s,

and finally into the Large Hadron Collider.

Freeman: As particle accelerators

have advanced over the past few decades,

they have been able to get particles

to higher and higher energies,

allowing them to create

more and more massive new particles

with each collision.

The older accelerators only had enough energy

to smash together two protons and make a new particle...

Aah! Aah!

...with just double the mass.

But theorists predict the Higgs weighs

at least 100 times as much as a proton.

The laws of physics say that

if you give protons extra kinetic energy,

you can smash them together to form a new particle

that weighs many times more than the sum of their parts.

Evans: Well, it all goes back to

the most famous equation in science,

e=mc squared.

In the LHC, we are converting energy into mass,

and if you want to make very heavy objects,

you need a high energy.

Freeman: Think of particle physicists as golfers

hitting protons instead of golf balls.

Over the years, they have gotten better and better clubs.

Evans: To make an analogy, I think this pitching wedge,

you can think of as the machines of the '60s.

This will take me about roughly 120 yards,

something like that,

because it doesn't have enough energy...

to go very far.

Then, the next one was the proton-antiproton collider.

The proton-antiproton collider was much more powerful,

and, yeah, a bit like a seven iron.

This time, the particles will get more energy...

...and will go quite a bit further.

And finally, of course, now we've got --

at last, we've got the machine

that can produce the Higgs boson.

And if you want an analogy with that,

this is my faithful driver.

So, here we go.

And that really moves it.

Freeman: Making a particle as heavy as the Higgs

requires far more energy

than any previous accelerator has ever produced.

Lyn and the enormous team of engineers at CERN

have had to push their technology to the limits.

Evans: Every time the particles come around,

they get a little kick,

increasing their energy incrementally

until we get up to the full energy reality.

Freeman: Physicists finally have the power they need.

But capturing and studying the Higgs boson

is about more than brute force.

It's a quest to pull a needle from a haystack --

a haystack made of trillions of subatomic particles.

For most religious believers,

God cannot be seen or heard.

But signs of his or her presence are felt all around us.

The Higgs boson is almost as elusive,

which is why the chase for it has been so challenging.

The Higgs can pop in and out of existence

in one billionth of a trillionth of a second

and only leaves behind the faintest of evidence

that it was ever there.

So, how do scientists find something

that can never be seen?

When physicist Joe Incandela was a kid,

his mom and dad hoped he would become a glass sculptor.

Incandela: I was very much interested in art as a kid.

My parents encouraged that very strongly.

They'd been very interested in art.

And I discovered one of my favorite glassblowers

was a chemist,

and so, that kind of gave me an excuse

to go to college and study chemistry.

And so, when I took chemistry, I had to take physics.

And that just immediately hit me.

This was really fascinating.

This was the stuff I wanted to study.

Freeman: Joe is now the leader of

one of the two major experiments at the LHC.

He directs thousands of physicists from around the world

who are all on the same quest

to figure out how and why

we and everything we know exist.

Incandela: We're really trying to understand

our place in the universe, you know?

What is everything made of,

and how did it become what it is?

These sort of fundamental questions.

Freeman: Joe believes the LHC will answer these questions.

The collisions at the LHC recreate the energy conditions

that happened just after the Big Bang.

Scientists are trying to gain some insight

into the moment when the Higgs field turned on

and spread across the entire universe,

creating matter, the stars,

and eventually us.

The force of the Higgs field is carried by the Higgs boson,

and a boson can only be detected by creating

an energy disturbance in the field.

Incandela: Turns out the Higgs is actually

determining the whole universe in some way,

what state it's in,

and how these particles will manifest themselves.

So, if we take an accelerator like the LHC,

and we provide enough energy,

and we smash the protons together,

we can actually pull, if you like,

a Higgs particle out of this fabric

and study it.

Freeman: Just like these glass balls

are filled with a bunch of stuff,

the protons that are smashed together at the LHC

are also filled with stuff --

particles called quarks and gluons.

When protons collide,

thousands of new particles come shooting out.

Studying the aftermath is a painstaking job,

like sifting through piles of shattered glass.

Incandela: We're looking for certain patterns.

The energy, the particles, the debris

is scattered around the detector in various ways,

and for a Higgs, you have very specific patterns

depending on the decay that's involved.

Freeman: But the God particle has blessed physicists with a twist.

It always vanishes before it can be spotted.

The Higgs decays almost instantly.

Its lifetime is so short, we can't measure it.

And so, we detect it by its decay products.

Freeman: To detect a Higgs, physicists like Joe

have to look at the aftermath of proton collisions

to figure out what the original particles were.

If Joe could analyze

each piece of debris in this glass collision

and calculate its trajectory,

he could reconstruct the crash

based on the remnants that came out of it.

Incandela: Most of the interactions that we see,

they immediately create a pattern

that we recognize as not interesting,

and we can reject them.

So, we reject, by far,

the vast majority of the collisions.

Freeman: The only collisions worth studying are when

the components of the protons are perfectly aligned.

If a quark inside one proton makes a head-on impact

with a quark inside the other,

then almost all the energy of the collision

is concentrated in one place.

This creates a strong enough ripple in the Higgs field

to make a Higgs boson.

But this type of collision almost never happens.

Now, those are rare events, okay -- really rare.

So, roughly speaking,

a Higgs production is almost one in a trillion.

Freeman: Since the LHC has been running,

it has produced about 1,000 trillion collisions.

Incandela: If you had 1,000 trillion grains of sand,

you would fill an olympic-sized swimming pool.

[ Zip! Crunch! ]

Freeman: But only a few hundred of those collisions

might produce a Higgs.

Ugh.

A few hundred grains of sand

would just cover the tip of your finger.

It is a seemingly impossible task,

but to the world's astonishment,

Joe and thousands of other physicists

pulled off the unfathomable.

There's very few events involved,

and we can trace where this comes from.

Freeman: On July 4, 2012,

Joe had the honor of announcing

that the teams at the LHC had made a giant step forward.

They had detected a new particle

that weighed between 125 and 126 giga-electron volts,

the predicted range of the mass of the Higgs.

...because these results are now global

and shared by all of mankind.

So, I thank you for that.

[ Applause ]

I've never seen anything like it in my career.

There was a lot of excitement. People were very happy.

Fox: It was just incredible, like going to

see the Beatles or something -- everybody was crazy,

and there was spontaneous applause

at a physics seminar,

which never happens, you know?

It's like seeing the Beatles

after waiting for it for decades.

Right, right. Exactly.

Evans: It's, I hope, not the end,

but it is a little step in a long journey.

It's taken us 40 years to get here.

And we now have a marvelous step forward

in our understanding of nature.

Incandela: The Higgs field is unlike

anything we've ever seen before.

The Higgs field is part of this fabric

that we're interacting with everywhere we go.

From it, we can, to some extent,

even possibly understand the evolution of the universe.

It's a very profound finding.

Freeman: It's being called the greatest scientific discovery

since Einstein wrote "e=mc squared."

Incandela: A great piece of art is something that,

you know, lasts forever.

A new scientific discovery or development

is something that contributes to humanity for all time.

Freeman: The particle that could solve the riddle of our existence

has been spotted.

Are we closing in on a final understanding of the universe?

Dan Hooper thinks the answer may be more complicated,

that there may not be one Higgs boson

but five.

Freeman: The Higgs boson is supposed to explain

where all the matter in the universe came from.

But in the last decade, we've learned that

most of our universe is made up of

invisible particles called dark matter.

In fact, there is five times more dark matter

than ordinary matter.

The current theory that predicts the existence of the Higgs boson

offers no explanation for this strange substance.

Could the Higgs have a hidden dark side?

Theoretical physicist Dan Hooper

has been waiting his whole career

for the announcement that

the Higgs boson has been discovered.

Hooper: I was up streaming it on my laptop,

enthusiastically waiting for the results.

You wait for something this long,

and when it happens,

no matter how prepared you think you should be for it to happen,

it seems surreal.

It seems unexpected

no matter how expected it should have been.

Freeman: The Higgs has been found.

But a huge mystery still remains.

What is dark matter?

Hooper: One of the biggest problems in cosmology

is that when we look in telescopes at space,

we find that only a small fraction of the total matter

is made up of things like atoms and other known material.

Most of it is some sort of elusive material

that, for lack of a better name, we just call dark matter.

Freeman: Half a century of exploring the subatomic world

has revealed an organizing structure

called the standard model of particle physics.

Scientists have discovered 12 fundamental particles of matter,

the fermions, equally split among quarks and leptons.

There are four particles that transmit force

like electricity and magnetism.

These are the bosons.

And then, completing the picture,

is one very special boson, the Higgs boson.

But the standard model has no explanation for dark matter.

And it has another serious flaw.

One of the biggest problems with

the standard model of particle physics

is something we call the hierarchy problem.

We know that the Higgs boson

has a mass of about 126 giga-electron volts

or gev.

This is a heavy particle, but naively,

we'd expect, according to the standard model,

that the Higgs should be much, much heavier than this.

And for some reason, it's lighter.

Freeman: The Higgs has weight issues.

Just as the Higgs boson gives mass to other particles,

other particles, in turn,

contribute to the mass of the Higgs.

When physicists work out how big the Higgs should get

from these other particles, they come up with a weight

billions of times heavier than it is.

Scientists have had to fudge the math

to make the standard model work,

fully knowing something is off.

Hooper: So, to explain this,

something has to very precisely cancel one another

to restore the Higgs mass to its observed value.

[ Blues music plays ]

Freeman: When the Higgs and dark matter weigh too heavily on Dan,

he takes a mental break from physics.

The only dark matter he and his band, the Congregation,

sing about are broken hearts.

But Dan can't help but find parallels

between the rules of music and the rules of the universe.

[ Song ends ]

It's amazing how many physicists I know

who are also accomplished musicians,

and maybe there's reasons for that.

The patterns that you find in particle physics

are oftentimes pretty similar to

the kind of symmetries you can find in music theory.

[ Blues music plays ]

Freeman: Dan believes there is a pattern in nature

that can solve the small mass of the Higgs

and explain dark matter.

It is an idea that modifies the standard model.

It's called supersymmetry.

♪ ...looking for so long

♪ but each time that I've tried ♪

Hooper: For every piece of matter,

every kind of fermionic particle,

there has to be a bosonic particle,

a force carrier.

So, the photon requires a photino,

the electron a selectron.

In music theory,

if you have a major scale like this "C" major scale...

[ Scale plays ]

...those same notes have to make up an "A" minor scale

if you just play them in a different order.

[ Scale plays ]

So, in a supersymmetric world,

you can't have a photon without a photino,

and in our music theory,

you can't have a major scale without a minor scale.

Freeman: According to supersymmetry,

the particles we have observed in nature

are only half of the picture.

There must be massive superpartners for each one.

One of these superpartners might even be dark matter.

So, in most supersymmetric theories,

the lightest of the new particles you introduce

is a very nice candidate for dark matter.

So, in the early universe, when the universe was very hot,

these particles would have been produced in copious numbers.

Most of it would get destroyed, but a little bit would survive,

and that little bit could make up

all of the dark matter in our universe today.

Freeman: According to Dan, if symmetries

are a fundamental part of our universe,

they can set the Higgs at the correct mass.

Hooper: If supersymmetry exists in nature,

then every contribution given

from a particle, like an electron,

gets an opposite contribution

from its superpartner, the selectron,

and they balance.

They cancel each other out for the most part,

leaving us with a pretty light Higgs boson.

Freeman: Supersymmetry makes sense

where the standard model does not.

It can explain the small mass of the Higgs

and what dark matter is.

But there is a catch.

In order for supersymmetry to be true,

there has to be not just one Higgs

but five.

If nature really is supersymmetric

and there were only one Higgs boson,

the theory would contain

mathematical problems we call anomalies.

It would contain paradoxes.

And to solve this, you need to introduce extra Higgs bosons.

If CERN were to discover a second or third

or fourth or fifth Higgs boson,

it would strengthen the case for supersymmetry,

even if we hadn't observed

those superparticle partners themselves yet.

If we are to explain the universe

as we already know it,

to understand how dark matter lives alongside ordinary matter,

scientists need to find evidence for five Higgs bosons.

It took 40 years to find one God particle.

Is the ultimate truth destined to elude us?

The Higgs boson is responsible for

giving everything in the entire universe mass.

That's a big job for one subatomic particle.

Some scientists believe it's too big a job for one particle.

What if the God particle

isn't carrying the weight all by itself?

Perhaps the real design of the universe

needs more than one Higgs to play God.

John Ellis is a theoretical physicist at CERN.

He spends his time thinking up ideas,

ideas that experiments here often prove wrong.

But that's okay by John.

Ellis: So, no, my job is to

think of things for the experiments to look for,

and then, as I like to say,

I hope they find something different.

Freeman: Albert de Roeck is an experimental physicist.

He spends his time testing ideas,

hoping to prove them wrong.

I joined these experiments in pursuit of

finding something to crack the standard model,

possibly kill the standard model

by finding things beyond the standard model.

Freeman: Albert, the experimentalist,

and John, the thinker,

have both been part of the hunt for the Higgs

since the beginning.

The Higgs boson was originally supposed to solve one mystery --

the mass of the "w" and "z" bosons,

which are extremely heavy.

The other two bosons are massless.

Physicists proposed the "w" and "z" get heavy

because they alone interact with

an invisible field that is everywhere --

the Higgs field.

But the other bosons do not.

Later, when the standard model was written,

the idea of the Higgs field was extended

to take on a much bigger job --

to give mass to the entire universe.

It was sort of added on.

It was not why this mechanism was invented.

Freeman: But physicists like Albert and John know

this one particle may not be responsible

for giving mass to everything.

Ellis: There's myriads of theories out there in physics

beyond the standard model,

and it's a general feature of them

that they predict something more complicated

than just a single Higgs boson.

Freeman: John and Albert have been trying to

come up with new theories, building upon the standard model

while fixing what is wrong with it.

It means they must change their predictions

for what the Higgs actually is.

Several varieties of Higgs particles

have been predicted.

You can think of it like flavors of ice cream.

If the LHC found a plain, old, vanilla Higgs,

it confirms what physicists already know.

[ Sighs ]

But if it turns out to be a more exciting flavor

like mint-chocolate-chip,

it opens up new thrilling possibilities for physics.

[ Smooching ]

Oh!

One of these possibilities would be that

there are two Higgs bosons, each with a different job.

So, there's been, you know, a number of ideas that say,

"well, maybe there's a bit of outsourcing going on,"

and that there is one Higgs boson

for the "w" and the "zed"

and another one for the matter particles.

Freeman: Imagine John is a "z" boson, a force carrier.

Albert is a quark, a matter carrier.

John is a well-known coffee addict.

Albert is a well-known chocoholic.

Say this café is one Higgs field

and this chocolate shop is another.

When John passes the café, he will slow down and gain mass.

De Roeck: But the other particle, myself,

would just zap through until

I encounter the field with which I'm interacting,

and that would give me mass --

in this case, a chocolate shop.

Freeman: The standard model

doesn't include two Higgs fields,

which is why this idea is so appealing to John and Albert.

If we were to find that there is more than one Higgs,

that would mean for sure

there is physics beyond the standard model.

Ellis: Now, if what we're looking at

is something which is not exactly,

you know, your grandmother's Higgs boson,

that could actually, in a way, be even more exciting.

Freeman: So far, there are some signs of anomalies

in the way this new particle decays,

suggesting an exotic flavor of the Higgs

might be lurking in the data.

And there are still piles of data waiting to be analyzed.

De Roeck: I actually hope that this Higgs boson

is gonna be a portal to the new physics

which we're going to find beyond the standard model.

And that would be exciting because

each time that happens, we learn something new.

Freeman: The LHC may be hinting that

the Higgs is only one of many players.

It may not be the God particle after all.

This man thinks the truth about the creation of the universe

lies deeper than the long-sought Higgs,

that we owe our existence to

particles we have only just begun to imagine.

It was the Greek philosopher Democritus

who first thought of the atom.

He imagined it to be

the smallest possible building block of matter,

one that could never be divided.

His idea was good enough to last 2,000 years,

until the nuclear age came along and revealed a deeper truth.

The atom is made up of smaller things.

Just as particles like quarks and electrons make up the atom,

smaller, more fundamental building blocks

might make up the Higgs boson.

If we can find them, they could reveal

not just how matter exists but why it came to be.

Francesco Sannino is a theoretical physicist

at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense.

He lives in the perfect town to let his imagination run wild.

Odense is the birthplace

of the famous children's story author

Hans Christian Andersen.

So, we are in the Hans Christian Andersen neighborhood.

He was born here,

and he has drawn a lot from these streets.

As you can see,

it looks like taken by a page from a storybook.

Freeman: But unlike this fairy-tale town,

our understanding

of the fundamental building blocks of the universe

is not picture-perfect.

The standard model

regards the Higgs boson as a fundamental particle,

but Francesco's imagination is driving him to look further,

to see if he can peer inside the Higgs.

Sannino: According to the standard model,

the Higgs is a fundamental particle.

It means it's not made of something else.

So, look at this wall. It's white.

But the truth is that there are three different lights

combined together making this white.

In fact, see what happen

if I put my hand in front of the wall.

I can resolve there's three different colors,

the green, the blue, and the red.

Together, they form the white light.

Freeman: Just as a white light

is actually made up of three different colors,

Francesco wondered if the Higgs

is made up of several different particles.

This would mean the Higgs

is not a fundamental root of all matter.

He and many of his colleagues think

the Higgs itself is governed by a new force of nature,

something they call the technicolor force.

Sannino: If you look deep inside the Higgs,

you will find it's made of something else.

[ Piano plays classical music ]

Freeman: Francesco believes

the Higgs boson dances to a new tempo.

Imagine these Lego bricks are ordinary quarks

and this board is the force of the gluons

that holds them together.

To make a proton, we need three quarks.

According to the technicolor theory,

the Higgs is just the same,

but it is made up of different types of quarks --

techniquarks.

Sannino: The techniquarks are held together

by a new force, a techniforce.

And the energy that comes from the interactions

also automatically provides the mass of the Higgs.

Freeman: Physicists know

ordinary quarks in different arrangements

make different particles.

One arrangement is a proton.

Another arrangement is a neutron.

Techniquarks work the same way.

Arrange them one way, and you get a Higgs.

But arrange those techniquarks another way,

and you get something else

scientists have been looking for,

a dark-matter particle.

Sannino: So, it's really like a Lego brick.

You put them together,

and in one form, you get the Higgs.

And in another form, you can get the dark matter.

Freeman: Perhaps the reason the standard-model Higgs

can't explain dark matter

is because the Higgs is dark matter in disguise

and both particles are held together

by the techniforce.

There will be definitely a new force of nature,

so it will be fantastic opportunity for mankind

to face a new force.

Freeman: Techniquarks could be glued together in many ways,

constructing several brand-new particles.

Those particles could be waiting to be discovered at the LHC

when it comes back online at much higher energies in 2015.

Francesco hopes that the Higgs boson recently discovered

is the first candidate.

We just won't know it

until we have enough power to crack it open.

Sannino: I think it's the duty of human beings

to understand what is around us and what makes us.

I think this is really a fantastic opportunity

to push the boundaries of science to that degree.

Freeman: Does the so-called God particle

have multiple faces?

Perhaps the Higgs is not as almighty as we thought.

But there are much more mind-bending ideas.

What makes us exist

could be objects that don't really exist at all.

When we look up at the night sky,

our moon peers down at us.

It seem to be magically suspended in thin air,

even though we know it's being held in place

by the force of gravity.

What if all matter in the universe

is actually being anchored by something else,

something far stranger than gravity

and far stranger than the God particle?

Howard Georgi from Harvard University

has been a particle physicist for most of his life.

But recently, he has made a career change.

He is now an unparticle physicist.

I was trying to think about

what the LHC might see that was really unusual,

and it occurred to me that whether there was something

that might show up at the LHC that was not particles at all.

That was the beginning of my career

as an unparticle physicist.

Freeman: Like many physicists,

Howard has been trying to fix the standard model

and come up with new theories.

While working on his equations,

he noticed some puzzling calculations.

In physics, massless particles like photons

show up in math as negative whole numbers.

Howard's equations were giving him negative numbers,

but they weren't whole numbers.

They were negative fractions.

Georgi: You do this analysis,

and you might get 2 1/2 massless particles.

And then, you scratch your head and say,

"What? What is going on?"

Freeman: Howard knew these half numbers

weren't half particles.

They were something new. He called them unparticles.

Georgi: There's something happening.

There's some physics,

but it's not the sort of physics that we're used to.

Freeman: Howard probed the math deeper

and learned more about unparticles.

He realized the reason they came out as fractions

is because they have fractal dimensions,

much like the branches of a tree.

Georgi: If you look at the tree,

it's not one-dimensional,

because the tree comes and it branches,

and then the branches branch again.

And the branch's branches branch again.

And the branch's branch's branches, et cetera and so on.

In a true fractal, that would go on forever.

Freeman: Unparticles are like the branches of this tree.

The pattern is the same

no matter how close or how far away you look.

But normal particles are like the leaves on the tree.

The closer you get, the bigger they look.

Georgi: I like the idea of thinking of the leaves

as the objects of the standard model

because they have a definite size,

like a mass that a particle has,

whereas the branches of the tree don't have a definite size.

Freeman: All of the particles that make up our universe

have mass,

which physicists believe exists because of the Higgs.

But perhaps those particles in the Higgs

are really being governed by an invisible world of unparticles

that defy the laws of known physics.

It would mean all matter particles in the universe

are like the leaves on this tree.

An invisible tree of unparticles may be their anchor,

the secret underpinning of the entire cosmos.

Georgi: That's really the point of unparticle physics.

In order for this invisible tree to be interesting,

it has to somehow interact

with the particles of the standard model.

The leaves will have to somehow be held up by that tree

or vice versa.

Freeman: So far,

there are no signs of unparticles at the LHC.

But Howard isn't giving up as an unparticle physicist.

I don't think we've got the right picture frankly.

When you have something that strange

and that different from what we know,

it's tantalizing.

And so, I think it's worth continuing

to try to beat on this complicated mathematics

and see if can make some more progress.

Freeman: Is the Higgs boson really the God particle?

Or is there something else underneath,

something more mysterious?

Do we owe our existence

to something we might never detect?

For now, scientists continue to probe

the God particle they have triumphantly discovered,

hoping they will one day find out.

The Higgs boson has been playing a game of hide-and-seek

for decades.

Now that we have finally found it,

or something like it,

we have more questions than answers.

Each time physicists find the key to one door,

they open it just to find, another door.

And then, five more.

Maybe the Higgs boson really is, God's particle.

A cosmic puzzle whose solution, is just another puzzle.

Destined to remain, an enigma.

Subtital By RA_One