Speaker 1: Imagine, if you will, a machine so massive, so I mean,
just unfathomably complex that just turning it on consumes the
energy equivalent of an entire city.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And this machine, it isn't in some far off
science fiction galaxy. It is buried right now, hundreds of
feet underground in this sprawling subterranean ring spanning twenty seven
kilometers across the borders of Switzerland and France, down in
the dark, exactly down in the dark, with thousands of
superconducting magnets chilled to temperatures colder than deep space, and
its entire purpose, its sole design, is to unlock the
ultimate fundamental secrets of the universe, to smash the very
building blocks of reality together and just you know, see.
Speaker 2: What spills out, see what happens.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but here is the part that doesn't make it
onto the glossy promotional brochures. Imagine the brilliant scientists running
this colossal machine, sometimes behind closed doors, sometimes in the
glaring eye of the global media, sweating over the microscopic,
mathematically real chance that simply pressing the on button could
swallow the earth whole, or you know, break the laws
of time. Yeah, quite literally, erase the fundamental nature of
reality itself.
Speaker 3: It is the ultimate expression of human curiosity, crashing headlong
into the absolute limits of safety. Yes, the anxieties, the
risk probability models, the intense legal and philosophical debates we
are going to look at today. None of this is
theoretical panic. It all happens.
Speaker 2: It's all real, exactly.
Speaker 3: The documents are real, and in many ways, as the
energy levels of these machines continue to scale up, those
debates they're still happening right now.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Thrilling Threads. I am so incredibly glad you
could join us today because we are pulling on a
thread that might just unravel the fabric of the universe itself.
Speaker 2: Literally.
Speaker 1: Today we are opening up a massive stack of declassified
safety reports, theoretical physics papers, historical transcripts, and media archives,
all centered around the Large Hadron Collider or the LHERN.
Speaker 2: And it is quite a stack, it really is.
Speaker 1: But our mission for this deep dive is not to
give you a dry textbook lecture on the standard model
of particle physics. We are heading straight for the terrifying
boundary where groundbreaking Nobel Prize winning science collides head on
with pure existential dread.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we're looking at why the people who understand this
machine the best, you know, the experts themselves, sometimes get deeply,
profoundly uneasy.
Speaker 1: Exactly. You might think of physics as just esoteric math
on a chalkboard, something entirely detached from your everyday life.
But today we're going to show you the exact moments
when that math pointed directly to the apocalypse.
Speaker 3: The documents we're looking at today reveal a spectacular tension.
I mean, we are analyzing a scenario where the pursuit
of knowledge reaches a physical scale that forces humanity to
confront its own utter fragility. There is a modern day
mythos being written in real time, blending high energy physics,
intense public panic, and well, the absolute limits of human comprehension.
Speaker 1: So let's start with the most visceral, primal fear that
erupted in the public consciousness around cern the fear of consumption.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, the black holes.
Speaker 1: The terrifying idea that humanity could accidentally build something that
eats our planet from the inside out. And to unpack that,
we have to look at the two thousand and eight
safety reports and the subsequent lawsuits surrounding miniature black holes.
Speaker 2: Which is just a wild concept to begin with.
Speaker 1: It really is, because when the average person hears the
phrase black hole, they don't think microscopic scientific curiosity, now,
of course not. They think of a cosmic behemoth, right,
an inescapable gravity well that pulls in light, rips apart planets,
consumes stars, and eventually swallows the Earth. So when CERN
announced that the Large Hadron Collider's extreme energy collisions might
produce microscopic black holes, the public reaction was, well, it
was sheer panic.
Speaker 3: And if we look at the theoretical models driving that panic,
the fear wasn't based on absolutely nothing, right. I mean,
the physics governing the LHC involves taking two beams of protons,
accelerating them to ninety nine point nine nine nine nine
one percent the speed of light, which is just incomprehensible,
it really is, yes, and then crashing them head on.
And the theory suggested that if you smash particles together
at those incredibly high energies, you could compress a tiny
amount of matter into a space so infinitely small that
its density becomes extreme enough to warp space time.
Speaker 1: You create a singularity exactly a tiny microscopic black hole,
and this fear became so tangible that in two thousand
and eight, actual lawsuits were filed in European and American courts.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I saw those in the source materials.
Speaker 1: We have the court filings right here. Yeah, Citizens, led
by individuals like Chaos. Theorist Otto Rustler, literally tried to
get a legal injunction to stop Stern from turning the
collider on.
Speaker 2: They wanted to pull the plug before it even started.
Speaker 1: They did. They argued that the risk of destroying the planet,
no matter how vanishingly small the physicists claimed it was,
was just an unaccepted will gamble to take without the
consent of the global population.
Speaker 3: Which, if you step back from the blackboard and look
at it from a sociological perspective, their argument is fascinating.
Speaker 1: It makes sense emotionally.
Speaker 2: It does. Now.
Speaker 3: The scientific community naturally rush to reassure the public, and
their defense relied heavily on the theoretical work of Stephen.
Speaker 1: Hawking, specifically the concept of Hawking radiation. So let's break
that down, because I don't want to just throw around
the term hawking radiation without understanding the mechanism. How exactly
does a microscopic black hole supposedly neutralize itself.
Speaker 3: Well, it comes down to quantum mechanics operating at the
very edge of the black hole, the event horizon. Okay,
in quantum field theory, empty space isn't actually empty. It
is a boiling soup of virtual particles. Pairs of particles
and anti particles are constantly pomping into existence, colliding and
annihilating each other in fractions of a microsection.
Speaker 1: Like a constant cosmic fizz.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3: Now, imagine this happens right on the razor's edge of
a black hole's event horizon. One particle of the pair
gets sucked into the black hole, but the other one
manages to escape into space. Right And because energy cannot
be created or destroyed out of nowhere, the universe balances
the ledger by subtracting the mass energy of the escape
particle from the black hole itself. So the black hole
essentially bleeds mass. It evaporates precisely, and the smaller black
hole is the faster it radiates and evaporates.
Speaker 1: So a giant one takes forever.
Speaker 3: The stellar mass black hole takes trillions of years to evaporate,
but a microscopic black hole created in a particle accelerator.
The math dictates it would evaporate in fractions of a
fraction of a second a septilianth.
Speaker 1: Of a second, so basically instantly.
Speaker 3: It would disappear, long before it had the time or
the gravitational reach to pull in a single neighboring atom.
Speaker 1: Okay, so that sounds incredibly reassuring. But and here is
the terrifying butt that fueled those two thousand and eight lawsuits.
What if the math is wrong?
Speaker 2: Right, that's the sticking Hawking.
Speaker 1: Radiation is a brilliant theory, but it is entirely theoretical.
We have never actually observed it in nature because we've
never been close enough to a black hole, let alone
a microscopic one to actually measure it.
Speaker 2: No, we haven't.
Speaker 1: So the plaintiffs in those lawsuits, we're essentially asking, what
if just one of these manufactured black holes doesn't evaporate,
What if it drops down into the center of the
earth and just starts slowly feeding.
Speaker 3: And that is where we hit the ultimate case study
in the psychology of risk assessment, because human brains are
simply not wired to process this specific kind of equation.
Speaker 2: No, not at all.
Speaker 3: In standard risk management, you calculate danger by multiplying the
probability of an event happening by the severity of its consequence.
Simple math, right, Look at the equation here. The consequence
is literally infinite.
Speaker 1: The complete destruction of the Earth in.
Speaker 3: The erasure of all human history. When the consequence is infinite,
how do you multiply that by an astronomically small probability.
For a theoretical physicist looking at the math, a one
in a trillion chance is practically zero. You ignore it
and turn the machine on. But for a concerned citizen,
a one in a trillion chance of the apocalypse is
one chance too many.
Speaker 1: It is like someone handing you a lottery ticket where
the prize is that you and everyone you love dies.
You know you aren't going to win the lottery, but
you still don't want the ticket.
Speaker 2: Yeah, keep it away from me.
Speaker 1: The courts, of course, eventually dismiss these injunctions in two
thousand and eight, largely deferring to the scientific consensus, and
allowed the LHC to power up. But reading through these
historical transcripts, that moment permanently altered public trust.
Speaker 2: Ohout of doubt.
Speaker 1: It highlighted a terrifying reality for the average person. A
few dozen people in Switzerland, brilliant as they are, essentially
have the power to place a cosmic gamble on behalf
of the entire planet, and we just have to trust
their math.
Speaker 3: And what's even more unsettling in these safety reports is
that miniature black holes weren't even the only planet eating
thread on the table.
Speaker 1: Oh.
Speaker 3: The documents point us toward a theoretical substance that is
arguably even stranger, and from a physics standpoint, perhaps much
more insidious.
Speaker 1: We're talking about strange matter.
Speaker 3: Yes, or as the subatomic particles are sometimes called, strange.
Speaker 1: Lits strange lits. It sounds like a nineteen fifties B
movie monster, but it is a deeply, deeply unsettling concept.
I want to spend some time on this because it's
a brilliant example of how nature's own rules can be
turned against us.
Speaker 2: It really is.
Speaker 1: So, what exactly is a strange lit and why were
people so terrified of it?
Speaker 3: To understand strange matter, we have to look at the
ingredients of a normal universe, standard matter, the stuff that
makes up your body, the chair you are sitting in,
the Earth itself is made of atoms. Those atoms have
nuclei made of protons and neutrons, and if you zoom
in even further, those protons and neutrons are made of
even smaller fundamental particles called quarks.
Speaker 1: Right, specifically up quarks and down quarks.
Speaker 3: Yes, but the standard model of physics includes other types
of quarks that don't normally exist in everyday matter. One
of them is called the strange quark. The theory proposes that,
under extreme unimaginable pressure and heat, the exact kind of
conditions the LFC is designed to create, you could force up, down,
and strange quarks to bind together into a new type
of particle.
Speaker 1: A strangely Okay, so we've baked a new exotic article.
Why is that a problem?
Speaker 3: Because the laws of energy states in physics, every system
in the universe inherently wants to rest in its lowest possible.
Speaker 1: Energy state, the path of least resistance.
Speaker 3: Think of a ball rolling down a bumpy hill. It
will keep rolling until it finds the deepest valley where
it takes the least amount of energy to just sit there.
Standard matter are up and down quarks, is sitting in
what we think is the lowest energy valley, but some
theoretical models suggest that strange matter might actually be more stable.
Oh no, it might be a deeper valley. It might
be the most perfectly stable form of matter in the universe.
Speaker 1: And here is where we need to use a metaphor,
because the mechanism of what happens next is terrifying. If
strange matter is more stable, what happens if it touches
normal matter?
Speaker 2: This is the scary part.
Speaker 1: I was reading about this in the sources, and the
best analogy I could find is Kurt Vonnegut's concept of
ice nine from his novel Cat's Cradle.
Speaker 3: Oh that's a brilliant comparison.
Speaker 1: Right, because in the book, ice nine is a fictional
type of water that is solid at room temperature, and
because it is a more stable configuration of water molecules.
The moment a crystal of ice nine touches regular liquid water,
it teaches those molecules how to be perfectly stable, too.
Speaker 2: It forces them to change.
Speaker 1: The liquid water instantly freezes into ice nine, which then
touches more water, freezing that in a runaway chain reaction,
until every ocean on Earth is frozen solid. Strange lets
act exactly like ice nine, don't they.
Speaker 3: That is a remarkably precise analogy for the mechanism at
play here. If a stable strain were produced in the
collider and came into contact with the regular matter of
the machine's walls, it would act like a cosmic infection.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 3: Because the strange lit is in a lower, more stable
energy state, the regular matter would be compelled by the
laws of thermodynamics to drop into that same state. An
atom of iron touches the strange lit and its quarks
instantly reconfigure into strange matter. It converts exactly, and now
you have two strangelets which touch two more atoms of iron,
and it spreads. The reaction is exothermic, releasing massive amounts
of heat, and it initiates runaway, unstoppable chain reaction. If
a strangelet were produced, it would drop through the floor
of the facility due to gravity, falling down into the
center of the Earth. Oh my gosh, it would begin
converting the planet from the inside out. The entire Earth,
every rock, every ocean, every living thing would eventually be
transformed into a hyper dense, searing hot sphere of strange
matter roughly the size of a football field. That is
just everything we know completely reform at it.
Speaker 1: Let's just sit with that for a second. The Earth
condensed into a sphere of the size of a football field.
Speaker 2: It's a lot to take in.
Speaker 1: I have to push back here on behalf of anyone
listening who was currently feeling their blood pressure spike. If
theoretical physicists, the smartest people in the room were the
ones who originally calculated these specific doomsday scenarios, why on
Earth did the scientific community proceed with the LHC.
Speaker 2: It's a fair question.
Speaker 1: We actually saw this exact same fear back in the
nineteen nineties with the relativistic heavy ion collider in the
United States, and the CERN projects just revived the whole
debate on a larger scale. Where is the line between
acceptable scientific risk and pure, unadulterated hubris.
Speaker 3: That is the pivotal question these safety reports had to answer,
and the consensus among the vast majority of physicists the
reason they felt confident turning the key relies on what
they call the cosmic ray argument. Okay, what's that the
universe is a violent place? High energy particles from deep space,
known as cosmic rays, have been bombarding the Earth, the Moon,
and the planets for billions of years, and the energy
of these natural cosmic collisions far exceeds anything the large
Hadrid collider could ever dream of producing.
Speaker 1: Oh I see, so the logic is nature has already
been running this exact experiment billions of times a day
for billions of years.
Speaker 3: Precisely, if creating planet eating black holes or contagious strange
lists was simply a matter of smashing particles together at
high speeds, the Moon would have been converted into a
dense ball of strange matter eons ago. It makes sense
the Earth wouldn't be here. The fact that we exist
to even build a particle accelerator is empirical proof that
these collisions do not destroy planets. The LHC is simply
allowing us to recreate these natural microscopic events inside a controlled,
observable environment.
Speaker 1: Okay, it's a compelling defense. We're still here, therefore it
must be safe. But the source materials note that even
this defense has its attractors.
Speaker 2: It does because you.
Speaker 1: Are relying on the assumption that our understanding of these
natural cosmic collisions is one hundred percent complete. You're assuming
the conditions in the vacuum of space are exactly identical
to the conditions inside a subterranean magnetic tube in Switzerland.
Speaker 2: And if there's an unknown variable.
Speaker 1: Right, if you are wrong about that subtle distinction, well
you don't get a chance to hold a press conference
and apologize. The Earth is already the size of a
football field exactly that. Okay, let's evolve the conversation. So far,
we've been talking about the threat of consumption things that
eat matter. Let's transition to the physics of violent, instantaneous annihilation.
Speaker 2: A completely different kind of terror.
Speaker 1: Because we are moving from the abstract theoretical fears of
black holes and strangelets to a very real, tangible substance
that CERN is actively producing right now. I'm talking about antimatter.
Speaker 3: Anti matter is one of the most fascinating and profoundly
dangerous realities of modern physics, and unlike strangelets, we know
for an.
Speaker 2: Absolute fact that it exists.
Speaker 3: At CERN, Researchers at the Anti Proton Decelerator Facility are
not just writing equations about it. They're literally manufacturing and
trapping actual atoms of anti hydrogen.
Speaker 1: Before we talk about how they trap it, which is
an engineering miracle, in itself. We need to understand what
we are dealing with. What exactly is antimatter.
Speaker 3: In the simplest terms, antimatter is the exact mirror image
of standard matter. Every fundamental particle in the universe has
an evil quin, so.
Speaker 1: To speak, an evil twin.
Speaker 3: Yeah, an electron has a negative charge. It's antimatter counterpart.
A positron has the exact same mass, but a positive charge.
A proton is positive, an antiproton is negative.
Speaker 1: So it's a perfect symmetry, yes, but it is.
Speaker 3: A symmetry that absolutely cannot coexist because of this mirrored charge.
When a particle of matter and a particle of antimatter meat,
they don't just bounce off each other. They utterly obliterate
one another in a process called annihilation. One hundred percent
of their combined mass is instantly converted into pure, unadulterate energy,
according to Einstein's famous equation EMC squared.
Speaker 1: And the efficiency of that reaction is staggering. When we
detonate a nuclear weapon, only a tiny fraction of the
radioactive core's mass is actually converted into explosive energy. The
rest is just blown apart as fallouts. Messy exactly, but
antimatter annihilation is perfect conversion. The sources highlight this with
terrifying clarity. Just one single gram of antimatter interacting with
regular matter would produce an explosive force roughly equivalent to
the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
Speaker 2: Just one gram.
Speaker 1: Think about that one gram. Imagine holding a paper clip
in the palm of your hand. Now imagine that paper
clip having the concentrated destructive power to instantly level an
entire metropolitan city.
Speaker 3: It's hard to even wrap your head around. But to
manage the panic here, we have to clarify scale. The
amounts of antimatter they're producing at Cerne are microscopic. We're
talking about individual atoms. To manufacture even a single gram
of antimatter using current technology would take millions of years
and cost trillions of dollars.
Speaker 1: So they don't have a paperclip's worth just sitting around right.
Speaker 3: There is nowhere near enough antimatter at cern to cause
any physical harm to the facility, let alone the public.
Speaker 1: But the philosophical weight of what they are doing in
that room is immense.
Speaker 3: Let me ask you this because this is where my
brain starts to melt. Okay, if antimatter violently annihilates the
literal microsecond it touches standard matter. What on Earth is
the container made of? How do you put something in
a box if the substance inherently destroys the box.
Speaker 1: That is the million dollar engineering question. You can't put
it in a glass jar or a steel tank. To
contain antimatter, physicists had to build a literal invisible thermos.
They use a device called a Penning trap.
Speaker 3: A Penning trap, how does that work? A Penning trap
uses a highly complex, carefully calibrated combination of electric and
magnetic fields to suspend the charged antimatter particles in the
dead center of an ultra high vacuum chamber.
Speaker 2: Doesn't touch anything exactly.
Speaker 3: The magnetic field squeeze the particles from the sides, forcing
them into a tight column, while electric fields cap the ends,
acting like invisible walls, pushing the particles back toward the center. Wow,
the antimatter is literally levitating in empty space. It's a
magnetic cage and it has to be absolutely perfect. Why
Because if the power fluctuates, or if the vacuum is
impure and a single stray atom of normal air wanders
into the trap, the antimatter touches it and poof annihilation,
a flash of gamma rays, and your experiment is over.
Speaker 1: Which brings us to a monumental record detailed in the
CERN archives. In twenty twelve, the Alopiche experiment team managed
to trap anti hydrogen atoms for one thousand seconds.
Speaker 2: Which is roughly sixteen minutes.
Speaker 1: Let's just stop and think about that for a second.
Sixteen minutes. Imagine sitting in that control room. You have
successfully manufactured the most volatile explosive substance in the known universe.
You have trapped it in an invisible cage of magnetism,
and you are just wh touching a digital timer tick
up ten minutes, twelve minutes. You are holding the physical
manifestation of destruction suspended by electricity.
Speaker 3: It is a stunning achievement. It allowed them for the
first time to actually study the properties of anti hydrogen,
to see if it behaves the same way as normal hydrogen.
Speaker 1: But the tension, knowing that even the tiniest microscopic failure
in containment means instant annihilation. It perfectly demonstrates humanity pushing
right up against the absolute limits of physical control. We
really are We are manipulating the fabric of reality at
a level where our margin for error is essentially zero.
Speaker 3: And speaking of the fabric of reality, that perfectly sets
up our next piece of source material. Oh definitely, Because
so far we have been talking about breaking the things
inside the universe, matter, cities, planets. But what happens when
the machines ATCERN threaten to break the actual underlying logic
of the universe itself.
Speaker 1: This is where it gets really weird.
Speaker 3: We are moving from the threat of physical to instruction
to an event that terrified physicists for an entirely different reason,
profound intellectual destruction.
Speaker 1: Oh man, we have to talk about the twenty eleven
neutrino anomaly. Reading the transcripts and news reports from this
period is wildly entertaining now, but at the time it
was a waking nightmare for the scientific community.
Speaker 2: It really was.
Speaker 1: Here's the setup. In twenty eleven, a research collaboration called OPERA,
which works closely with CERN, made a data announcement that
shook the entire world of science to its absolute core.
They had been tracking particles called neutrinos.
Speaker 2: Neutrinos are fascinating. They are often called ghost particles.
Speaker 1: Why goost particles.
Speaker 3: Well, they have almost zero mass and no electrical charge,
which means they barely interact with standard matter at all.
Right now, as you are listening to this, trillions of
neutrinos produced by the Sun are passing straight through your body,
through the floor, and continuing completely unhindered through the entire
solid mass.
Speaker 2: Of the Earth.
Speaker 1: That is deeply weird to think about. Because they don't
interact with much, they are notoriously difficult to detect. But
the Opera experiment was set up to do just that.
CERN was firing a concentrated beam of neutrinos from their
facility in Geneva straight through the Earth's crust to a
highly sensitive underground detector in Grand Sasso, Italy, about seven
hundred and thirty kilometers away, and.
Speaker 3: They were timing the journey. They synced up atomic clocks
using GPS satellites to measure exactly when the neutrinos were
fired in Switzerland and exactly when they hit the detector
in Italy.
Speaker 1: And when they looked at the data in twenty eleven,
they found something impossible. The neutrinos had arrived at their
destination sixty nanoseconds faster than a beam of light would
have in.
Speaker 2: A vacuum, which is just you can't even process that.
Speaker 1: They appeared to be traveling faster than the speed of light. Now,
to a lay person, sixty nanoseconds faster sounds like a
neat little speed record. But to a physicist, what does
that specific data point actually mean?
Speaker 2: It means the universe is broken?
Speaker 1: Literally broken.
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 3: Since nineteen oh five, Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity
has been the immovable bedrock of modern physics, and the
central unvilable pillar of relativity is that the speed of
light in a vacuum, roughly three hundred thousand kilometers per second,
is the absolute ultimate cosmic speed limit. Nothing with masks
can ever reach it, and certainly nothing can exceed it.
If this data was true, if cern had actually observed
particles outrunning light, it wouldn't just mean Einstein made a
math air. It would force a ground up rewrite of
the last century of physics.
Speaker 1: And let's get into the why of that, because it
isn't just about speeding tickets in space. The speed of
light is deeply fundamentally tied to the concept of causality.
Speaker 3: Right exactly, this is where it gets truly mind bidding.
In space time geometry, the speed of light is basically
the speed of causality is the speed at which one
event can physically influence another.
Speaker 1: Okay, stick with me on this.
Speaker 3: We can use a Minkowski spacetime diagram to visualize this,
but to keep it simple, if you can send a
particle or send information faster than light, you're essentially sending
information outside of the boundaries of linear time, which means,
from the perspective of certain observers in the universe, a
faster than light particle arrives at its destination before it
was fired.
Speaker 1: Wait, let me make sure I am grasping the horror
of this. The effect happens before the cause. Yes, so
applied to everyday life. The glass shatters on the floor,
and then you knock it off the table.
Speaker 3: Precisely, the universe's fundamental logic collapses. If particles can outrun light,
causality breaks down.
Speaker 1: That's terrifying.
Speaker 2: It would mean that.
Speaker 3: Time travel paradoxes like the famous Grandfather paradox where you
go back in time and prevent your own birth, become
mathematically real, tangible possibilities.
Speaker 2: The very structure of how we perceive.
Speaker 3: Reality, sequence, logic, and history would disintegrate.
Speaker 1: The anxiety in the physics community during those months must
have been suffocating. You have multiple PhDs, people who have
dedicated their entire lives to studying the precise roles of
the cosmos, staring into an intellectual abyss.
Speaker 2: I can't even imagine.
Speaker 1: You are faced with the very real possibility that every textbook,
every equation, every foundational assumption you've built your career on
has to be thrown into the fire.
Speaker 3: It is the ultimate intellectual vertigo. Scientists build their worldview
on these pillars. Gravity polls, light has a limit, Cause
precedes effect. To have a pillar kicked out from under
you makes you question your grip on reality itself.
Speaker 1: For months, the smartest scientists on Earth frantically double check
their data, terrified of what this meant. And then the resolution,
the grand finale of this existential.
Speaker 2: Crisis, Oh, the grand finale.
Speaker 1: After months of panic, the Opera team finally discovered the
source of the faster than light neutrinos. It wasn't a
groundbreaking paradigm shift in the fabric of space time. It
was a slightly loose fiber optic cable connecting a GPS
receiver to a computer.
Speaker 2: It is a truly remarkable anti climax.
Speaker 1: It is I'm sorry, but it is objectively hilarious. It's
like thinking you've hacked the matrix, unlock the secrets of
time travel, and proven Einstein of fraud, only to realize
you just needed to jiggle the HDMI cord in the
back of the server.
Speaker 3: Rack is amusing in hindsight, definitely. But even after they
found the loose cable, tightened it and corrected the data,
proving that the neutrinos were indeed obeying the cosmic speed limit,
many physicists admitted in interviews that those few months were
deeply scarring. I bet it was a stark, terrifying reminder
that our grasp on the universe's rules is only as
good as our tools, and our tools are fallible human constructs.
It proved how quickly and how easily the illusion of
our scientific mastery can shatter.
Speaker 1: That unease, the realization that we are playing with systems
we barely comprehend. Tracks perfectly with the most heavily redacted
and debated sections of the CERN safety files, it really does.
Because breaking causality is a terrifying thought experiment. But what
about accidentally destroying the actual container of the universe itself.
We are moving away from manipulating particles. We are shifting
gears into manipulating the physical geometry of space and time. Right,
cern isn't just looking for smaller pieces of matter, They
are actively hunting for extra dimensions.
Speaker 3: Yes, and while this sounds like pure science fiction, it
is entirely grounded in cutting edge mathematics. How So well,
the standard model of physics is incredibly successful, but it
has gaping holes, It cannot explain gravity very well, and
it doesn't account for dark matter. To solve these problems,
physicists rely on frameworks like string theory. Okay, but the
math of string theory simply does not work in the
universe with only three spatial dimensions and one dimension of time.
The equations require reality to have ten, sometimes eleven dimensions.
Speaker 1: So where are they If we live in an eleven
dimensional universe? Why can I only move up, down, left, right, forward,
and backward.
Speaker 3: The prevailing theory is that these extra dimensions are compactified.
They are curled up so infinitesimally small on the quantum
scale that we simply cannot perceive them or interact with
them right, Some theoretical models suggested that the immense concentrated
energy of the collisions at the Large Hadron Collider could
briefly interact with these hidden geometries. Specifically, the energy could
be great enough to temporarily pry open microwormholes, oh wow,
microscopic gateways, or leaks into these higher dimensions.
Speaker 1: And while physicists are fascinated by this because finding an
extra dimension would be the greatest scientific discovery since fire sick,
the general public heard the word wormholes and absolutely.
Speaker 2: Panicked, completely lost their minds.
Speaker 1: Looking at the media coverage from two thousand and eight,
critics and conspiracy theorists weren't excited about math. They were
worried about what could come through those dimensional openings, or worse,
what part of our world might leak out into the void.
Speaker 3: It taps into an incredibly ancient human fear, the fear
of opening a door that we lack the knowledge or
power to close. It is Pandora's Box updated for the
atomic age. Absolutely, the public anxiety surrounding these dimensional gateways
became so widespread, it's so incredibly disruptive that cern actually
had to address it legally.
Speaker 1: I have a summary of the two thousand and eight
safety report right here. Just think about this from a
public relations perspective. Cern, a premier scientific organization, had to
spend time and taxpayer money to publish a formal official
document that essentially says, we formally promise our machine will
not accidentally summon interdimensional entities, nor will it leak our
reality into a higher plane of existence.
Speaker 2: It's absurd, but they had to do it.
Speaker 1: They did. The official word was that any microwormholes created
would be smaller than a proton and would collapse instantaneously.
But the very fact that they had to write that
report they had to mathematically disprove an interdimensional invasion, shows
how deeply uneasy people were with the sheer scale what
was happening underground?
Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 3: And you mentioned earlier looking at the safety reports, that
there is one concept, one theoretical risk that eclipses all
the others.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, a scenario that makes miniature black holes look like
child's play.
Speaker 1: Let's untack, false vacuum decay. Because of all the things
in these source materials, this is the one that genuinely
keeps me up at night.
Speaker 3: False vacuum decay is, without hyperbole, the most apocalyptic scenario
in all of theoretical physics.
Speaker 1: Let me explain it to us.
Speaker 3: To understand it, we have to look at the underlying
fields that govern reality, specifically the Higgs field. The concept
is based on the idea that our universe as it
exists right now might not be in its most stable
baseline state. Okay, it might exist in what quantum physicists
call a false vacuum.
Speaker 1: Let's use an analogy here, because vacuum states can get
dense very quickly. The best way I've heard this described
is the mountain valley metaphor.
Speaker 2: Oh, that's a good one.
Speaker 1: Imagine you are rolling a boulder down the side of
a massive mountain. Eventually the boulder rolls into a valley
and comes to a complete stop. It feels perfectly stable.
You can build a house on it, you can build
a civilization around it. But what you don't realize is
that this valley isn't the bottom of the mountain. It
is just a temporary life edge, a divot halfway down
the cliff face, and there is a much deeper, much
more stable, true valley thousands of feet below it.
Speaker 3: That is a perfect visualization of the mathematics. In this scenario,
the boulder is the baseline energy state of the entire universe,
governed by the Higgs field. Okay, right now, our universe
is sitting in that temporary valley, the false vacuum. It
is stable enough for galaxies to form, for chemistry to work,
for human life to evolve. But if you give that
boulder enough of a kick, if you hit it with
an incredibly massive surge of energy, it could roll over
the lip of the temporary valley and plunge down toward
the true bottom of the mountain.
Speaker 1: And in physics terms, the kick that pushes the boulder
over the edge could be a sufficiently high energy particle
collision at the LHC exactly, So what happens at the
universe drops into the true vacuum? What does the bottom
of the mountain look like?
Speaker 3: The results are absolute and instantaneous. The collapse would begin
at the micro scopic point of the collision, inside the colliiner.
It would create a tiny bubble of this new true
vacuum reality.
Speaker 1: And what's inside the bubble.
Speaker 3: Inside this bubble, the fundamental laws of physics would be
completely different. The Higgs field would have a different value.
The forces that hold electrons to a nucleus would change,
the rules of chemistry would cease to exist. Protons might
completely decay.
Speaker 1: Everything that makes matter possible would just stop working exactly.
Speaker 3: And the most terrifying part is the expansion rate. This
bubble of new reality erasing physics wouldn't just sit inside
the collider, Oh no, it would expand outward in all
directions at the exact speed of.
Speaker 1: Light, meaning if they accidentally trigger it a false vacuum
decay at certain today, we wouldn't even see it coming.
Speaker 3: You cannot physically see something coming. If it is approaching
you with the speed of light. The visual information of
its arrival arise at the exact same instant as the
destruction itself.
Speaker 2: Just boof.
Speaker 3: There would be no warning, no alarm bells, no time
to comprehend what happened. And one moment you were sitting here,
and the next the very fundamental laws that allow your
atoms to bind together are rewritten, and you, the Earth,
and eventually the entire solar system simply cease to exist
in any recognizable form.
Speaker 1: That is profound. It is the ultimate off switch for existence.
Now to pull us back from the ledge. Here, theorists
and later studies heavily concluded that this was nearly impossible
at the current energy levels. The LHC reaches right.
Speaker 2: The cosmic ray argument holds up here too.
Speaker 1: The universe has survived much higher energy impacts, but the lingering,
pervasive dread is tied to the unknown. Humans are artificially
creating localized energy levels and manipulating fields in ways never
before achieved by our species, and this unease reached a
global fever pitch in twenty twelve around a very specific
monumental discovery.
Speaker 2: The Higgs boson.
Speaker 3: The Higgs boson Yes July twenty twelve. The discovery and
confirmation of the Higgs boson by CERN was a monumental
historic triumph for physics. It was the missing puzzle piece
of the Standard.
Speaker 1: Model because it proves the Higgs field right.
Speaker 3: The Higgs boson is the physical manifestation of the Higgs
fields which we were just discussing. It is essentially the
mechanism that gives mass to all other fundamental particles. Without
the Higgs field, electrons would just zip around at the
speed of light, never clumping together to form atoms. It
is the reason matter has weight, the reason stars ignite,
the reason we physically exist.
Speaker 1: The science was beautiful, but the public relations surrounding it
an absolute unmitigated disaster. Oh co, the mainstream media looking
for a catchy headline, nicknamed the Higgs Boson the God Particle.
Now I am not a pr expert, but if you
want the general public to stay calm about your massive
underground dimension hunting machine, maybe do not use terminology that
directly implies you are playing god with the foundational machinery
of reality.
Speaker 3: It really was the worst possible name.
Speaker 1: The headlines were wild, blogs and news outlets claim cern
might destroy the universe by creating something unnat. People were
actively linking the discovery of the Higgs Boson to ancient
Mayan doomsday prophecies, considering twenty twelve was already a young
steeped in apocalyptic superstition, and.
Speaker 3: While the public panic was largely sensationalized by journalists wanting clicks,
if you read the internal transcripts and letters from the
scientific community at the time, there was real genuine.
Speaker 1: Unease even among the scientists.
Speaker 3: Yes, they weren't worried about immediate destruction, but they were
deeply concerned about the philosophical implications of what they were doing.
Even Peter Higgs himself, the brilliant theoretical physicist who originally
predicted the particle in the nineteen sixties and whom it's
named after, was on record warning that high energy physics
could unleash unexpected consequences.
Speaker 1: That's chilling coming from him.
Speaker 3: When you were literally tinkering with the mechanism that gives
mass to reality, you were tampering with the foundation of
existence itself.
Speaker 1: The world obviously didn't end in twenty twelve when they
confirmed the discovery. We're still here talking about it. But
the panic it triggered is a perfect illustration of how
quickly scerns experiments cross the line from groundbreaking mathematics to
absolutely terrifying existentialism.
Speaker 2: It's unavoidable.
Speaker 1: The fear is a natural, unavoidable byproduct of stepping out
of the light of known science and into the absolute
pitch black of the unknown. We are monkeys who found
a control panel to a spaceship and we are just
pressing glowing buttons to see what the ship does.
Speaker 3: That's a highly compelling way to look at it, and
it perfectly explains the final category of documents we need
to review.
Speaker 1: Today the weird stuff exactly.
Speaker 3: Because when a machine doesn't just attract scientific inquiry but
acts as a lightning rod for human superstition, paranoia, and
incredibly bizarre side effects, you start to see the culture
around the machine warp just as much as the magnetic
fields inside it.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about the physical footprint of this thing. We
mentioned earlier that it consumes the energy of a city,
but the source materials have the exact numbers, and they
are staggering. The large high drin collider consumes around one
point three tarawatt hours of electricity every single year.
Speaker 3: To contextualize that for the listener, one point three tarrawhite
hours is roughly equivalent to the annual energy consumption of
a small to medium sized country or a major metropolitan city.
Speaker 1: That is just insane.
Speaker 3: And all of that raw, crackling electrical power is being
funneled into a subterranean ring just to smash invisible subatomic
particles together. It requires so much energy from the grid
that during the winter of twenty fifteen, cern actually had
to agree to shut down major experiments.
Speaker 1: Wait really, yeah.
Speaker 3: The country of Switzerland simply did not have enough power
to keep the civilian grid running, keep homes heated during
the cold months, and simultaneously operate the LHC.
Speaker 1: That is wild. The machine is so incredibly thirsty for
energy that it can literally dictate national power schedules, and
that sheer incomprehensible volume of electromagnetic energy being pumped into
the Earth's crust spawned an entirely new genre.
Speaker 2: Of modern oh the Internet rumors.
Speaker 1: Looking at the Internet archives from the twenty tens, people
started linking the operation times of CERN to bizarre, unseasonable
weather patterns across Europe, and even to seismic activity and
earthquakes around.
Speaker 3: The globe, which, to be clear, scientists entirely dismissed. The
magnetic fields generated by the superconducting magnets are incredibly powerful,
up to one hundred thousand times stronger than the Earth's
natural magnetic field, but they are highly localized and tightly
contained within the accelerator ring. They aren't altering tectonic plates
thousands of miles away. But again, look at the underlying psychology.
When a single scientific instrument can drink a city's worth
of electricity, it feels like an experiment that is far
too powerful for fragile humans to safely control exactly. It
evokes a primal mythological fear of tampering with nature's equilibrium.
It is Icarus flying too close to the Sun, but
with superconducting magnets.
Speaker 1: Luck. I have to defend the public here. If you
build a subterranean machine that drinks a city's worth of power,
smashes the building blocks of reality together, actively searches for
hidden dimensions, and is explicitly studying the God particle. Of course,
people are going to get weirded out farepoint, and honestly,
CERN did not exactly help their own case with their
landscaping choices. Let's talk about the Shiva statue.
Speaker 2: Ah, yes, then that Raja.
Speaker 1: In August of twenty sixteen, a video surfaced online that
caused an absolute uproar, spreading across social media like wildfire.
Shot from a window overlooking the main courtyard of the
CERN facility at night, it appeared to show a group
of individuals in dark flowing cloaks performing a mock human sacrifice,
this complete with a very theatrical stabbing of a woman
in white on the stone courtyard.
Speaker 3: And the crucial detail is where this was filmed. It
took place directly in front of a massive two meter
tall bronze statue of the Hindu deity Shiva, specifically Shiva,
portrayed as the Nataraja, the lord of the dance. In
Hindu theology, Shiva is part of the s supreme prinity
and is widely known as the destroyer. The cosmic dance
of the Natarajo represents the rhythmic, endless cycle of the
destruction and the creation.
Speaker 2: Of the universe.
Speaker 1: Now let's look at this rationally for a second. The
statue was an official gift from the Government of India
given to CERN in two thousand and four to celebrate
their long association with the facility.
Speaker 2: A completely standard diplomatic.
Speaker 1: Gift exactly, and from a pure physics standpoint, I actually
completely get it. The metaphor of Shiva dancing the universe
into and out of existence is a beautiful, deeply poetic
parallel to what is happening inside the collider, particles violently
annihilating each other to create entirely new exotic particles. It
is the dance of subatomic creation and destruction.
Speaker 2: It's very fitting, but from a public.
Speaker 1: Relations optic standpoint, it is a nightmare. You have a
machine that a vocal segment of the population actively believes
will destroy the world, and you put a literal statue
of the destroyer of worlds in your front yard.
Speaker 3: The optics were indeed terrible. The twenty sixteen videos sent
the Internet into overdrive. People legitimately believed and some still do,
that CERN was a front for performing occult rituals tied
to their high energy experiments, actively trying to open demonic
portals or some in dark.
Speaker 1: Entities, which forced CERN to respond.
Speaker 3: CERN launched an internal investigation and had to issue public
statements confirming that the.
Speaker 2: Video was a prank, very bad prank.
Speaker 3: It was staged by researchers or visiting scientists who had
authorized badge access to the secure grounds, basically making a
very dark, very ill advised joke during their downtime.
Speaker 1: But the damage was done. The imagery of a midnight sacrifice,
combined with the stated scientific mission of recreating the exact
conditions of the Big Bang, deeply disturbed people. It left
a lasting cultural impression that permanently associated these high energy
physics experiments with the occult.
Speaker 3: It made a lot of physicists highly uncomfortable because it
highlighted a massive disconnect between the sterile, rigorous math they
were doing the labs and how the public was a
motion processing their life's work.
Speaker 1: It is the perfect storm of high science and dark folklore.
But of all the weird bizarre incidents linked to CERN
in these files, my absolute favor, and honestly, the most
theoretically unhinged but fascinating concept, comes from a malfunction in
two thousand and nine, the Great Baguette sabotage.
Speaker 3: It is certainly one of the strangest, most absurd events
in the facility's storied history.
Speaker 1: Set the scene for us.
Speaker 3: In November of two thousand and nine, the large Hadron
Collire experience a sudden, serious power failure in one of
its cooling plants. Engineers scrambled, assuming a highly complex piece
of superconducting machinery had broken down. Understandably, what they discovered
upon inspecting the outdoor above ground electrical installations was that
a piece of bread, specifically a piece of a French baguette,
had fallen into the high voltage machinery, shorting out the system.
Speaker 1: A piece of bread dropped presumably from the sky by
a passing bird. A multi billion dollar reality smashing machine
temporarily brought to its knee by a pigeons lunch. It
is objectively hilarious. It sounds like a cartoon, It really does.
But what makes this story so eerie and why it
is included in these declassified physics discussions wasn't just the
malfunction itself. It was the timing, and it was the wild,
peer reviewed theoretical speculation that followed from actual respected physicists.
Speaker 3: This is where we crossed the line from a funny
engineering failure into theoretical philosophy. The LAC had faced an
unprecedented series of delays, massive magnet quenches, and bizarre malfunctions
leading up to its highly anticipated search for the Higgs boson.
Things just kept going wrong constantly. Following the bird incident,
two highly respected theoretical physicists, Holger beck Nielsen from the
Nils Bore Institute and Masao Ninomiya from the Yukawa Institute
in Japan, published a series of papers proposing a mathematical
model that sounded like a joke but was exploring a
real mathematical anomaly.
Speaker 1: The theory of retroactive sabotage. I read these papers and
my jaw hit the floor. Let's break down exactly what
they were.
Speaker 3: Suggestingnielsen and Nino Mia speculated that perhaps this string of
failures wasn't just incredibly bad luck. They used complex mathematical
models to suggest that the discovery of the Higgs boson,
or the creation of certain high energy conditions might be
so fundamentally abhorrent to the universe, or perhaps so dangerous
to the underlying fabric of reality, that nature or time
itself was acting retroactively to stop the machine from operating.
Speaker 1: It is essentially the grandfather paradox applied to particle physics.
Speaker 2: Exactly.
Speaker 3: Imagine a time traveler going back in time to stop
a massive disaster. But in this mathematical theory, the time
traveler isn't a person in a machine.
Speaker 1: What is it?
Speaker 3: It is a literal ripple of probability from the future,
moving backward through time to increase the likelihood of seemingly
random malfunctions like a loose connection or a bird dropping
a piece of bread in the exact right spot, specifically
to prevent cern from making the discovery. The universe was
mathematically rejecting the experiment.
Speaker 1: It is the most incredible concept. If I am a
time traveler from the year three thousand and My desperate
mission is to prevent the universe from being instantly erased
by a false vacuum decay triggered at Cerne. Dropping a
piece of a baguette into an outdoor power supply is
objectively the funniest, most French way to save reality.
Speaker 2: He really is.
Speaker 3: Most mainstream physicists laughed this theory off, obviously classifying it
as a fun mathematical exercise rather than actual physics. But
the sources note that some scientists submitted the endless string
of coincidences and delays was at the very least kind.
Speaker 1: Of unsettling if we synthesize all of this, If we
look at the entire scope of the materials we've reviewed today,
the fears of microsopic black holes, the contagious spread of
strange lids, the destructive curity of antimatter but lot, the
intellectual terror of breaking causality, the existential dread of false
vacuum decay, the Shiva statue, and the time traveling birds.
What we are really looking at is a profound psychological phenomenon.
Speaker 3: Is it's a modern myth making process happening in real time.
The science happening atcern is so abstract, the math is
so dense, and it operates at energy level so far
beyond standard human experience that the human brain simply cannot
process it as just engineering.
Speaker 1: Right. We have evolutionary frames of reference for fire, for storms,
for predators. We do not have an evolutionary frame of
reference for the Higgs field, or an eleven dimensional wormhole
or antimatter annihilation exactly.
Speaker 3: And when humans encounter the truly incomprehensible our minds automatically
referred to mythology. We project our deepest, most primal fears
onto the machine.
Speaker 1: We make story.
Speaker 3: We create sweeping stories of occultism, of weather, control of
the universe, actively fighting back against our hubris. It proves
that no matter how advanced our science becomes, no matter
how precise our mathematics get, human superstition, awe and terror
will always remain deeply intertrined with our discoveries. The machine
is a mirror reflecting our own existential anxieties back at.
Speaker 1: Us, which brings us to the big picture of this
entire journey. Today, we have gone from the incredibly microscopic
fear of a tiny singularity evaporating in a fraction of
a second to cosmic infections of strange matter converting the Earth.
We have visualized holding the raw explosive power of antimatter
in an invisible magnetic cage for sixteen agonizing minute. We
have stared down the intellectual abyss of breaking causality with
faster than light neutrinos, realizing that our understanding of time
could shatter. We looked at the literal abyss of erasing
our entire universe through the speed of light expansion of
false vacuum decay, and we've seen how all of this
immense crushing pressure cooks the collective human psyche until we
are analyzing a bird dropping a piece of bread as
an act of cosmic time traveling self defense.
Speaker 3: This entire saga perfectly highlights humanity's relentless, almost reckless drive
to understand the universe. We are a species uniquely driven
by profound, insatiable curiosity. We want to know how the
clockwork of reality functions. We want to take the clock
apart and see the gears.
Speaker 1: But as we dig deeper, the tools required to dismantle
that clock become more extreme and the energies involved become
far more perilous. Looking at these Sowne debates forces us
to ask a deeply uncomfortable question that will only become
more relevant as technology advances.
Speaker 2: Where's the boundary?
Speaker 1: Exactly? At what precise point does brave noble scientific exploration
cross the line into dangerous existential hubris? And that is
the exact question I want to turn over to you
listening right now. We have talked about all the theories,
the risk probabilities, the engineering miracles, and the mind bending
realities of what happens hundreds of feet underground at CERN.
Now it's your turn, So I am putting you in
the driver's seat. I want you to imagine you were
standing in the main control room. You have the final
button in front of you. You know for an absolute
fact that this button will turn on a machine that
is guaranteed to give humanity the ultimate final answers to the.
Speaker 2: UNI, the final truth.
Speaker 1: It will perfectly explain dark matter, it will map the
extra dimensions, it will reveal the exact mechanism of the
birth of time itself. We will become a fully enlightened species.
But the physicist besides you hand you a clipboard with
a mathematically proven one a trillion chance that pressing that
button will cause a false vacuum decay and instantly, painlessly
erase our entire reality the ultimate weight? Would you press it?
Do the ends the ultimate final enlightenment of the human species,
justify the microscopic, practically non existent risk of the ultimate means?
Where is your personal line between the pursuit of knowledge
and the instinct for survival.
Speaker 2: It's a tough call.
Speaker 1: We really want to know where you stand on this.
Leave a comment below and let us know your thoughts
on the ultimate cosmic gamble. Thank you so much for
joining us on this incredibly deep dive to the very
edge of physics, philosophy, and fear. This has been thrilling threads,
and I'll catch you on the next one. Goodbye,