Citation Needed - Large Hadron Collider

Episode Date: December 6, 2023

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle collider.[1][2] It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008 in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists and hundreds of universities and laboratories across more than 100 countries.[3] It lies in a tunnel 27 kilometres (17 mi) in circumference and as deep as 175 metres (574 ft) beneath the France–Switzerland border near Geneva.

Okay, so Loki is the time stone obviously visions the mine stone obviously Sure, but can't they just switch the focus to like X-Men and do one of their big crossover events? I don't what are they gonna do house at M? I don't know. It's fine sure It's better than whatever is happening right now. I don't think anything's happening right now Not the computer, not the computer! Yeah! Sorry, Cecil, part of the problem. Uh, hey guys, what's, um, what's going on?

Yeah, so Tom Redd knows essay about the LHC, and now he's afraid of atoms. Not afraid of him Heath, just aware of my enemy heart. Oh, that's the scare! Come on, man! Okay, but everything is Adams. Yeah, we told him that. Uh, did it help? It did not. Surround it at all saves! Tom, Tom, the LHC doesn't do anything

that doesn't happen thousands of times a day in our own atmosphere already. All the LHC does is allow us to see and measure those things. Oh, really it does? Yeah. So there are the ones who can tell me where the enemy is the weakest. No, gentlemen. Yes, I will see you on the other side.

And he jumped out the window. No. Gentlemen, yes, I will see you on the other side! And he jumped out the window. Nice. Yes, I think Tom's gonna destroy all the atoms. Well, he's gonna try. We gotta stop calling him about like things. Yeah, we really do. Hello and welcome, citation-eated, odd-gaster, chooses subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia and pretend we're experts. Because this is the internet, that's how it works now. I'm partling the fuck out of some physics here, but I'm gonna need my gang of quirks,

a charm of strange, a top and a bottom. I love you, boost. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers to you. And it turns out I do have a gender identity, everybody. Okay, so from now on, that's the one we're going with. Hey, what if you're not a top or a bottom, but just like a lazy sideways, like a big spoon with a nap in a fashion?

I love you two, Tom. I guess I have to say of all the last one to the notes has to be the bottom challenges that I've lost on the show. This is the least unpleasant. This one is right here. There's a moment. So now that I mentioned other particles, I want to take a minute to thank the most fundamental particles of them all, our patrons.

And if you'd like to learn how to join their ranks, be sure to stick around until the end of the show. And with that, the way, tell us Eli, what person, place, thing, concept, phenomenon, or event we'll be talking about today. We'll be talking about the large Hadarron Collider. I assume we chose me to say it's name first to kill everyone at home who might correct our pronunciation for the recipe episode.

So Noah, you didn't hear me call dibs on this one and you're just going to do it even though you can clearly see that I had my orange cone on top of it the entire time. I saw the orange cone. I figured that was there to get my attention to this. All right. So what is the large Hadron collider? It's the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator. It was built by the European organization for nuclear research, which is abbreviated to CERN because all languages aren't English.

Cousin, skeptical. Hatch tag English words matter. Thank you, Tom. Of course, yep, yep. And it was built on the border of Switzerland and France near Geneva. Its main feature is a 27 kilometer or about 17 miles circular tunnel. It sits over 100 meters underground, which can accelerate particles to the mind-boggling speed of 99.99999991% of the speed of light.

And smash it together and see what happens. Now, Nike, okay, you know some boss guy saw that number. He was like 99.991. That's really, it's really close. So we're just, you're like, you're normal, are you nudged a little bit, right? Yeah.

Yeah. She was a little slow. This project is like the natural extension of everyone that had those hot wheel tracks as kids, right? Everybody. Exactly. Exactly. We should have known it was going to get here eventually.

Now, obviously, that's insanely fast. It's too fast for us to really comprehend. If you like, I got it. Oh, well, rest of us. But suffice to say that by the time the particles are fully accelerated, they circle the entire circumference of that tunnel 11,245 times per second. But it takes about 30 minutes to accelerate them to that top speed. So in honor of that limitation,

I thought I'd take my sweet ass time and getting to the point. So we're gonna start with the basic history of particle accelerators. And word of warning, I'm gonna do a terrible job of convincing anybody that I'm an expert here. I understood a solid 15 and a half percent of what was on any of the Wikipedia entries that I worked off of for this one.

Yeah, welcome to the club. No, and hey, it makes you feel any better. I promise not to learn anything from your ass. So our story starts at the end of the 19th century Yes, when descendants of the atruskins using pottery only they could pot Build the world's first particle itself. I mean, that's actually true. I mean in a True, so wait, but I was gonna say when physicists started to realize that atoms weren't Indivisible units of matter. I was really kind of fucks up the whole point of that. Yeah, exactly right. But that started with the discovery of the electron in 1897 and was proven beyond a doubt by a British scientist named Ernest Rutherford in 1911.

He showed that the atom wasn't uniformly dense, but rather that its density was concentrated in the center in what we now know as the Adams nucleus. In 1927, Rutherford addressed a royal society in London and talked about how awesome it would be to have a device that could provide scientists with a steady supply of Adams and subatomic particles. Yeah, their current dealer kind of sucked. He was a white guy with dreadlocks

and lived in that shady apartment complex. Nobody wanted to go to. He's always trying to sell you particles and you're like, what am I going to do with particles? So about five years later, Rutherford would get his wish when two of his students, John Cockroft and Ernest Walton built exactly such a device, which they used to split the atom for the very first time.

This would usher in a whole new era of physics. Right? So because before this, if you wanted to study subatomic particles, you had to wait for radioactive elements to kick one out for you, but particle accelerators allowed scientists for the first time to break atoms apart into individual neutrons and protons and shit at will. Now around this same time, yet another earnest was getting in on the action. A whole ocean away. Ernest Lawrence, the third Ernie in a story that only has four people in it so far was an American physicist. What's the eyebrow situation? I don't know. Check. But he was an American physicist at Berkeley.

He was inspired by a sketch that he'd seen from a Norwegian inventor of how to build a particle accelerator. But the problem with this guy's design was that it was too long to be practical. In order to keep your beam of particles from whacking and to random gas molecules, you had to accelerate them in a vacuum and there were serious practical limbs that I mean, there still are, but they were far more limited back then as to how big a chamber you can realistically pump all the air out of.

So Lawrence's idea was to make the accelerator round so you could keep using the same space over and over again until you got it up to speed. Okay, I'm picturing atoms starting to get mad in like a TGI Friday's parking lot and doing that circle walk thing It's a lot like that. Yeah, so at this point I should probably explain how particle accelerators work which I am totally qualified to do. I mean, you're the most qualified on the shelf, it makes you feel better. I think first, don't you need a boy scout

in a potting shed behind his mom's house? But in this case, it's a really big, really big one. Yeah, and this is super big. That's the most important part. So particle accelerators use an electric field to pull charged particles like electrons or protons along the way, and they use magnets to basically steer those particles and focus them into thin beams so they can be fired directly

at a target as small as, say, a single atom. Or as this story goes along, another string of single-file electrons going just as fast in the opposite direction. I should also note that when it comes to particle accelerators, scientists don't generally talk about the speed of the electron or whatever because what matters is it's momentum. So instead of saying something like, it accelerated a particle to X million miles per hour, we'll be talking about it reaching X giga electron volts

or whatever. Yeah, and just to keep that relationship simple for the audience, velocity is a measurement of speed that requires distance to measure while momentum is a measure of the mass of an object times its velocity. Those are both different than acceleration, which is the change in that velocity over time. I just want to make sure it's not confusing for our comedy show. That's right.

Thank you. No, we've all got it now. Yeah. So I'm Eli. So Lawrence invents the circular version pretty much at the same time as Cockroft and Walton are building theirs He initially calls it the proton Mary go round and then other scientists are like dude You can't call your thing a proton Mary go round or we'll never get funding to build a big one Carosella raider

So he gives it the far more... Bumpermo? Bumpermo? Susice. Bumpermo is great. Nice. So he gives it the far more formal and scientific name of a cyclotron, which I guess sounds as much like a transformer's bad guy as anything that exists in the real world at least. Now Lawrence's cyclotron is pretty humble as a beginning when you compare it

to its great granddaughter, the LHC. The first one was about the size of a donut. By 1939, he'd built one that was 60 inches in diameter, but dead world war two happened, and if you were an American scientist, you were either building nukes or radars, so the whole field kind of paused there for a bit. But after the war, newer, bigger,

and more powerful designs for particle accelerators are popping up every other year. You get your synchotrons, your linear accelerators, your fixed field alternating gradient accelerators, your rototrons, and yes, I read what all of those things are, and no, I still don't understand any of it, but those all happened then. Now, I should be clear here, that there are actually a lot of uses for particle accelerators.

We're mostly going to be talking about their use in theoretical physics because that's the most interesting, but great. I'll estimate it 30,000. Get in there and we'll be really worried for that. But I'll be estimated 30,000 or so that are currently operating only about 1% to research machines with relativeistic speeds. Almost half of them are used in radio therapy and the rest are used for ion implantation,

industrial processing and biomedical research. In fact, if you've ever used an old cathode rate tube television, you've used a simplified version of a particle accelerator. They're also used in making circuit boards, as I understand it. So I think you're at least secondhand using one right now too. Yeah, I mean, don't get me wrong, that's all interesting, but I do hate when people are like,

when are we going to use this in the real world? It's like, no, someone's going to use it, man, you're going to grow your hair into dreads and cell C-cell particles. Someone that's going to use it, I don't need to prove this to you, Kyle. Right, yeah. But despite all the eventual commercial uses, the first job of the particle accelerator was to break apart atoms So much so that people mostly just called them Adam smasher's back then nice now Businesses have moved away from that term despite how much cooler it is than particle accelerator for two reasons One is that it's not accurate Right like mostly you smash subatomic particles with these things nowadays, but secondly, Adam's smasher sounds super scary. Right? You tell people, hey, we're going to build

an Adam's smasher in your town and they picture sudden unplanned mushroom clouds. If you tell me you're building a particle accelerator, they think of it. It's like a fancy electronic. Skate shots and demons. Sorry. No. It's a sling shot. Yep. When you said science, I just, I love the adorable optimism of the scientists think they can change the name and idiots won't be afraid of them.

Right. You guys named it the butterfly effect and we were like, if I breathe hard in China, my penis exposed, that's not how our stupid works, everybody. Yeah. As, as we'll find out later in the essay, but incidentally, the fear of Adam's measures more or less directly led to the invention of the first video game. One of the first big particle accelerators in the US was built at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York and do a swage to the fear of locals. They invited people in

for a couple of days every year for a community fair, which was boring as fuck, because it was a place where they did theoretical physics stuff uh so to make it less boring they had this engineer named William Higginbotham rig up like a bazillion dollars worth of equipment to put together the most rudimentary possible video game called tennis for two uh sorry i just i cannot resist adding that detail okay we played doubles right get the fuck out We play doubles right get the fuck out. Oh, no So anyway, so along the way particle accelerators keep getting bigger and bigger and at a certain point it bears asking why Right like they're circular

Right at least the super high energy ones are so any amount of distance is theoretically infinite. But if you're on a circular track, you can run an infinite distance regardless of the size of the circle, but it turns out that when you nudge the particles into that circular motion, they radiate a little bit of energy in towards the center of the circle. So the bigger the accelerator's diameter, the smaller the individual nudges you have to make, and the more energy you can ultimately create. I think I really had a lot of trouble understanding this part. Hey, if it makes you feel better, Noah, you lost me at Adams and Cells are different things

at the beginning. So, did anybody else picturing like, Canadian guys with tiny little brooms skating in front of the particles and nudging them gently along pretending that to sport. Yeah. That's an awesome sport. How different is awesome. Chuffing or whatever. I'm imagining that as much as the real.

Yeah. So of course, this led eventually to designs for what would be the biggest particle accelerator ever built, the super conducting super glider. Sorry, you didn't think I was getting to the point already. Did you? No know of course not So now before we get to Europe's great success I have to mention America's embarrassing failure see the superconducting super collider or SSC would have absolutely Dwarfed the LHC

Its plans or conference was 87 kilometers. That's over 50 fucking miles. That would be three times the size of the LHC. Right, but they named it after how the flash got his powers. So, you know, so after spending over two billion dollars on the project, it was mothballed in 1993. And for the record, I am very willing to fail to produce anything useful, and I will do it for a much more reasonable sum. Oh, right. Yeah. So no, unfortunately, the attitude of the country at the time was all about deficit reduction. The Texas governor was against the Clinton administration's support was taped and superconducting super colliders, a silly fucking name that didn't seem like

it was worth that kind of money. So with a mere 14 miles of the planned 54 mile tunnel board, work stopped and we left the door wide open for Switzerland and France to steal all our particle physics glory. Well, so far we learned that everything is bigger and worse in Texas. So let's take a quick break for a thing we like to call potential advertiser slot. Okay. Okay. All right, guys, we check the math and we can seriously do this thing. The superconducting supercliter will open a brand new world of science and innovation.

Uh, sorry, are we firm on that name? What name? The superconducting super collider. Yes, Dave. We're firm on it because that's literally what it is. Yeah, yeah, but it has the word super in it twice. Because that's what it does, man. Okay.

What about superconducting super supplier? Ooh, a iteration. Yeah, I like that. No, that makes no such guys. We're not changing the name. It's called the thing that it is. It's called the cock grower 9,000. Dude, what the fuck are you talking about? Call the thing that it is. Okay. Just call it the cock grower 9000.

Dude, what the fuck are you talking about? If you call it the cock grower 9000, it'll be the best fund in scientific endeavor and human history. Yeah, it's true. Yeah, without the alliteration. Fuck you. It's actually right. It's true.

I think it's like, okay, so, all right. So we open with cock grower 9000. If we get a no on that, we go with superconducting superglider. I feel like we didn't vote on supplier and we did. Let it go Larry, just let it go. Okay. Okay.

Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.

Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Alright, when we left off, Texas made a collider out of a stick in an old tire, besides universal healthcare, how else did Europe embarrass us now? That's a big question, Cecil.

We don't have time for all of it, but I'll go back to the supercladorship. So the big advantage the LHC had over the failed American superclider is that they already had the tunnel. In fact, they already had the world's largest particle accelerator inside the tunnel. It was called the large electron positron collider, and it's still apparently the largest accelerator of leptons ever built. But apparently, you can only go so far, colliding leptons, so around the turn of the millennium, it was dismantled to make way for the even more ambitious large Hadron Collider. No, somewhere in the drafts of your Google doc is a paragraph where you attempt to

explain what a lepton is, and then you just stared at a picture of Tom and myself for an hour and hit delete. And either confirmed or denies her. Okay, Eli, I know what a lepton is. It is the particle that gold at the end of the rainbow is clearly made from. So, there you go, lepton is. It is the particle, the gold at the end of the rainbow is clearly made from. So, see, go lepton. Just me that. Mm-hmm. So, as to stem, I don't think larger collider are really in need of explanation,

but I know that I didn't know what the fuck a Heydron was before I started writing this essay. So, as defined by Wikipedia, a Heydron is, quote, a composite subatomic particle made of two or more quarks held together by the strong interaction and That's beautiful. I'm working that into my vows one day It's true. You have love now. You're allowed to do that right. Yeah

So that that would include apparently barrions like protons and neutrons as well as mason's like pions and hayons I guess are things. I don't I don't think the LHC has ever collided pions or hayons though. No, I think you're confusing particles for chat GPT sci-fi villain names. That's good. God, I miss new Coke. Oh, make a regret saying that. So the construction of the LHC was approved in 1998. The Wikipedia article

has a bunch of details on like initial budgets and cost overruns and shit, but they're listed in a mixture of Swiss, Franks and Euros. And I'm damned if I'm going to do all that math and translate that shit and adjust for inflation. So I'll just say that the total cost of building was in the range of about $5 billion. and from what I can find, it costs about another billion dollars a year to run the damn thing. Now, of course, in addition to the cost overruns, there were also a bunch of delays during construction, which is, you know, to be expected when you're undertaking one of the most ambitious construction projects in the history of building shit, but the various delays did feed into a version in conspiracy theory about the potential dangers of the LHC

This is the best No, to be clear conspiracy theorists were already kind of obsessed with CERN even before they started building the LHC And they already were kind of freaked out about particle accelerators But all of that kicked into high gear when a scientific paper suggested that the LHC could create small black holes high gear when a scientific papers are just that the LHC could create small black holes. Now, I don't know how true that is, but I do know that the danger of the LHC creating a black hole big enough to suck the earth into it are zero, right? Zero in some other number, which puts me way ahead of conspiracy theorists who know shit, claimed that the various construction delays were due to time travelers from the

future trying to sabotage the device before it could destroy the world. Okay, so the people in the future invented a time machine. They invented time travel and they were like, here's what we do. We go back in time and prevent something that definitely did not happen with our time machine. But then some French and Swiss nerds fought off the top of that. Right, yes, clear. So they won.

That's the theory. Yeah. Or we destroyed the earth by getting it sucked into a black hole and then invented time machines which seems really hard to do from within a black hole where everyone is No, the theory is that the earth was being slowly destroyed over like a couple hundred years And they built the time machines right at the end. Yeah, I don't know. They didn't answer More sense that way, but I'm sorry. No withdrawn withdrawn that track. Jesus. I feel stupid now. Thank you on with Tron that tracks. Jesus.

I feel stupid now. Thank you. A bunch of trumpers throwing themselves into the black hole to pone the lips. But believe it or not, earth devouring black holes weren't the silliest danger. The conspiracy theorist offered up. They also suggested it would cause earthquakes, open portals to other dimensions, shift our world into an alternate timeline or, and this one is my personal favorite, open a doorway to hell.

Interesting. Okay, so in their head, God was like, all right, I gotta let him have a hell door. Obviously, they have to have hell door. It's gotta be kind of thinking. Give me a lot of humorous, involved, the hard sciencey stuff. So anyway, despite the temporal interference

from a doomed future, the LHC was completed in 2008. And of course, the scale of everything is crazy impressive on this motherfucker. Like I said, it's just shy, a 17 miles around. The two tracks or beam lines run in opposite directions and cross at four different points. There are nine different detectors at each of the collision points that measure stuff that I can't begin to comprehend, but I'm sure it's all very important and very precise. Not sure if Noah's getting lazy in his

essay or if he knows I was picturing a giant screen that said either accelerated in green or not accelerated in red. I actually the excitement of trying to explain all this led to his first heart attack Eli. So we got to I don't I don't love that we're already calling it my first heart attack Tom. So to direct the beams it uses an insane number of enormous mags. Yeah, but how do they work? Oh, I'll I'll tell you. No, actually, I won't. I don't know. There are 132, I'm confusing. Thank you. I don't know. I don't know what I'm confusing. It's like a field or something.

I'm using some it's an oscillation. So electricity can be a fucking phrase. I don't even think it's oscillation like a field or something. I don't. It's an oscillation. It's an oscillation. Electricity can be a fucking phrase. Stephen thinks it's a translation. I just said that word because it sounded so. David Ikses it a lot. Kill J. But while I don't undervalidation of ICP going on right now that I didn't expect.

I'm not going to lie. I only put not our makeup. I'm going to slide. Yeah. What's your fucking clowns on this podcast? You bet. So I can't explain how Magnus worked, but I can count them. What? What? What's your fucking clowns on this podcast, you bet? So I can't explain how magnets work, but I can count them. There are 1,232 dipole magnets that keep the beam moving

in its circular path in another 392 quadrupole magnets that focus it on other 10,000 smaller superconducting magnets correct slight imperfections in the trajectory. And don't think refrigerator magnets, when I say thisions in the trajectory, and don't think refrigerator magnets when I say this shit. The biggest of this. No, it's on my refrigerator, Noah. Right, no, no, so everybody but Tom's refrigerator, I guess, but yeah, but some of these magnets weigh like 27 tons.

That's crazy. They also need to use about 96 tons of superfluid helium for to keep these magnets that they're operating temperature of negative 450 degrees Fahrenheit. That's almost all of the degrees, right? That's minus 271 Celsius. So if you really want a sense of how cold we're talking about here, it's 1.7 Kelvin. Well, that makes the LHC among all its existing sprue lives the largest cryogenic facility on the planet as well. Yeah, I just don't think they should be exposing Walt Disney's head to all those barriots,

you know, like, still pops out racist cartoons, but like, really small. And they decay very quickly. Yeah, lovely. So and also I found this interesting. There's not like one continuous beam of particles generally. Apparently they're grouped in bunches, specifically for reasons that I'm sure exist. 2,808 bunches of about 115 billion protons each, so that interactions between the beams happen at specific intervals rather than just happening continuously.

Apparently, that makes it way easier to tease out data from the individual collision. Yeah, that and like the fastest intern ever with that hand clicker thing. He knows. Like a lot. Right. The men shifts. One of the right 115 billion. That's on me.

But as impressive as the LHC's size is, its power is even more mind blowing. When they fire that motherfucker up, it uses 200 megawatts of power. That's about a third as much as all of Geneva. At full acceleration, particles in the LHC are going about seven miles an hour slower than the speed of light. At that speed, it takes about 90 microseconds to run a full lap. I like the idea of just a flashlight in this giant circle tube being like, oh my god, I'm laughing you every single time. This is so embarrassing for you, idiots.

Wow, I'm from Radio Shack, Yikes. Radio Shack. So of course, the most important number here is the output. How much are we actually learning from this thing? Well, every day that it's active, it generates about 140 terabytes of data, the total data produced by the LHC was estimated according to the WIC, yet 200 petabytes a

year, which begs the question of how the fuck you even keep that much data, right? Well, the LHC computing grid started with 140 computing centers in 35 countries. Now it's up to 170 centers and 40 countries. Apparently you can even add your computer to the network and help crunch LAC data while you're not using it, which is cool. Yeah, no thanks Noah. I already feel guilty enough watching porn without knowing I'm slowing down the progress of humanity. Why am I looking at a penthouse from 1995? Science for science. Science. I care. My big knowledge.

So anyway, so all of this goes online in 2008. They do a few inaugural tests to show that everything works and it doesn't. There's an incident a few days later where some shit that I don't understand happens to some shit. I don't understand. I don't understand. We're losing it. We're losing it.

Yeah, that was only so far. So far I can go. So naturally the conspiracy theorist figured that this is the time travel is given at one final go. And it was a hell of a go. The accident which Wikipedia refers to as the quench incident took over a year to fix. The LHC wasn't brought back online until November of 2009. And much to the surprise of dedicated conspiracy theories, it would operate for a full seven years before actually opening any doors to an alternate hell dimension and curing our reality through that.

Of course, that brings us to the obvious question of why the fuck anybody would spend five billion dollars to smash protons into each other. Right now, I'm not smart enough to actually answer that question, but I do understand the kinds of questions that you can answer by doing it, and they're among the coolest of all the questions. Why do particles have mass? Are there extra dimensions? What is dark matter made of?

Why is there so much more matter than antimatter? And the question that sold the whole thing to begin with, is the standard model of particle physics complete and correct? And that final question revolves, of course, around the discovery of the Higgs boson. The Higgs boson sounds like a high-end steakhouse with really dark wood and like a huge bourbon list. Yeah. It doesn't know vegan options. Like, it does sound good. Yeah. Okay, so I also don't get all the physics about Higgs boson or most of the stuff we're talking about right now. But I don't do that. It does sound good. Yeah. Okay, so I also don't get all the physics about Higgs boson or most of the stuff we're talking about right now, but I don't think the science people do either. So I tried to read about this and it says the boson is a particle that pops out of the Higgs field, which is quote, Mexican hatch.

Wow. So I stopped reading there and I was like, you're all lying too. You don't want to solve that anomia before you publish. Maybe. So yeah, no, I'll freely admit, I read a whole fucking book on the Higgs boson without ever really getting my head around what the fuck it is. So I'm not going to embarrass myself by trying to go into any detail here. Suffice it to say that the LHC did discover it. His discovery was announced on July 4th of 2012.

That's Europe, trying to steal America's glory again. And it's widely considered to be one of if not the most important scientific discoveries in my lifetime. Again, I have no idea why, but people way smarter than me get very excited about. Look, if it didn't get me laid, paid or cure my aides, I'm

not interested. Dude, what? I need a catchphrase. I'm fucking tired of this stuff. Not that one. Fucking idea with being said. But the LHC wasn't done just because it had served its primary purpose. After the Higgs was discovered, they shut down the thing for a couple of years, while they juiced up the whole system to run even higher energy experiments. During the first run of experiments, the particle beam is maxed out around four Terra-electron volts. That's four trillion volts. With the new upgrade, they'd be able to reach higher energies in excess of 6.5 TeVa piece. After a few years of that, like those even smashier collisions, I guess, because it was shut down for a further four years to nudge that number up to 6.8 TeV for a record total of 13.6 TeV collision

energy. And if you want more reason to weep for the never finished SSC, by the way, its design would have allowed for collisions of over 20 Tera electron. Get the fuck out of here. Crazy. I know. But there's only so much tweaking you can do to up the numbers in the existing terror electron gets a fuck out of you know crazy i know but there's only so much to eat you can do to up the numbers in the existing facility which is why sirna is now pushing for a successor to the lhc that would be a hundred kilometers around

while cost twenty three billion dollars worth it and that's before the inevitable cost overruns in motion uh... to give you an idea how aspirational that one is, by the way, they're hoping to begin construction in 2038. Just do a marble run thing and feel like we got a breath. Ooh, that would be cool. Maybe a TikTok dance in there. Mm.

You get it somewhere as we learned in one sentence, what would it be? That I should have left this topic for you. So, so, I looked at it and it's a terrible job. I'm glad you did it. Are you ready for the quiz? As we learned in one sentence, what would it be that I should have left this topic for you? Did it are you ready for the quiz 11,250 times a second I am Okay, Noah you took a dense mathematically and scientifically complex topic as a subject of your essay immediately after returning from a heart attack Hey the fuck, man? B, you could have just quit. C, really?

I mean, you could have, we'll still be friends. Friendly, we can still be friendly. It's the answer is D. We can be friends, you see. Maybe, I think. All right, Noah, which of the following is my favorite detail about the LHC conspiracy theories? Hey, one theory that went viral on TikTok

says that smashing protons together is tearing the fabric of reality as evidenced by the change in the spelling of double stuff orios to just one act. Jesus Christ. In reality, it's always been spelled out, eh? But the Mandela effect has a bunch of people convinced it was changed when Surn created the multiverse

with proton smashy stuff. B, following the Oreo claim, a Surn particle physicist named Larinelist made a video response that said, exact quote, look bro, just because you misremembered something, doesn't mean CERN is going around changing your Oreos. There are much higher energy particle collisions

happening in our atmosphere all the time. What CERN is doing is tiny in comparison. I can promise you we're not going around changing labels on your food." See, in 2016, somebody made a prank video from inside the Surn facility to show people in cloaks surrounding a statue of the Hindu deity Shiva and they stab a lady as part of a human sacrifice. A lot of people thought it was real.

It was not. D, when the idiots all over the internet were like, Satanic rituals, a hellgate knew it. This group of the world's top scientists again, had to make a statement saying, we're not opening a hellgate for Satan. And if we did do that, we wouldn't be using a Hindu deity for you talking about.

What the fuck? Jesus. Oh, that's actually a tough one, which is, I think it's secret answer, e, those are all tied for your favorite detail. Correct, they are. I love all of those. All right, Noah.

Lot of nights like myself might walk at a $5 billion price tag, but what should give us pause? Hey, the $160 billion of worldwide food waste that happens every year. The $6.8 billion spent on homeeopathy every year. See, the $5 billion of unused electricity we waste every year, or D, the arts. electricity we waste every year or D the arts I'm gonna go with secret answer E you should have already had pause you shouldn't have needed any of that stuff Oh, no, I'm sorry. It's the arts

Eli wins I win all right. Well, you know, he's been talking a lot of smack this week So I want to see him I want to see him roll up his sleeves and wow us next week. Tom, you're up. Yeah. Alright, well for Tom, Eli, Heath and Noah, I'm Cecil, thank you for hanging out with us today. We'll be back next week and by then, Tom will be an expert on something else. Between now and then, you can start on our back catalog of the show and see how far you get. And you can take it as a challenge.

And if you'd like to help keep the show going, you can make a PURP episode donation at patreon.com slash citation pod or you could leave us a 5 star review. Have a reacan. If you'd like to get in touch with us, check out past episodes, connect with us on social media or check the show notes. Be sure to check out citation pod dot com. Which is why NASA is so pleased to announce our newest rocket, the Gersonator 4000. That's the one.

Go to Mars, everyone. Go to Mars.