Okay. Good afternoon. Welcome, everybody. Thank you for coming to the Cincy lecture.
I am absolutely delighted to be able to introduce to you this afternoon Hitoshi Moriyama.
He's flown in from Japan. He has, I think, the best title of any director of an institute that I know.
He is the director of the Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe.
But even more remarkably, he has a position both in Tokyo and also at Berkeley.
And so he's a man who flies to the moon more or less every year.
He has many accolades and awards.
Most recent of which was his election to the membership of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
And so it's a wonderful opportunity for me to introduce him to give the lecture on the quantum universe.
Hitoshi Okay. Thank you, Roger. Thank you.
It's really a great honour to be invited to give this intellectually here.
Of course, Oxford is one of the most world premiere institute in this area of research, and so is Tokyo and Berkeley.
So of course we are in some of this competition here. But anyway, it doesn't matter.
So the title of my talk here is The Quantum Universe, and that is meant to be an oxymoron universe.
It's the biggest thing we can study. And quantum has to do with tiny things like atoms and electrons and quarks.
So what do they have to do with each other? And so that's basically the content of my talk today.
But before getting into this, you know, there was I introduced me,
I started actually this new institute in Japan called the Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe.
So my friends in Berkeley was surprised that suddenly I became the director of the Institute for the Physics and Mathematics, the Universe.
And they said they didn't like that. This is way too long.
Let's try to shorten this by picking the beginning and the end of the title to that one.
That sounds like a huge responsibility to me. And even more, this responsibility doesn't come with high enough authority.
Because there's somebody at home who claims she's the voice of God.
That's very hard to compete with.
But anyway, so I founded this institute back in 2007 and we did trying to address some simple and very profound questions about the universe.
And that's what we scientists actually do. We ask very simple but profound questions which any little kid might actually ask looking up the night sky.
So looking at this beautiful night sky, you know, every child wonders, how does the universe begin?
What is this fate way like going? What is this made of?
And what are these laws and why do we exist in it?
And these are very simple questions. I'm sure anybody had wondered about these questions.
But these are questions now we can address by scientific methods.
So this is actually incredibly exciting time because we can really answer these simple and profound questions.
And that's what my talk is about. So, for example, this topic, the last question, where do we come from?
And of course, this used to be the realm of religion for many millennia is also a question in philosophy.
And more recently, like the end of the 19th century, thanks to Darwin from this country, we start asking the question in the context of biology.
And it's not clear we are heading the right way in terms of the evolution these days.
But anyway, so that's the scientific question now.
And obviously to really understand where we come from, the machine we would like to have is that time machine.
And incredibly, we do have time machine to study this question.
And the time machines are these instruments.
One of them are big telescopes.
The reason why big scopes a time machine is is because if you use a big telescope, you can look really, really far away in the universe.
And then if you look far away, light takes so many billions of years to reach us.
You're looking back into the past. So you can literally see the path of the universe.
That's kind of time machine. But another kind of time machine we have is something called particle accelerators.
And these machines can create the condition how the universe was like when it got just started.
So that's another way of looking back into the past. So we use these time machines to try to understand the question where we come from.
So that's what I'm going to talk about. And just just flash you a couple of pictures to make this point clear.
Let's say this is the picture of Andromeda taken with a new camera action we just completed on a telescope called Subaru Telescope.
And this Andromeda is about 2.3 million light years away.
So what we can see is the way Andromeda was 2.3 million years ago.
So if this happens to be somebody living there and looking at all planet Earth, they will see us being still apes 2.3 million years ago.
So that's how you can look back into the past if you look farther away.
For example, this is a beautiful picture of something called the cluster of galaxies.
So each each of these a yellow blob is a galaxy on its own.
Again, each one of them has 100 billion stars in it, and they actually are living together.
So that's a cluster. And this particular one is 2.1 billion light years away.
So we're looking back into the universe when it was 2.1 billion years ago.
So we can really look back into the past. And this is the Guinness Record.
So this picture shows if we brought this picture up and you eventually find this little red smudge,
and this smudge is a galaxy which is 13.3 billion light years away.
So we're looking at the universe, how it was 13.3 billion years ago.
And now we think that universe itself was born 13.8 billion, 13.8 billion years ago.
So what you're looking at is the picture of a galaxy when universe was as young as 500 billion years old.
That's a very young universe compared to our universe today.
That's 13.8 billion years old. So this is the way you can study.
Our universe was like at the very beginning of it. But it turns out there's a limit to this.
If you look even farther away, 13.8 billion light years away, you still see the universe.
But this is a wall. So what's going on here is something like this if you are looking at the sun.
And of course, I don't want to do this because I would burn your eyes. But suppose you are looking at the sun.
Then what are you seeing is actually the surface of the sun.
You can really look inside the sun. And that's because sun is such a dense hot object.
Light doesn't go through it. So only thing you can see is the surface of the sun.
This is actually the surface of the big, bad, big band started with this huge explosion 13.8 billion years ago.
But at the beginning, it was so dense and so hot light can go through it.
So if you look 13.8 billion years away, you can still see this dense universe.
You can see the big bang in a way, but you can not see the Big Bang, the core of it, because it's so hot and dense, you can see through it.
This is the surface of the big bang. And that's the best you can do with a telescope.
So this is the kind of wall this is the best you can see with any telescopes we can ever build and imagine.
So this beyond this, we have to rely on something different.
So this is the wall. And so beyond this wall, the universe was filled with this tiny elementary particles like electrons and photons.
It was a huge, hot and dense soup of these tiny objects.
So that's the world of quantum world. Universe was made of these tiny things.
And because this is so dense, you can't see through it.
Big Bang is supposed to be over there. But you can really see the core of the big bang.
That was the picture of the surface of the Big Bang on the previous slide.
But of course, we would like to understand what's going on before then. When the universe was 380,000 years old, that's already a very young universe.
If you think of this 13.8 billion years to be a year, then this is like 15 minutes.
So this was a pretty baby universe. The fact that we can see this baby very hot, dense universe today is already amazing enough.
But to really understand the question where we come from, we have to go beyond that.
And for that purpose, we use different kind of machine rather than telescopes.
So this is the best you can do with telescopes. This is the big bang.
This is you thinking about where you coming from 13.8 billion years later.
And using the best telescope we can build. You can go see back to this this point when universe was 380,000 years old.
But we would like to understand what's going on before then.
And for that purpose, we use the second machine I mentioned it's called particle accelerators.
So these machines would speed up our course, the incredible speed and energy,
and you smash them against each other so that you can sort of recreate the big bang in the laboratory.
What we can really do, big bang, but we can do little better. And that's how we try to do using this machine to understand what's going on there.
For example, we can recreate the situation how universe was like when it was about only 3 minutes old, very young universe.
Then you can smash these tiny particles called neutrons and protons against each other.
Then if you do this experiment, you'll find that sometimes they actually stick with each other.
And that must have also happened, the big bang, because we can do it in our own lavatory.
And this is the way this thing called helium, which you can use in a balloon, has to be made in our universe.
And you can also see how much of this helium had been built at the time of the Big Bang.
And you can also observe in the sky how much of that still exists in the universe today.
And they agree very well with each other. It's 3 to 1.
So that's how we know the whole universe was like when it was only 3 minutes old using this new machine called particle accelerators.
You can see beyond this wall and study how the universe was like much earlier on.
So combining these two instruments, giant telescopes and the particle accelerators.
I'd like to talk more about where we actually come from, where you come from.
And that's the topic of my talk today. So, you know, I have three kids and this is a picture of my daughter on a very bad mood day.
And she's obviously made of atoms. So we need to understand where the atoms come from.
And atoms are made of something tiny in the middle called nuclei.
And this nucleus is made of smaller particles called neutrons and protons.
And we also know, learned back in the 1970s that these are also made of even smaller objects called quarks inside.
So where do these things come from? So that's the first question we would like to talk about.
It turns out, as I already mentioned, when the universe was only 3 minutes old, we could make hydrogen and helium.
And these are the only things that were there at the time of this hot, dense universe when it was only a few minutes old.
The rest of the stuff weren't there. But then you would not be here, right?
To build your body, you need carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, calcium, iron.
You need all kinds of elements on this period of table elements.
Where do they come from? Well, if you use, for example, these three helium nuclei together, you hope to build up carbon to build up your body.
But where was this done? We know that we can mimic the condition of the big man.
Big Bang itself didn't do it. We need to do something different in something different.
Actually, it turns out to be this star.
So what's going on inside a star? Why does the sun shine?
And it's actually very interesting to think of the fact that we didn't know the answer to this question until
the beginning of the 20th century is we actually learned this fairly recently in the history of of of science.
And that's all thanks to this guy, Mr. Albert Einstein, who came up with this famous equation,
E equals M.C. squared, which means energy and mass are the same thing.
And after people thought more about this equation, eventually people came up with this idea that sun is shining.
Because of this, you bring in four protons together and they stick with each other and become this helium and speed out.
Actually interesting object called anti-matter. That's a positron.
And another interesting thing called a neutrino. I come back to this in a moment.
And that actually gives away energy. And that's because if you actually put these things on a scale.
What you started out with is heavier than what you end up with.
And that actually doesn't sound right if you think of no collision of cars.
It was a huge accident. Two car comes against each other. They smash against each other.
Then you see a lot of debris is flying apart.
But if you collect all of this debris, collect them all and weigh them together, they should weigh exactly the same amount as the two cars combined.
Right. That that's what we know. That's what we always think. But here's something else happen.
If you smash these things against each other, somehow, you got lighter.
Mars disappeared. But the Mars that disappeared, thanks to this equation, turned into energy.
So that's how the sun is making energy. It's actually shedding its own mass and creating energy.
So as a matter of fact, as the sun is shining and giving us all this abundant light and heat, it's becoming lighter by 4 million tons every second.
It's really setting its own meat to give us all this.
Heaton Energy is doing this incredible thing, and, you know, we can really measure this directly.
So how do we know this is true? Well, one idea people came up with is the following.
So if this reaction is really happening at the core of the sun, again, we can only see the surface no matter how you look.
So how do we know what's going on inside the sun? Well, is this by-product of this reaction called the neutrinos?
And they are incredibly shy. They don't interact very much with pretty much anything.
So even though the sun is such a dense hot ball, it can just go through it very easily.
So if you can, you actually manage to see these nutrients coming from the sun.
You can look directly at the centre of the sun and tell that this is really happening.
Inside the sun, we will know that this is really what's going on to power up the sun.
Can we do that? Well, I already mentioned that these are usually incredibly shy, but they are produced in a great amount.
So as we speak, about 100 trillion neutrinos are going through your body every second.
You might think, oh, that's crazy. We're inside a building. Right? But as I said, neutrinos can go through pretty much anything very easily.
The entire sun, entire earth, they don't care. So this concrete is nothing for them.
Even in the night when the sun is on the other side of the earth, they still come through through the earth.
And this 100 trillion neutrinos are going through your body every second.
Do any of you feel this wind of nutrients coming from the sun? Whenever I ask this question in Brooklyn, somebody always raises his hand.
Oh, Dave does. Yeah. Welcome to the club. So this is all happening right now.
But you don't feel that because they're incredibly shy.
But some people actually manage to see these neutrinos.
And this is one explosion.
Some of the people here are also involved in and this is an experiment built as a huge water tank in underground mine in Japan.
A name of the place is called Cardiaca. And this is a huge instrument.
The name of the instrument is called Supercam. You can do it. And what you see here is that these little eyes and they really act like eyes.
They see light. Each one of them is like this big.
And what you see here is the glider students on a on a on a little rubber boat and they are on a mission.
When you built this thing, you want to see these neutrinos are incredibly shy, so they don't interact very much.
So you tend to get fooled by other things going on. If that water is a little dirty, you need to make this whole thing very, very clean.
So they are on a mission to clean these little eyes, big eyes very carefully.
Wipe it, wipe it, wipe it.
Eventually they go around all the way back after 40 metres.
Then what you do is to pour water into go a notch up, wipe it, wipe it, wipe it all the way back and 40 metres and then another notch up.
It takes about six month to fill this up and just to see how big this thing is, they remove the picture from this bottom to the top of this tank.
It's this big. So it is, for example, right?
The neutrinos are very shy. They don't interact very much.
But if you make a huge target, maybe once in a while, they will produce a little kick inside this water.
And that's what they they can look for. And indeed, they managed to actually do this.
So the burning atoms and the sun produces these neutrinos.
I mentioned this many going through your body every second, but when they come into this water tank once in a while, they produce a little kick.
And even though are so many of them coming from the sun, you get to see them with this huge tank of water.
Like, only, like, ten times a day. But if you are a patient and if you collect ten inches a day patiently over five years, it's like a chemo camera.
The exposure and open for a long time to take a picture of something really, really dark like stars.
You can take a picture of the sun using neutrinos.
Even though this is in pitch darkness a kilometre underground, there's absolutely no light coming into it.
But you can see the sun. This is a picture taken using neutrinos.
You can really see the sun from underground.
And not only you can see the sun, what are seeing is the centre of the sun where that reaction is actually happening.
So we know that the sun and stars actually are burning atoms.
They bring these atoms together to build out the bigger atoms.
That's really happening inside the stars. But.
Okay, so this is about the sun. Do we really know that the other stars are doing the same thing?
Well, we do. So this is actually an amazing example that you can see a explosion of a star at the end of its life.
Even though this particular one is like 160,000 light years away.
And this explosion also brings atoms together and produces a lot of neutrinos, much more so than our sun does.
And the smaller explosion that actually existed before this was supercam.
You can experiment, actually manage to see those. And that happened in February 23rd, 1987.
And this was an incredible feat. These neutrinos took 160,000 years to get to the planet Earth.
And because the the neutron is so shy, most of the time, the only thing you see is the noise.
This is the noise. This is pretty much all you can see. But at one instant, there came a burst of neutrinos.
We were it's actually only 11 of them, but it's a burst.
And lo and behold, when people looked at the telescope and observe the sky, there was this explosion of a star.
So neutron is came from that. And this observation led to a Nobel Prize award to the physicist Mr. Kawashima in Japan.
And I always find this story incredibly amazing.
You know, just a month before this discovery, they actually didn't manage to bring this noise level down.
So if this supernova explosion happened just a month earlier, then the noise was so high that you wouldn't be able to dig this up.
So it became really just the month before. But also a month later, because Shiva was supposed to retire the mandatory retirement.
So there was only two month window and the story exploded,
360 thousands before the middle of this two month window so that he could get a Nobel Prize.
So you see, you need the incredible luck to earn a Nobel Prize.
But we learn something from this. These stars are so far away, nobody can get to them.
But they do the same thing our sun does. They bring atoms together, build up bigger atoms, and let the neutrinos out from this reaction.
So this is the way we now learn that this is how we actually came to exist at the beginning of the universe.
We can study this with particle accelerators. You can build up only up to helium, no carbon, no oxygen, no calcium, no iron.
But the first stars got built using just hydrogen and helium.
And while this other star burns and shines, it builds these more complex atoms at the very centre of these of these stars.
So the stars are actually the factory or building bigger atoms.
But if the atoms are built, but if they stay there inside the sun, you still wouldn't exist because you don't get to use them.
You need to take them out. It's so conveniently that some of these stars actually do explode.
So they do this factory of building heavier atoms inside a star.
Once they explode, they spit everything out into the empty space.
And eventually those little atoms spit out from this x one of the stars.
You can collect them later and build the second generation of star.
Again, inside the star, you'll feel more and more atoms. Inside it's another factory.
In a way, they explore the game. Then you build the grandson star, the third generation.
And it is sort of belief that our son is the grandson.
It's the third generation of stars. So when it was already built, there was plenty of other elements in it.
Iron, calcium and oxygen and so on.
So that's how planet Earth already did have those elements, and that's how you could be born.
So it's literally the case that my daughter and everybody here came from these exploding stars.
And those explosions also led to a Nobel Prize, which is kind of convenient thing.
So if you ask the question where you come from, you should answer.
We are stardust. You came from stars. Of course, I don't recommend this.
If we meet somebody for the first time, if they ask you, where do you come from?
If you tell them you come from the stars, you know they think that you are. I wouldn't say.
But anyway. So I don't recommend it. But this is true.
You came from stars. Well, you know, there's one little problem with this thought that, you know,
if the sun is keeps burning like this, it's burning hydrogen to build up helium and heavier atoms on the way.
Eventually, our sun would also have energy crisis.
It would run out of fuel. So what happens then?
Then it can't make energy anymore, so it can sustain its own weight.
So at the centre of sun we just sort of go boom, it collapses.
And as a result, the outer part of the sun would bounce back and becomes bigger and bigger and the
sun becomes as big as to the extent of basically swallowing up all planet earth,
maybe not exactly swallowing it, but we get knocked down. So we get all civil so we wouldn't be able to live on this planet anymore.
So that is supposed to happen in about four and a half billion years from now.
So hopefully this is enough time so that we can get ready to escape a planet or to go somewhere else.
So that's the end of our solar system. Okay.
But we still haven't quite understood where we come from.
I talked about this little nucleus at the centre of atoms, but we still need these electrons moving about to build atoms.
Where do they come from? Well, these electrons actually want to go with speed of light.
So if you want to keep them going about around the nucleus to build atoms and build up of bodies, you need to slow them down.
How do we do that? Well, this is where something called the Higgs boson comes in.
You may have heard of this name. It was discovered at CERN using this experiment called Large Hadron Collider three years ago.
It was a huge coverage over the media. And this Higgs boson is the reason why you exist.
So let's let's talk about this. So this is the machine that built at CERN at the border of Switzerland and France.
This is the border and this is Geneva Airport.
And they have dug this underground tunnel, which is bigger than the runways on airport circumference of 27 kilometres.
It's a big underground tunnel.
And inside this underground tunnel, there's this tremendous high tech instruments just lined up one after another, all the way around 27 kilometres.
It's a huge machine. And inside this huge machine, you speed up these tiny particles, protons I talked about already,
and you make it to an incredible energy and eventually smash them against each other.
So that's the way we would like to create conditions of the Big Bang.
Big Bang, even earlier than the 3 minutes I talked about.
You want to go back even earlier to understand where things come from?
So that's this machine called LHC or Large Hadron Collider, and that led to this discovery called the Higgs boson.
This is some of the ways the Higgs boson had been discovered. And for us working in the field, this was an amazing moment.
You know, this had been in the work for a long time. So it was discovered, announced on July 14, 2012.
And a couple of people in here that actually came up with this idea that our universe is filled with these tiny particles called Higgs boson.
It's everywhere. It's here. It's there. It's everywhere.
It's completely frozen into empty space. And this crazy idea came out back in 1964, like 50 years ago.
That's when this idea was proposed. And people start to think about how to actually discover this particle like 30 years ago.
And they started to actually build this machine, like, 15 years ago.
And only now we got to the stage of discovering this very, very important particle.
So that was a moment of huge celebration, especially in the United States.
I was at home in Berkeley. This is the July 4th.
That's Independence Day, the United States. So we all decided to celebrate Higgs Dependence Day.
And it was a huge media coverage all over the world.
And the people here and also my colleagues in Brooklyn, Tokyo, are working together to build this again, humongous instrument.
So when you smash these particles against each other, an incredible speed, incredible energy,
a lot of the breeze would fly out from the collision and it would like to detect all of them.
Then for that purpose, again, you need a big instrument like this one, and this one is called Atlas.
And I hope you can see this little figures. This is the size of the human.
This is huge. And it's a very complex instrument, too.
So the name Atlas is really meant to indicate that this is a big instrument.
And using this instrument, you would like to really see the details or what exactly was happening around at the beginning of the universe,
when it was very dense, very hot, and a lot of energy.
And people on this, this group called Atlas, they're working together, thousands of physicists working together from around the world.
Now, this one one thing I really admire about them, because this kind of study is done using taxpayers money.
They really feel strongly that we have to give what they are doing back to taxpayers.
And they created this video even before they actually finished building the instrument.
So this is the way you bring protons against each other. This is the incredible energy of the collision.
A lot of things come out. Then you start to see what movie they had in mind, and they were pretty serious about this.
Just. Just keep watching. Pretty good, huh?
So. So this is what they built and this is the picture doing.
They are building this humongous instrument. Again, you see a guy sitting at the centre of this, I guess this is running out of battery.
So I try to use the cursor hoping, look, I don't know.
But anyway, I hope you see this this person in the middle. It's not quite working.
Uh. Sorry. So, anyway, so you see a guy in the middle, and this is still doing construction.
So the inside is kind of empty. But this got all filled up with the high tech instruments eventually.
And using this instrument, they actually discover the Higgs boson.
You know, this is, you know, basically collection of metals and the wires.
And these are, you know, high tech material. But, you know, if you look at this picture, people sort of saw some sense of beauty in it.
So not only that this has done an incredible scientific discovery, it also made an influence in the world of art.
For example, this is the video clip from an opera done in Valencia, Spain.
And you can see this space that is out backlit. So there's a big influence, just not as high as but also in the world of art and music.
So this is what they have done. Smashed protons against each other.
And you see these two bodies flying apart from there. Then what you can see is these are two green things.
And these green things are actually a particle of light, very high energy.
And by looking at these things, they could tell that something interesting happened.
So when you actually managed to create this Higgs boson, unfortunately, it actually disintegrates in an instant.
But what it can hope to see is the debris when Higgs boson disintegrates.
And by looking at this debris as the fly apart from each other. You can tell that something disintegrated.
And that actually turned out to be the Higgs boson.
So in this particular case, expose on the disintegrated into two particles of light called photons that.
And it's really amazing that they actually managed to see this in the midst of something like this.
Each time you collate this collection of a bag of protons against each other, you see this huge mess.
But inside this huge mess, they managed to pick up what they were looking for.
And they keep doing this like tens of quadrillion collisions.
And then what you're looking for is about 100 out of them. So, you know, it's really a needle in the haystack.
But, you know, using the modern technology, using this computer, a big data,
you can use them to dig out these tiny, tiny signals out of this big mess.
So what did we learn from this? Well, so we know it started out very hot and dense and something being hot like this.
People coming up from volcano. I mean, the tiny particles of flying, that incredible speed.
This is what it means to be hot. You have these tiny particles zooming about and that's what is hot when you go out in the summertime.
You feel that air is very hot. It's because these tiny molecules are bumping into your face all the time and that makes you hot.
So this is what it means to be hot. So it's such a big chaos.
But when you cool it, for example, the vapour, if you're cooled down, eventually becomes ice.
Right. And ice is a very orderly object.
These tiny things are lined up very, very neatly. So there's an order to it.
So if you stop, is something hot? That's a disorder or chaos.
And if cooled it down, it actually creates order. And that's exactly what Higgs boson did.
Higgs boson was flying about, zooming about very incredible speed in the chaos of the beginning of the universe right after the big bang.
But as the universe cooled at some point. Higgs boson frozen everywhere and filled up the entire universe.
So how cold the universe was back then? Well, it became as cold as 4 quadrillion degrees.
But that was cold enough for the Higgs boson. Higgs boson frozen to space.
And that's the space we live in. So what's going on then?
Is this. So, as I said, these tiny particles called electrons want to zoom at the speed of light.
That's what it wants to do. But it's living in this universe filled with the Higgs boson.
So he bumps into it and he can go with the speed of light anymore.
It slows down, and that's how it can happily move out this atomic nucleus to build up the atoms.
And then you. So we need the Senate.
So if the expose on that frozen in the entire space due to some reason evaporates this instance,
then electrons start to move at the speed of light in your body also evaporate in about a billionth of a second.
Higgs boson is what is keeping you together. It's doing this incredibly important job to create order to the universe.
So right after discovery, I was actually called to a TV station, that broadcaster NHK, that's sort of similar to BBC in this country.
And this is actually a prime time TV news show. And the host of the show actually asked me a very simple question.
Okay, Mr. Moriyama, you're telling me that our universe is filled with this thing?
I sort of get it. But if it's here, why don't we notice it?
Why didn't we know this stuff before? And this is a tough question to answer.
So this is the way he responded. Well, it's sort of just like the air.
Do you feel are living inside the air? We don't we can't see it.
We can smell it. We can touch it. We can taste it.
How do we know that the air is around us?
Well, of course, ancient people actually didn't know that. Right.
And so if the only way you can tell that there's something out here, of course, we learned that in school.
Maybe parents tell us about it. That's how we know.
But the only way we sort of sense that something's out there and when there's a motion, if the emotion of the air,
that's the wind and the wind actually blushes your face, then you can tell some things out there.
But still, Asian people thought there's something called wind.
It's very hard to tell that we are living in the air.
So if something is always there, you take it for granted.
It's very hard to tell that it's actually there. So he exposed.
It's very similar. So if we can create motion and expose on, you can probably feel the wind of exposure.
But that's very hard to do. It's really stuck together, frozen in very, very tight and rigidly in space.
You can't really push it and produce any motion and exposure on.
So all you can do is okay, if it's here, I take a hammer, then whack and one of them pop up.
That's exactly what this experiment did. You bring in these high energy protons against each other and you've smashed them against each other.
That's the hammer you whack. Empty space with this hammer.
But space actually is an empty is filled with the Higgs boson.
So one of them popped up, then decayed right away.
But we managed to capture that, to breathe. So that's how we discovered the Higgs boson.
But next question. This newscast they ask me is, okay, that kind of makes sense.
But now we need to tell the story to the average viewers for this program.
How do we do that? I'm going to have to think of quite a bit about this question, but in the end, I said, okay, bring in a bunch of kids.
Like this? No. If the kids are running around, that's the chaos.
That's the beginning of the universe. Everything was flying around, zooming around very hard.
And that's the way it was. Was like. It's a big chaos. But then comes the magician, Mr. Higgs boson.
And this magician casts spell on these bunch of kids, and somehow they slow down and sit at their own desk.
This desk is the nucleus. The kids are the electrons.
And now you'll find atoms. That's where you came from.
But he has a little problem. So who is this Higgs boson, then?
That brought order to the universe. We discovered it, but we still haven't seen its face.
It's faceless. We don't quite know what this thing actually is.
You know, we have discovered this particle. But what is it? And this is the kind of particle nobody has seen before.
Very, very unusual. Well, it's kind of strange to think that there's one particle with no other particles of similar type.
But this particle, too, is the most important thing in the universe. That doesn't sound right.
Maybe it got siblings. And why exactly is part of that frozen in to empty space?
We don't know that either. So there are still a lot of mysteries about this particle.
And what I mean by not having a face is that is this every particle we have seen before,
electrons photon the particle flight or the other particles we have seen before are like, plop.
It's spinning forever. It's a total clock. It's spinning forever.
All of the particles we have seen before are doing it.
And if particles spinning, depending on which way it spins, you know, it kind of looks different from each other.
So you've got a face, you can recognise it. But this particle is totally faceless.
It's not spinning. No matter how you look at it, it looks exactly the same.
That's what I meant. Doesn't have a face. And that's a very, very unusual thing.
So that's why I actually said it's a spooky particle and because it's such a strange thing to think about a particle without a face.
When I first learned about this idea, you know, ranging 50 years ago when I was back in grad school, I couldn't believe it at all.
No way such a particle could never exist. So I ended up writing scientific papers about Higgs less theories.
But now it's discovered. You know, clearly I was wrong and pretending I'm a proper Japanese.
I go to conferences and apologise like this.
Okay. What's wrong? But it really brings up these questions.
Is it the only one? Is this such a special part? Because that's the only one.
Does he have siblings and relatives? Or maybe it's some spending an extra dimensional space?
There is actually a serious theory called extra dimensions.
Our universe has three dimensions up, down, from back, left, right.
But some people think that they're actually tiny up dimensions everywhere in the universe.
We don't get to see. So maybe the six balls on is actually spinning.
But spinning in this extra dimension, we don't see that. You can tell it's spinning.
No, that's a that's a serious possibility. Well, maybe it's wrong to think that this is an elementary particle like electron.
Maybe it's actually a build-up of some smaller things. And why did sparkle freeze into this empty space when universe was incredibly hot?
Well, you know, we run at least something that this thing exists.
And to learn what this thing actually is, you need to look at it from many different dimensions and angles.
And that's what astronomers have been very good at.
Once you discovered an object, you use a different kind of light to study it using different kind of instruments.
And eventually you learn that this funny shaped object is actually a result of the merger of two galaxies.
And that's why it looks like a sort of like a Valentine picture of hot in the middle and the swing coming up with like a ribbon.
So if you look at it with many different methods, maybe you can tell better what's really going on.
So that's one of the things I would really love to do.
So at the Large Hadron Collider, you are smashing these bags, of course, scoring protons against each other.
And so this worked incredibly well. We did discover the Higgs boson that way.
But, you know, if you're colliding a bag of stuff against each other, it's like smashing a cherry pie against cherry pie.
What you really want to study is to see how cherry picked and another cherry picked would collide against each other into something interesting.
And but if you actually do this, of course, cherry pits may still meet with each other,
but you get this incredible goo coming out from just smashing cherry pies.
That's why the pixel look very complicated. But if you managed to bring cherry pits against severe pits, then you don't have this goo extra goo.
So you get to see much more clearly what's going on. Right.
But you can immediately see, you know, throwing the cherry pie is kind of easy thing to do.
And make them meet against each other is also kind of easy or relatively speaking.
But throwing sometimes something that is tiny is already hard enough.
Making the meat is also very hard. So indeed, this is technologically much more challenging.
In this case. This cherry pit is an elementary particle electron and its anti-matter counterpart called positron.
But, you know, people have learned that maybe we can actually do this.
And that is a project called ALS, the International Linear Collider.
So you bring in these electrons against each other after sort of waiting them over a long section of about 15 kilometres.
And this, a yellow thing is called cryo modules. They've got actually cooled down to only like a and down to that -270 degrees.
So it's a very, very cold object. And inside this cold object, you actually bring the electrons in.
And what you do is basically like a surface. You're big in wave.
It's called wave. You wave and you put electron on top of the wave that get a little kick all the time from the behind,
it gets accelerated and eventually becomes course the speed of light.
And you bring them over in the middle and apply them from both direction.
You focus them down to incredibly small size and smash them against each other.
Then you see a collision without this incredible goo.
You see much more clearly what's going on. So that's actually something we hope to do in the future.
Okay. But this is not the end of the story. Okay. We learned atoms were made thanks to stars and Higgs boson.
That's great, but we still need stars.
Where do the stars come from? If you don't answer this question, you still haven't understood where you come from.
And at this stage, when you ask the question, how were the stars made, there is still a big mystery.
And that big mystery is called dark matter. We don't still have an answer to this question.
So if you take pictures with telescopes, sometimes you'll find really, really cute objects like this one.
Isn't this cute? You see two eyes, nose, mouth, sort of the the frame of the piece.
And this thing is so cute. I got me this this sort of size called Cheshire Cat.
Like in Alice in Wonderland. And what do you see here is something very, very strange.
What you see is something really, really stretched out, right? Something very long.
There can't be such a thing. It can't be a galaxy.
What is this? There can't be such a funny shape galaxy in the universe.
It turns out that this is actually dark matter.
Playing tricks on you. There are many similar things you can also see in the cluster of galaxies.
This is the picture I have shown you at the beginning of my talk. Again, you see something that's really, really stretched out.
And I it's too bad that my point is not working.
I hope you can see something really, really stretched out over here like this.
Another one over there like that. You see another one up here, too?
It's very long. So these things are actually also something that dark matter played tricks on us.
They are supposed to be irregularly shaped galaxy. Just a round object.
But dark matter playing tricks on them. They look really, really stretched out.
So how does that work? Well, it works like this.
When you have the collection of dark matter, the gravity is very strong because there's so much dark matter out there.
And when the gravity is strong, gravity, of course, pulls stuff.
So if there is this dark matter here, if there's another galaxy behind it,
the light coming from that galaxy actually falls because the gravity pulls, it doesn't go straight.
So dark matter then acts like a lens.
That's the trick document is playing on you. So this faraway galaxy, the light comes this way.
And on its way, light bends. So it's like a lens. And once it does that, the image of this faraway galaxy gets totally stretched out.
And that's something you can actually simulate using computers.
So all of these faraway galaxies have this regular shape round.
But here's a lot of dark matter. And if these galaxies flow behind this dark matter, then the light from those galaxies get bent.
And then it looks like it's really, really stretched out. But as it passes behind it completely, it comes back to the original shape.
So the shape itself has never been affected, but it's just a little trick played by dark matter in front of them.
But this is great. You know, we don't know what the stock camera is, actually.
But if they can play tricks on you, then you can tell where the tricksters are.
So using this, you can actually image dark matter, even though it's absolutely invisible in telescopes.
So this is the kind of picture you can take using modern telescopes and forget about these these bright objects.
They are nearby stars. We only interested in your faraway galaxies here.
And these little dots are galaxies. But using one telescope, you can really tell its shape, even though they are billions of light years away.
And then you find that they are also stretched out. So they are tricks played on this on you.
Then you can tell where the trick stars are. So even in this picture in telescope, you have no signs of dark matter whatsoever.
You can tell that they are actually right here. With modern technology, you can create maps of this dark matter, very mysterious object.
You can't really see with any form of light, but you can tell where they are.
And again, people here are working on this as well.
So at my institute, this model here at the college is a professor who is actually a great master in creating these maps.
And you can also he see his assistant, a very important person.
This way we learn something very striking. We talked about atoms and where the atoms came from, and that's what we are made of.
But atoms is a tiny minority in the universe.
More than 80% of of the matter in the universe is actually this dark matter.
We don't know what it is. We are totally outnumbered.
So this is what universe is actually made of. And the most striking picture, because of the tricks by dark matter is this one.
So this looks like a beautiful picture of the cluster of galaxies 4 billion light years away.
And when I saw this picture for the first time, you know, I wish that I could be there as this looks like such a beautiful place.
But I regretted that I was happy that I'm not there because something incredibly ugly happened.
So what's shown in this picture in pink is ordinary gas, mostly hydrogen.
But it got heated up so much that it lights up with X-ray very hot gas and used hot gas.
Here's another hot gas. What's painted in blue is the tricksters.
We know dark matter is there because they play tricks on you.
So here's dark matter. Yes. Also dark matter. Now, this pair of dark matter and gas is one cluster of galaxies.
This pair of dark matter and gas is another cluster of galaxies.
But one thing is strange about this. The picture is that dark matter and gas are not together.
It shouldn't be that way because dark matter has so much gravity.
It pulls everything in. They're supposed to be together. So the reason why they are separated like this one is something ugly happened.
Namely that this cluster of galaxies and another cluster of galaxies collided at an incredible speed of 4500 kilometres per second.
Once it lost that this happens. So each cluster is basically a collection of dark matter with a little bit of gas sprinkled in.
When they collide, the gas would collide against each other. They get heated up.
There's a friction. They slow down. But the argument just keeps moving on as if nothing has happened.
And that's how they got separated. And thus, you can understand this picture.
So what do you learn from this cold bullet cluster?
Is that the dark matter went through the other one like a bullet and didn't seem to have any affected at all.
So dark matter is like a little ghost muscle, like neutrinos.
They are incredibly high. Don't seem to interact at all with the rest of us.
So it is really a spooky object. Hmm.
But this is also a very important object because dark matter is a man without dark matter.
We would not have been born. What this is showing is the computer simulation, how the universe changed from the beginning to now.
So at the beginning there was a little then spots of dark matter.
And if there's a dense spot that would pull more stuff in there and becomes denser and then gravity becomes even stronger,
I suppose most of it becomes even more dense. And then you create this contrast between dense spots and empty spots.
And it is ten spots. There's so much dark matter, so much gravity pulls in.
The ordinary gas and gas would scatter against each other.
Maybe slight cools down and eventually form stars and galaxies.
That's how we were born. But in a computer, you can simulate a hypothetical wrong universe that doesn't have dark matter.
Then, you know, even though there may be some tiny variation in atoms, gravity is not strong enough.
13.8 periods later, there's still no ten spots.
Empty spots, no contrast. No stars, no galaxies, no us.
So without dark matter, there wouldn't be any stars and there wouldn't be any us.
So dark matter is really our mom. And this story, this is the picture of a Nobel laureate, George Smoot, my colleague in Berkeley.
And when he got Nobel Prize. University administration asked him to do something interesting.
And this is what he did. And so when they said we wanted to create a new bang with you guys, you know what I said?
No way. I want to be in Somalia two or three days a year to do this before the second day.
So the idea is everything in the early years was back together, very densely made up of an infinite number of people.
So we just that is what we got. And then everything stretched and everything got bigger.
And the further away or the faster you go.
So we didn't want to start the beginning with everybody tax debts and just run around and play like a rabbit.
Everybody is worried. They're running very fast, moving faster until people get inside and there's a little bit of irregular motion.
So. What happens is you're going to form a little less together in five Six Flags, and that will be three people waving goodbye.
And then slowly as you move out of the Liverpool Galaxy, which are round one people.
So now there is a brass section that will go to.
They make a really spectacular flutter about this very big one like early.
So they really don't have to go down so fast that you get to make way for a to get away and you get a is about this whole.
This is how you were born. But you have to remember, 80% of people here are dark matter.
You don't see them in Georgetown with himself. It's a centre of a milky Way galaxy, apparently.
So he's actually a black hole as heavy as 4 million times our sun.
I get you don't get to see it. So Universe is full of these invisible things.
But what exactly is this dark matter? It's all Mom. We would like to meet her and thank her.
But we still haven't done that yet. At least we have an idea.
So it's sort of like monster version of neutrinos.
They are so shy they can pass through the entire earth very easily.
We don't get to feel them. And they got the name called Wimps.
And Wimp stands for weakly interacting massive particle.
This is probably a stable, tiny, tiny particles, elementary particles born in the Big Bang itself.
And pretty much all of them have disappeared by now, but some of them are still out there.
And that's the dark matter. At least that's the idea. But once you have this idea, you know, that sounds familiar, right?
We managed to capture neutrinos. What have we done?
Go underground. Go to a quiet place. And the reason is that if you're on the surface, it's like in Manhattan or London.
It's so noisy. You don't get to hear anything very subtle.
You need to go somewhere quiet. And a quiet place is indeed underground.
I used to walk underground myself. It actually looks something like this together with my family.
So it's a dark spot, but nonetheless,
you can build that game the instruments and try to hope that maybe once in a while Dogmatic sneaks in underground and produce a little kick.
Which you wouldn't miss. You hope so. And one places people here also work in this laboratory called Snow Lab in Canada.
You go underground and build again, instruments like this one and hoping for a dark matter to produce a little kick once in a while.
Well, I told you that the neutrinos you may see, say ten of them a day.
But in the case of dark matter, maybe you see two of them a year.
You have to be even more patient. But that's what people are trying to do.
And even Stephen Hawking visited this place, another where you might actually find dark matter.
It's make them if big man made them, maybe we can make them, too, by using these giant particle accelerators.
So these are things both going on and you're looking for something like this.
This is a sign that dark matter has to be made in these experiments.
And by combining what you actually have learned from telescopes,
you can map out where dark matter is and you can go underground trying to see if dark matter produced a little kick once in a while.
Well, maybe you can make them using giant accelerators. We hope to understand what document actually is.
We'll get to thank eventually.
But in addition, not only learning what Dogma is actually about, we also learn about the universe when The Dark Knight is born.
That's when the universe was only like a 10th of a billionth of a second old.
We get all the way back to where they started using dark matter and expose on.
That's how we tried to approach this question. Where we come from, how this universe got started, and what it's made of.
And I have to jump ahead and talk a bit. But one strange thing, which is also a very important subject we are studying right now,
and that has to do not at the beginning of the universe, but the fate of the universe.
Then I finish up. So I told you the universe was getting bigger.
It started with a big fan. It's getting bigger and bigger. And that is still sounds like a just incredible thing.
But according to Einstein, it just, again, gravity.
It's basically like standing on a surface of the earth, holding a ball in my hand and then throw the ball like this upward.
Initial thrust is the big bang. That was this huge explosion.
The way the ball keeps going upwards corresponds to how the universe expands over time.
And if you think about it, if I follow a ball upwards, then eventually would slow down, stop and come back down and hits the ground.
So we used to think that universe started with the Big Bang, stopped expanding for a while,
but eventually stops, come back down and eventually hits the ground.
They go. And universe and what's called Big Crunch Universe ends in a big crunch.
We used to think that way. But again, it's science.
We would like to make sure that is the case by doing observation.
Again, principle is very simple. You measure how the universe is expanding nearby, and then you can tell the universe is expanding.
How fast it is is expanding very recently. If you look far away again, you look back into the past.
If you measure how quickly this is expanding far away, you can tell how it was expanding long time ago, and you can compare that.
Does it really slow down, as we thought, according to Einstein.
But people discovered it's actually speeding up. It's crazy.
Something is pushing. Gravity only pulls, but something is pushing.
And he may actually go even crazier that if the universe gets faster and faster at some point, it may become infinitely faster.
Some point the universe gets infinite, ripped apart and ends there.
And that possibility is called the big rip. And, you know, we don't know this is the case, but that's something we would like to study, too.
So I told you really strange things about today. So we have these atoms.
They they actually do make up only like 4% of the universe. And they are inside this box called the universe.
When you leave us with some twice as big box is eight times bigger and atoms thin out eight times thinner.
Dark matter is about 23% of the universe. We still don't know what it is, but it's matter.
So if the universe becomes twice as big, the universe is eight times bigger, then it becomes thinner eight times.
But this dark energy we call that's pushing the universe,
making the universe faster and faster and ripping it apart is actually even 73% of the universe.
And as the universe becomes bigger, it looks like it doesn't thin out, becomes bigger and bigger.
That's how it keeps pushing. The universe becomes faster and faster.
It looks really crazy. And this is the key on the fate of the universe.
We'd like to know its nature better. When the box becomes eight times bigger, does eight energy become precisely eight times bigger?
Well, maybe seven times. Then it would eventually slow down, or maybe nine times bigger.
Then we're heading to this big rip. So we would like to study this question again using telescope, observing faraway galaxies,
and making sure that we actually do a very precise measurements.
Unfortunately, the process I'm leading still is lacking funds, so I created a promotional video to solicit donations.
I going to pass out pass later on. So here's the promotion video.
So we need to study these far away galaxies to understand how the universe began, thanks to dark matter and with heading to thanks to dark energy.
And we also would like to understand how our own Milky Way galaxy had been made.
Why do we exist? And so we need to study light coming from these galaxy, billions of light years away.
And it's incredible to think that that light particles that travel billions of years all the time eventually finds our galaxy,
finds us for the first time, and finds the planet Earth, a big island of Hawaii.
That's where we have this big telescope possible. And those particles of light get into this telescope, bounces back by the mirror.
And you have these robotically controlled fibres that actually captures these light that gets eventually fit another system called spectrograph.
And there you can see a detail of what the colour of this individual light is.
And that's the way we would like to understand where we are going.
Dark energy is ripping the universe apart, but somehow it is actually determining the fate of the universe.
And by knowing better and better about what exactly is doing,
we hope to understand if there is an end to the universe, what is the fate of the universe?
So clearly you can see this instrument rocks.
So this is the end of my story. And I initially prepared this talk for the visual particles and feels that's an entity in American physical society.
And I told you already that what physicists, astronomers,
science in general would like to do is to really try to answer these simple questions by little kids.
How did the universe begin? What is fate? What is made off?
What are its fundamental laws? And where do we come from?
And I talked a lot about this problem, but you can also see all of these questions are very much interrelated.
And hopefully, after doing these observations and experiments, we make progress to win this fight.
Thanks for your attention.