Building a Big Bang Machine on the Moon - with James Beacham

If we could build a particle collider so large that it stretches around the moon, what physics could we uncover? James Beacham takes us on a tour of particle physics.

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The Large Hadron Collider switched on in 2015 at the highest energy ever, re-creating the conditions of the universe as they were just a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, and what physicists are learning so far is that our universe seems to be … extremely odd. But to know exactly how odd it is we need to build a bigger collider, to get even closer to the moment of the Big Bang. How big do we need to go? Join particle physicist James Beacham as he explores what we would likely learn from a hadron collider around the moon, such as whether we live in a multiverse — and what this means for society.

James Beacham is a post-doctoral researcher with The Ohio State University, based full-time at CERN, where he is a member of the ATLAS Experiment collaboration, one of the two teams that discovered the Higgs boson in 2012.

His research focuses on finding explanations for some of the key unsolved mysteries of the universe, like determining what dark matter is, whether the Higgs boson is standard or not-so-standard, why gravity is so weak compared to the other forces of nature, and whether there are hidden, dark sector forces out there that we've yet to uncover in collider experiments.

This talk and Q&A was filmed at the Ri on 27 March 2018.

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[GammaFields]

James Beacham; one of my new heroes.❤ Never shall we stop looking up and asking those big questions that arent being begged to be answered.

[TechNed]

I really liked the 2 cars annihilating into a bicycle which explodes into 2 skateboards thing!

[geeky_explorer]

Probably the finest lecture have ever seen from RI, it's a previledge for us to get those lectures for free

[DumbAsh]

Near the end of his speeches he always delves into politics.... I love it, I love everything he has to say

[PencilfDoom]

Great talk... I found his enthusiasm for the subject so contagious that his halting, sometimes stammering delivery was all the more engaging rather than being a distraction as it can often be. This bubbly gawkiness merely served to make his penultimate diatribe on geopolitics / macroeconomics incredibly poignant, as his countenance fell grave, the camera pushing in on his glossy eyes... regardless of whatever collectivist utopia the visions of which he may harbor in that sweetly bleeding heart of his, one thing is certain; he loves humanity as much as the matter of which we are comprised.

[alejandrogomez]

Dark matter, dark energy, supersimetry, multiverse, all this make me think about the "Ether" and "Primium movile" of Ptolomeo. After 2000 years of modern physics and maths we have made some discoveries but seems to be that we have no idea of how the universe really works or what is it made of.

[Penndennis]

At 9.52 Two white males? Really! What's their skin colour got to do with it?

[etmax]

I would have thought that particle colliders need to be shielded from natural radiation/particles to such a degree that they benefit from being on a planet with a dense atmosphere (Earth) and then buried underground to further attenuate the noise. Add to this the cost of shipping stuff to the moon. This would sort of rule out the moon as a location.
A more natural location would be somewhere out in central Australia, basically a really big flat area. It might not make the grade in available size, but it would still offer a massive increase in size

[danielhavens]

I believe, if it were to be done, we would need to mine the resources and make the materials there on the moon. The fuel costs of launching the raw materials off of Earth to then decelerate them onto the moon would be ridiculously high.
The first thing would be to build a lunar space port for the reception of initial equipment including prospecting and mining equipment.

[biffy]

Thank you Prof. James Beacham for a challenging talk. You've presented an interesting question: Should the wealth of humanity be concentrated in the hands of a few or should it be used for scientific research?

Some people in the comments say you have no place asking that question. I say, ask away. If science is our best understanding of nature at this time, then there are no questions you can not ask.

[matthewjpace]

The guys that wrote everything everywhere all at once definitely saw this lecture

[HatRSol]

Regardless of my judgement of the idea of building a PC around the moon; I respect this man and wish earth was full of his alikes.

[sgtshatta]

James is the first scientist I’ve seen that openly recognizes the empire is stifling human progress. I like this guy, well done.

[unclerick]

I scrolled down to comment on what apparently most others have noticed: What's with the "two white males" remark? Are you kidding me?
"Welp, looks like two *white males* won the Nobel prize again."
No, two hard working scientists won the Nobel prize.

[Yodel]

Mindblowing! We actually bent light and by doing that we countered dark matter and dark energy by adding a sliver of light where there should not have been any because that higgs boson added light to light without borrowing from it's source. That's really cool. It's actually like reversing time and I think that is really amazing. I'm blown. I wonder how many gravitrons are in a proton.

[peterpalumbo]

According to a not too long ago book on S-Particles there could be 5 Higgs Bosons. If we had a bigger machine maybe we could discover additional Higgs Bosons. If I recall there was a recent 'blip' at about 750 million ev. Mabey this is another form of the Higgs Boson. An interesting experiment could be to expose a target to a beam of Higgs Bosons and see if there is a weight or mass change in the target associated with the beam or field.

[sgramstrup]

Finally, a scientist who speak out on this infantile ideological system we are in now.

We could easily use scientific thinking to better the human condition, and to better every scientific field. We can easily 'afford' this and every other thing we want, but the current ideological (non-scientific) system are holding us all back.

Thank you James.

[jerrygundecker]

Would it be harder to build it in space rather than the moon? And how much harder to have machines doing most of the work?

[rameyzamora]

Speculative scientific ideas that cannot be proved are called Science Fiction. I think it's great that young physicists like Beacham are open to the marvelous ideas that are still speculative.

[diwitdharpatitripathi]

U know that. Billion trillion zillion, every imaginable figures of measurement. And exceeding that too . That kinda immortality.