Speaker 0:  cern has switched off the world's most powerful particle collider, and it will stay largely silent for about four years. they're not rebuilding it to smash particles much harder, but to produce so many more collision that events currently buried in statistical noise may finally become visible. the large hadron collider has gone dark, and engineers are now dismantling parts of a machine buried beneath two countries. when it returns around 2030, it will create up to 200 proton collisions at once and attempt to tell them apart to within trillions of a second. cern's solution to not finding enough new physics is beautifully scientific. run the experiment several billion more times. the difficult part is that every collision now arrives with a 199 unwanted remains. what do you think about this, john?

Speaker 1:  yeah. this, so there's a lot of people that have said that since the, lhc, large hadron collider, has gone offline, they feel more rested. so, kinda weird, but, anyways, very interesting. so the large hadron collider is essentially the world's most advanced microscope. and so instead of using light, they smash protons together at nearly the speed of light, and they study the smallest building blocks of the universe. and so they've used it to discover the higgs boson in 2012. but there's a lot of big mysteries are, that still are out there. dark matter, dark energy, why matter exists at all, and whether there are undiscovered particles. so rather than building an entirely new machine, which would cost billions and billions of dollars and take millions of years, they're giving me this they're giving the lhc a big upgrade. so they're going to replace more than a kilometer of accelerator components. they're gonna install stronger superconducting metals. they're gonna upgrade detectors, improve data systems. and then when it starts in 2030, it's going to become the high luminosity lhc. and so it won't necessarily smash particles with much higher energy. it will smash many more of them. and so it's gonna create vastly larger datasets, and, hopefully, they'll be able to find those extremely rare phenomena that could reshape modern physics. so, the difference between energy and luminosity, though, is, the biggest misconception is that increasing the collider's energy, the biggest misconception is that cern is increasing the collider's energy, but it isn't. it's already accelerating. i think it's, like, 14 tera electron volts, which is ridiculous. so luminosity, it measures how many particle collisions occur over time. so if you can think of it like buying lottery tickets, increasing energy is like buying one expensive ticket. increasing luminosity is like buying millions of tickets. and so the prize of this is discovering new physics. so, it's still unlikely that they're going to discover these new new particles or discover dark matter and discover more of this stuff, but, the chances of doing that if you collect more data, is gonna improve dramatically. so, this is really cool. i love what the large hadron collider is all about and what they're looking to detect and and all of the science behind it. what do you think about this upgrade?

Speaker 0:  the most compelling technology may be the detector is not the collider itself. 5,000,000,000 channels silicon tracking, picosecond timing, and real time filtering systems capable of discarding nearly everything the machine produces. now this is a multibillion dollar bet that nature may reveal itself through tiny statistical deviations rather than one spectacular new particle. i think this is interesting. you know, like you said, people are feeling better potentially after shutdown, but the running joke for a long time was the world broke back back in 2016 when they fired it up in the first place. so, is this gonna fix the world or not? who knows? but cern is studying a proposed 91, kilometer future circular collider. a decision on whether to proceed is expected around 2028, but no construction, decision is final. so this looks interesting. i love what they're doing. they're just gonna every time the lasers cross, it produces, hundreds more. so they're gonna think of this like trying to understand 200 conversations happening simultaneously in one crowded room. ordinary tracking tells you where each speaker is standing, but many voices overlap. precision timing gives every word a time stamp accurate enough to determine which conversation it belongs to, you know, at the picosecond level. this technology is really cool. light travels only about nine millimeters in thirty picoseconds. thirty picosecond sounds abstract. so picture this. in that amount of time, light travels less than a centimeter. that timing position helps distinguish collisions occurring almost simultaneously. so this is like, the technology here is really, really cool. so i'm looking forward to this. the h l l h c is a precision and statistics revolution, not a straightforward increase in collision energy and certainly not a guaranteed new particle machine. cern is spending four years rebuilding the machine so nature can run the same experiment millions more times and leave itself fewer places to hide. with no new particle, but much higher tighter limits on what can exist count as a successful result to you, let us know in the comments below. we'd love to hear from you.