What Are We Made Of?

What Are We Made Of

What are we told? That everything is made out of atoms. But in the last few decades, scientists have looked inside the atom and found that things are a lot more complicated. Despite all of our knowledge, we still don't understand the true nature of matter. We do what kids do. We smash things, and we look to see what comes out. And so, to do that, we need to smash things harder and harder and harder to see what's smaller and smaller and smaller. At Chicago's Argon National Laboratory, Bob Stanek builds machines that peer into the subatomic world.


Professor Frank Close is a theoretical physicist at Oxford University. Antimatter is a perfect opposite to matter. If I was made of antimatter, I would look exactly the same as I do today. If you looked at the atoms that I'm made of, they would look exactly the same if I was made of anti-atoms. It's only when you get inside the atoms that you see the difference. That's the atoms that we're made of have little negatively charged electrons whirling around a big, bulky, positive nucleus. The world is safe. Antimatter is what we're not made of. But the fact that it exists at all reveals how alien the Universe really is and how little we understand the cosmic forces at work in the heavens and deep inside our own bodies. The discovery of antimatter was followed by deeper probing into the heart of the atom on larger, more powerful Particle Accelerators. But physicists didn't like what they saw. The closer they looked, the less things made sense.
The accelerators exposed a bewildering array of mysterious particles dozens of strains, pieces of matter, all seemingly different. Some were incredibly heavy. Some had no weight at all. The subatomic world earned the nickname The Particle Zoo. When we were learning about the zoo of particles that were not defined, it was pretty chaotic, and it just didn't look right. You're thinking, this is bull crap. There's got to be something better than this. 'Cause this is just all, you know, like, just categorizing stuff, black magic, and people just didn't know what they were doing. Physics is a quest for simplicity. This was chaos. Why? To help crack this mystery in the 1970s, the United States built a high-energy research facility 30 miles outside of Chicago. Fermilab sits on top of the Tevatron, a four-mile-long Particle Accelerator. Nobel-prize-winning experimental physicist Leon Lederman conducted many of his experiments here. You see a single line that's giving up energy in the back half of the detector, more characteristic of what a muon object would look like, a muon being a heavy electron. So we can start to get a lot of information by just looking at a couple of very simplistic ideas in terms of where the particles traveled, how much they curve, and where they deposited energy in the detector. Today, after years of reading these subatomic tea leaves, physicists feel they are getting closer to answering the question. what are we really made of? The stuff that we are made of today only requires maybe a handful of little particles the atoms on the outside are electrons whirling around like planets, if you like. There's a nucleus in the middle of the atom which we used to believe was made of protons and neutrons. Well, it is, but deeper down, they, in turn, like going to the heart of the cosmic onion, are made of little things called quarks. And two types of quarks an up quark and a down quark. And that's it. An up and a down quark joined together in different ways ultimately make the atomic nucleus. An electron whirling around the outside make the atom. Throw in a neutrino, which is created in radioactive processes, and that's the basic particles that make up everything that you see around you. There's also the photon of light, which we are seeing with right now, and that pretty well is it. Most of the atoms in our body are made of nuclei and electrons, and the nuclei themselves are made of protons and neutrons, and the protons and neutrons are made of quarks. And, of course, you say, what are the quarks made of? And that's where we're stuck. For the last 40, 50 years, we've been studying the quarks, trying to find something inside, and we get the same results we had for the electron. There's nothing inside. The quarks don't have any size. The size, the radius of a quark is zero. It's a little bit like Alice in Wonderland. Remember when Alice saw the Cheshire cat sitting on the branch of a tree with a big smile? And much to Alice's great astonishment, right in front of her eyes, the Cheshire cat started to disappear, and finally poof! It was gone. But it left behind one component its smile. That quark smile is a tiny box stuffed full of energy. All matter is actually made of energy that has congealed into particulate form. So that appears to be what we are made of at least as far as we can see right now. But knowing this opens up an even greater mystery, which is why does the stuff we are made of behave the way it does? The question is, what? Today, we think we know what we're made out of the incredibly small building blocks that form all the matter in the Universe. But finding these bits and pieces of matter revealed another even more challenging mystery why are things solid? Why do they have mass? Matter is mostly empty space. Every now and then, you find the point of an atom, but most of the time, it's empty space. So, that point of atom and that point of atom and so on how are they held together? How are you held together? How am I held together? It's not glue. You know it's not glue. It has to be some exchange of fundamental properties. The strong forces are what holds the proton together, what holds the quarks into three pieces that form a proton. So, us guys are doing the weak forces and the strong forces, and what we don't understand is the gravitational force, and we think we understand the electromagnetic force. Just as we can't see the things we're made of, we can't see the fundamental forces around us. Solving this mystery could reveal the Universe's most closely held secrets not just what we're made of, but why the stuff inside us holds its shape. The key breakthrough in particle physics was the discovery that certain particles are actually force carriers. CERN's Large Hadron Collider. At full power, it can channel 7 trillion electron volts, making it by far the highest energy particle accelerator ever made. What they've really built at CERN is a Big-Bang machine. While trying to solve the mystery of matter, physicists realized that they're on the trail of a much bigger mystery perhaps the ultimate mystery. What happened in the first moments of creation? Right now, thousands of science detectives hunt the Higgs Boson the elusive particle that gives everything mass, the thing that may keep matter glued together. The mystery they are trying to solve is much, much bigger than anyone first imagined. To solve it, they have to go back to the beginning and re-create the first moments of the Universe. In the first moments just after the big bang happened, it was incredibly hot billions of billions of degrees. And heat is energy. And the energy congealed into forms of matter, many of which we have already discovered, many of which we only believe exist because of our equations. Most of these things only lived for a trillionth of a second themselves. They were made, they died away and left children, grandchildren, and so forth. This cascading down from these ephemeral particles into the stable stuff took place very quickly. The stable stuff then ends up congealing to make the stuff that you and I and everybody's made of today. So, what we're doing is re-creating in the lab the first moments of the Universe, and then by surrounding the site of the collisions with these special cameras, detectors, we can record what happened. And so we are simulating just after the big bang, making mini bangs, if you like, in the lab. And from what we find there, we begin to get a sense of how matter, the stuff that we ultimately, 15 billion years later, are made of, first came to be. Jon Butterworth is a physicist at the University College of London. Adam Davison is a postdoctoral student. The two largest detectors are called Atlas and CMS. M.I.T.'S Steve Nahn leads a team that helped design and now runs the CMS detector. We build our detectors to take pictures of the events which happen once every 25 nanoseconds. That's 40 million times a second we have an interaction that we want to take a picture of. And our detector is made out of several different cameras. The two men are trying to create maps of what they think the subatomic Universe looked like just seconds after its creation, then matching their imaginary maps up to reality. And this is why people, when people ask, you know, what we're gonna find, when are you gonna get your Nobel prize? What if the Standard Model is wrong and the Higgs doesn't exist? What would be more exciting is, in fact, we find things that we don't understand. So, we understand that the Higgs is gonna be there, and so we find it, so, hurray, hurray. Now what do we do? But if you find something you don't understand, well, now people have a job. My job every day is to go to work and understand things that I don' understand. If I have more stuff to no understand, that's job security. So, what are we really made of? Dig deep inside the atom, and you will find tiny particles held together by invisible forces in a sea of empty space. Dig even further, and we discover that everything is made up of tiny packets of energy born in cosmic furnaces. This energy that cools down gets dragged through a mysterious force named the Higgs and clumps together, forming all the things we call matter. It has an evil twin called antimatter, but most of that has long since disappeared. As we get closer to re-creating the heat of the big bang in our accelerators, we get closer to understanding how and why all this happened. Perhaps some day not long from now, we'll finally solve the last remaining riddles of matter and fully comprehend the inner workings of creation.