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[00:00.44] This looks like a spaceship and just like a spaceship, this machine is helping scientists go where they've never gone before,
[00:12.12] in the quest to decipher what science has never been able to explain, the origins of the universe.
[00:13.72] They can confirm the existence of the smallest particles that theoretical physicists have predicted, and accelerate protons, one of the building blocks of atoms to nearly the speed of light, and they can create antimatter.
[00:26.47] But this doesn't mean they understand everything yet.
[00:29.92] Scientists think that at the beginning of things, the so-called Big Bang, matter and antimatter, negative matter, were created in equal amounts.
[00:39.22] In principle if the difference between the two is only the charge, they should have just recombine and leave nothing but rejection, okay?
[00:47.45] However, we are here, I'm talking with you right now, so it means that at some point matter took over the antimatter, and this must be, because there are some differences between matter and antimatter that we don't know about.
[01:01.26] Searching for those differences is one of the tasks for the people at CMS, the Compact Muon Solenoid, one of four main research points around the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
[01:12.95] Packets of protons race around the circle in beams traveling clockwise and counterclockwise.
[01:19.33] And when the physicists are ready, the beams are focused and made to collide at one of four experiment locations around the circle.
[01:26.51] If I would collide the beam unfocused, the probability of my fingers colliding here is very low.
[01:30.48] And then on either end of the experiments, we will switch from focusing magnets so that the beams squeezes into a small dimension, and therefore, the probability of collision increases.
[01:40.31] Out of the 200 billion protons in the two beams rushing around the circuit, only 100 will collide.
[01:48.28] But right now the Collider and the experiments around it are in the midst of a two-year shut down for maintenance and upgrades, something that happens every three years.
[01:57.58] For VOA, that meant a chance to get a rare glimpse of a world not many get to see. For the scientists, it's a chance to recharge.
[02:05.02] I would say it for us it's an opportunity. We're looking at ways of making the detector better, repairing things, putting in new detectors, and preparing for the future runs, which the experiment will be running until we hope till 2035.
[02:26.27] The CMS collaboration includes some 4,000 scientists from more than 50 countries from all over Europe, from India, China, Korea, Egypt, other parts of the Middle East and Russia.
[02:46.72] McBride says that while the scientists loved when the experiments confirmed their predictions, they also loved it when things don't match up,
[00:00.00] because that might be saying something very fundamental about how the universe is put together, because many things cannot yet be explained.
