Big Think

Lisa Randall: Well so what the Large Hadron Collider is called the LHC more familiarly  it collides together two protons. So theres underground rings an underground ring 27 kilometers in circumference. And what happens is proton beams go around and theyre accelerated by magnetic fields as soon as they go around. And they go in opposite directions, and two beams accelerate to extremely high energy, and then they collide together. And when they collide together, constituents inside the protons become energy, and that energy can turn into particles with mass because it, after all, equals mc2; which is to say if you have a lot of energy, you can make particles that have big mass. And so the idea is to make particles that you wouldnt have been able to have seen before on earth, because theyre just heavier than things that would have been accessible to us. And by looking at what those particles are  what are their properties, what are forces that apply at those scales  were trying to understand whats happening at shorter distances; whats happening at higher energies; what are the more basic ingredients of matter; what are the more fundamental forces. And so it . . . One thing were trying to find is called the Higgs particle which we talked about earlier, which is associated with particles acquiring mass. But were also trying to answer this big question about the hierarchy problem which might very well entail notions such as super symmetry, which is an extension of space-time symmetry, or even space time itself as we just discussed. So . . . and if it turns out these extra dimensional theories are right, there would be new particles called Kaluza-Kline particles particles that have mass because they travel in extra dimensions. And it would be a radical insight into the nature of our universe. Kaluza was the first person who introduced the idea of an extra dimension of physics in 1919. And he was trying to unify the forces that were known then, which were only gravity and electromagnetism. And he proposed an extra dimension of space to try . . . And he realized Einsteins theory allowed an extra dimension, and he tried to work out the consequences of the theory.  Recorded On: 11/2/07 Now Kline was the person who suggested that this extra dimension was tiny  it was rolled up, and thats why we dont see it. So Kaluza-Kline particles are named after the two of them.