Cern Click

This week, smashing particles. A spinning house. And a trip to the

birth of the universe. Now we're talking!

How did it all began? What happened at the big bang? What is the

universe is made of? These are the questions that I have come here to

find out. Please scan your eye. Thank you. Your identity has been

verified. Just outside Geneva, straddling France and Switzerland,

is the European Organisation for nuclear research, Cern. A massive

coming together of scientists who are looking for the fundamental

building blocks of the universe. I think we have it. You agree? Their

most high-profile discovery in 2013 was evidence of the Higgs boson. The

particle that gives everything mass, and confirmation that

science's standard model of the universe is correct. And this is how

they did it. Under the ground, a series of four particle accelerators

gradually bring beams of particles up too close to the speed of light.

Then they are smashed together, and the particles are smashed apart. The

largest of these accelerators is the one that has made all the headlines

recently. It creates temperatures of trillions of degrees, and conditions

similar to those at the birth of the universe. Now, it's time to head

underground. I have a very small head. And meet the beast itself. 100

or so metres below the surface, a 27 kilometre long loop running under

the French Swiss border. Let's see what we've got. This is the largest

machine in the world. The Large Hadron Collider. This is it, the LHC

tunnel. My guide is the head of the beams instrumentation group, Roger

Jones, who I leave in no doubt at all about how happy he has made this

little peak. -- geek. I need a moment. Wow.

I don't know what I was expecting, but to be honest this looks almost

to science fiction to be real. This enormous collection of components,

donated by so many countries, is a real reminder that this is a truly

international collaboration. Science, here at least, knows no

borders. What you see here are what we call

the focusing magnets. So it is a bit like your lens in a camera. So when

you say focusing the particles down you mean aligning them into a really

narrow beam. You can imagine it to be like you with the sunlight and a

magnifying glass burning a bit of paper. It is exactly the same

thing. They focus, all the particles come down here to a very tight spot

just beyond the wall and that is where the collisions occur. And from

these collisions we then look up to see where we can find these new

particles that we are talking about. And getting these two extremely fine

beams to collide is no mean feat. And it is Roger and his team who

make that happen. You are in effect the sniper, to get these beams

exactly in line. What we build measures the position, we then

feedback to make the current and we slightly adjust the position. So

without you these beams properly would miss each other. As we turn

and head back to the left, it is worth remembering that although the

beams are tiny, the energies involved down here are incredibly

high. So high that humans are usually banned from this tunnel.

Really lucky to be allowed down here. The only reason we are is

because the LHC is switched off for maintenance. If this was running it

would be far too dangerous Ross to be down here. In fact, we have all

been given these little tokens. And if any of are detected either

sensors down here, you can't switch the LHC on. OK. Time to leave

Switzerland just for a few minutes. Now, not all of us need as much

power as Cern, but in the future we are all going to need more power.

The Sun is one solution but it is still quite expensive to first

collect solar energy and then store it. Ben Simons visits physicists

research Inc in Germany who want a max out what the sun can do for us.

-- want to max out. It is free energy, at the technology needed to

capture it is still expensive. So when it comes to heating or lighting

your homes, some believe the answer revolves around the planet's

movement. It is more efficient to move this

house to track the sun across the sky than it would be to heat and

light it. This is such a weird sensation. Because it's quite

steady, it just looks like everything outside is slowly going

past. It is the strangest feeling. It's almost like we are not moving,

but they are. Researchers are carefully measuring the environment

inside and outside the house, to see what prompts these two desk workers

to open windows, turn on fans or heaters, or adjust the blinds, all

of which they can do remotely from their computers. If our homes are to

track the sun but we end up turning on the air con, for example, we are

unlikely to see energy savings. Sofia and Lewis have been willing

guinea pigs for this experiment for seven months now, with the initial

results due later this year. For the initial experiments, we are

manipulating how the sun is affecting people. In winter you

could try to face the sun as much as possible. The game the sort of

radiation and the heat through there. But in some time we maybe

don't want to have it as warm, and we don't want to have sunshine, so

we you will turn your back and keep it cool inside. Now, for most of us

spinning our existing home isn't really an option. So back to those

solar panels at Europe's largest research solar park where they are

finding out how to make it cheaper and better suited to our homes. If

you get energy from the grid, you pay around 29 euros, producing your

own energy might end up around nine or ten euro cents so the difference

between these 29 and nine is available for storage. Available for

storage means that 20 cents per kilowatt power saving is at the

moment almost completely spent on buying the hardware in the first

place. And as most batteries only achieve 4000 to 5000 cycles, they

are looking to match better battery tech with clever control systems, to

deliver the cost saving solar power has been promising for decades. One

idea is to reduce the need to store solar energy. Most solar farms, all

the panels would face the same way, usually south in the northern

hemisphere, to get the most amount of electricity. Here they are

testing outpointing the panels in different directions in order to get

a more even delivery of electricity across the course of the day. So

rather than make as much energy as possible, the idea now is that we

harvest it at the same time we use it, and reduce the need for those

expensive batteries. The panels themselves are starting to deliver

about 20% efficiency. So it is now starting to be possible to design

power systems even in northern Europe that pay for themselves in

ten years. Looking to the future, architects are imagining how

skyscrapers could spin, while harvesting solar, and in this case

wind power. But this dynamic power, or anything similar that could power

itself, has yet to be built. And perhaps that is because of a small

problem I have found with buildings that move. Where is the car? Hello,

and welcome to the week in Tech. It was the week that Apple and the FBI

went head-to-head over unregulated phones. Apple boss Tim Cook

announced that the company will fight a court order which will help

the FBI access data on the phone, belonging to San Bernardino gunmen

Syed Farook. They say the US government is asking it to hack its

own users while the FBI says the phone contains crucial information.

It was also the week that Russia showed off some space age robots.

The world's cheapest smartphone was revealed in India for a mere ?2.50.

And as you know, the one thing we have all been crying out for is self

parking chairs. And if you wondered what Darpa, the Pentagon's defence

research division, was up to recently, well this week they showed

off their incredible if asked, fully autonomous quad copter drone. It is

able to reach speeds of 45 mph. And finally if you want a peek at the

future, well, here it is. Researchers at Queens University,

Canada, have shown off a truly bendable, flexible smartphone. The

nimble mobile is able to measure how much pressure is being put on the

Flex is green, allowing you to control the cursor or plate angry

birds like never before. -- play Angry Birds. Having been down to the

tunnel containing the Large Hadron Collider itself, it's time to come

up top and meet the people who actually operate it. The physicists

conducting the experiments rely on engineers like Julia in the Cern

control room, to make sure the proton beams are connected correctly

and behave himself during the process. Can you describe the kind

of satisfaction that your job gives you? You are not dreaming up the

experiments or sifting through the results, you are operating this

machine. Our job is to give the experiments could conditions, good

collisions. High tech pleasure, call it, when there is a problem

understanding what the causes. , just point out, Julia works only

over ball. There are some people who say this could be a big waste of

money. What is the point of looking at the origins of the universe? When

there are more important things in the world to spend the money on.

What would you say? It is a lot of money but there are other things on

which more money is spent. It is worth it so much more, this one

thing is can parable. What we're doing here is the advancement of the

knowledge that mankind has on nature, why we are building this and

learning more technology that can be used elsewhere. Really useful and

easy to understand is accelerators for cancer therapy. There is a whole

world that and it is the technology that is produced in accelerators

that is used to kill people. -- your people. All these lights are

concerning regions of the machine that we can access. Each quarter of

the control room runs a different part of the accelerator process. And

since the LHC was offline for maintenance and things were suitably

quiet, I was able to grab some time with Paul, director of teams. Which

is officially the coolest job title in the world. Each This island is

the one that looks after all the basic infrastructure of Cern. For

example, the electrical distribution system, the cooling systems, the

cryogenic systems. You must need a hell of a lot of electricity! We do

need quite a bit, yes. When the whole complex is running flat-out,

we're drawing roughly 200 megawatts. Does anyone else notice when you go

live? Do the surrounding towns' lights flicker? No, because we

continue sucking and pushing energy backwards and forwards between us

and the outside world. If we didn't have, um, what we call compsators,

then everybody's lights would follow the 1.2-second pulse of Cern in the

Geneva area and we would not be very popular. So instead, we have a

mechanism which damps this out, which means that the outside world

does not see this heartbeat of Cern. Can I ask about the bottles of

champagne? Yeah. There are quite a lot up there. I'm guessing they are

to do with discoveries? Discoveries or major milestones for us in the

development of the machine. Somebody normally turns up with a bottle of

champagne to celebrate it. It's the great Cern champagne tour, for a

smashing good time! Congratulations on our very first fant obarn. Now

never forget your first phantobarn. That's a good year, that, 10-to-the

33. Always steer a way from clear bottles in your dad f shed. It says

mineral water. That is so not mineral water. No naked flames,

ladies and gentlemen. No naked flames. The hick single malt. Do the

physicists here drink well, or do they have one glass of wine and

they're anyone's? Oh, we can manage to, ah, to put it away when it's

appropriate. We don't drink and drive the machine, as it were.

LAUGHS High-five. You've done that one

before! Well, it may not be scientifically

accurate, but they do say that money makes the world go 'round, and these

days, technology helps give it a little extra spin. And so today,

I've joined the suited financiers at the Finovate conference in the city

of London, where the latest apps to heped us spend our money are being

shown off. If it's simple control of your cards you're after, VyPera is

an app that aims to help. It gives options like being able to tell it

when you're travelling so, your reg strd cards will expect you to be

abroad, rather than causing security alerts each time you're you use

them. You can also select options like not allowing any online

payments so that you can choose exactly what you want your card to

be used for, and when. You can register your cards and then look

through your transactions, seeing them turned into some nice, if not a

little scary, graphs. Then, from learning your habits, it'll also

provide personalised location-based offers - something this event showed

there was a growing trend towards. Deutsche Bank have been the first to

sign up to using the app, but its success will be dependent on other

banks following. PaySend is an app due to be released later this year.

It provides a way of being able to make a credit or debit card payment

directly to someone else's card. Meaning that, if you're paying a

friend or, indeed, anyone, you don't need to do a full-on online

transfer. Its makers hope that it will prove a good solution for easy

and secure global money transfers - but of course, there is plenty of

competition. They plan to charge a basic 1% plus ?1 fee for a

same-currency payment, with added costs for cross-currency

transactions. But they will need a licence from the financial

authorities first. But the question that this type of tech always comes

back to is how secure is all your data going to be? People need to be

careful. You need to know the company you're dealing with.

Generally if they're regulated, they're going to be fairly safe to

deal with. You can also look at whether they're working with banks

or Karnetworks. Over time, people are doing things they said they

would never do. Gradually, as we use technology, it becomes normal. So

people are using more new technologies. If something makes

things faster, easier or cheaper, it's likely to be popular. It's not

just about making our lives easier, but about securing our devices.

Forget fingerprint identification - this is all about eyeprint. Eye

verifies iPrint ID is already being used by some US banks. The level of

encryption is equivalent to a 50-letter password, and you don't

need to remember anything other than to open your eyes. We do find that

we get much better match scores when we use both eye veins and

microfeatures. We've tested them separately, and they both work. But

when you combine eye veins and microfeatures, we get a much better

score. Its creators could be laughing all the way to the bank if

it extends beyond finance. The work here at Cern is some of the

most extreme research being done anywhere in the known universe. So

far, we've seen the control room, and we've seen the Large Hadron

Collider itself. Now, it's time to see the place where it all happens.

One of four locations where those two high-energy protonbeams actually

collide. And it is absolutely jaw-dropping.

LAUGHS Oh! Right, now we're talking! This,

for me, is hallowed turf. This is called the CMS. It's the

Compact Nuon Solar Noise. Nothing compact about it, if you ask me!

This is, um, a bit spiritual, really.

15m across, this leviathan is a collection of detectors that all

focus their attention on what's happening in the very centre. And

only because it's down for maintenance - only because it's open

- can we take you to its very heart. Right. We're now all gonna see

something that not many people will ever get to see in their life. The

inside of the CMS. So this is where the beam of pro tonnes comes - it

shoots through here. It collides with another beam of protons that

comes the other way. In the dead centre of this thing is where the

collision happens. The debris has is flung out, and this massive detector

sifts through that wreckage looking for evidence of new particles. The

beginnings of the universe. SIGHS

All right, compose yourself! It turns out that it's not just

overwhelming for first-time visitors like me. Stephanie, one of many

scientists who churn through the data generated by the LHC, likes to

come down here as often as possible. As a physicist, your everyday work

is basically being in front of a laptop. Sometimes, like everyone in

the industry, you're frustrated by forgetting why you're doing this

work. So coming here and having a view to the detect detector with

also visitors and showing them how great it is just reminds me really

why I'm doing such, because this is amazing to see what we can build all

together to make some research and discovery as we are expecting. So,

job's done now. You've detected the Higgs boson. Switch it off, take it

apart, and move on? No, no! We still have plenty of things to detect!

What do you want to detect next? We still have a lot of unknown, like

why do we have more matters and antimatter, for example? We still

don't understand what we call dark matter or dark energy in the

universe. It could be coming from new particles that we are trying to

detect in this detector. So we have plenty of things to do. Yep, the LHC

certainly has its work cut out for it, for at least the next 20 years.

The collisions may be tiny, but the impact they'll have on our

understanding of the universe - and ultimately mankind's path through it

- will be massive. And I'm really sorry, but that is it from Click at

Cern. I don't know about you but, um... ..Yeah. I'm emotional. I'm

gonna stick a tonne of photos on Twitter, so @BBCclick is where you

can find them, and you can check out our website for more throughout the

week. We'll see you soon. A weekend of big weather contrasts

across the UK and here is why. This one is making all

the way back across the Atlantic.