Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory

This particle is also not in the standard model, but has nothing to do with supersymmetry.

Hints of its existence have been found in the Fermilab particle accelerator experiments.

It may also be that there were some gigantic bursts of regular neutrinos at the time of the observed events.

Hit the Earth with enough high-energy neutrinos, for example, from a supernova explosion, and at least some of the ultra-high energy ones could make it through.

So it was these hippie guys.

And they had this huge experiment in Illinois at Fermilab where they were trying to find the top quark.

And I just slid right into it.

And I found that doing physics felt in my mind the same way as playing jazz.

Today, we're diving into a fascinating tension at the heart of cosmology.

Brian Keating sat down with Scott Dodelson from Fermilab and the University of Chicago, and what emerged was this picture of a field that's both triumphant and under serious strain.

Right, and that's what makes it so compelling.

Dodelson leads the cosmic physics division at Fermilab, and he spent years testing Lambda CDM, the standard model of cosmology.

The thing is, this model rests on concepts like dark matter, inflation, and dark energy, and none of these has ever been directly found in a lab.

Yet the Dark Energy Survey, which Dodelson helped lead for a decade, tested Lambda CDM with remarkable precision.

He compares it to scientific revolutions in other eras, where researchers slowly realize the old picture no longer fits every observation.

What I found interesting is how he emphasized the scale of collaboration behind DES.

I know it's a big statement.

Fermilab in Illinois is where this experiment was done.

Have you ever heard of, um, the standard model? Any...

Have you ever seen anything that looks like this?

So it was originally done in Brookhaven National Labs in 2001, and it was such a big result at the time that they're like, "We have to verify this." And so they took the big old magnet, a big superconducting magnet, 50 foot in diameter.

Here it is.

See that red thing? That's the magnet arriving at Fermilab to a big party and a big celebration because it was transported 3,200 miles to upgrade it.

I went to Fermilab in 2016, and the only picture I took besides like, "Oh, this is a pretty view down the building," was of this diagram that shows the path that the magnet took.

I can't remember the name of the guy.

It's at Fermilab in Illinois.

They're developing a very sensitive piece of equipment that determines if light has a preferred travel direction, thinking that if we can show that in one direction light travels with a little bit less interference than in another direction, then that might indicate there's sort of a lattice to space.

Unfortunately, they can only go to a certain resolution, which is way above the Planck level, and I kind of suspect that our reality is actually even below the Planck level.

That's the best way to figure out, like, what is the universe made out of just by smashing stuff together and seeing if something new comes out.

That's-- To me that was always the, the best way to answer, like, the deepest questions like "What's the universe made out of?" So I did my PhD outside Chicago at th- at Fermilab's Tevatron.

Used to be the biggest collider in the world and then CERN built a bigger one so we all moved over there.

You know, the whole community moves to follow the biggest accelerator in the world because the bigger the accelerator, the higher the energy, the more you can explore what the universe is made out of.