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Don Lincoln

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2026-05-29
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2026-05-29
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  1. “I mean, to come up with something like space-time, you know, there's one idea, for instance, to say the space and time aren't real. They emerge from entropy. Yeah, that's a way of, a new way of thinking. And maybe there's some validity. And I want people to think about it. But in the end, it's just an idea. And that's the real key thing. And as you say, it has to tie to a macro world. You have to validate. If you don't validate, it's a crazy idea. Theorists are incredibly creative, smart, wonderfully interesting people, but I don't care. I want a measurement that validates the idea because there are so many, I mean, if you read the journals, there are so many theoretical.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Tiny lever arm predicting it out a quadrillion away and say, oh, yeah, we got it right. What are the odds? And my answer is, you've got to be kidding me. Now, I could be wrong, and I admit that I could be wrong. But that's why I think the real issue is not the brilliance of humanity. It's the stuff we haven't found. We don't know. I mean, the simple one, say it's simple, and it's not, but what is dark matter? We don't have a bleeping clue. Not a clue. We know a lot of what it isn't, but we don't know what it is. And so, you know, talk about super strings. All right, well, maybe dark matter fits in super strings, or maybe dark matter is governed by a physics that is completely diametrically opposed to the superstring concept.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “To do that in my kids' lifetime, or something like that. But in order for us to predict a quadrillion times higher, I'm pretty sure super string theory is wrong. Not because people aren't smart, but because something new is going to happen. I mean, if you were talking about chemistry, you would have never predicted nuclear physics. And that's a small increase in energy, right? The idea that there is something in the nucleus of atoms that causes the sun to burn, there's a reason why people didn't believe they calculated how old the sun should be and it should only be 10 million years old because otherwise it would burn out. Well, that's clearly wrong and it's wrong because of nuclear physics. That is why I feel fairly confident to say, well, someone could think, well, superstring might be right or something. Maybe it's right. And I hope it's right. It would be awesome if it's right. But what are the odds when you're making something with that?”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “The pinnacle of arrogance to think that what we can do given the understanding that we have from what we've measured now and predict it out a quadrillion times higher than we can see now. So my opinion, and this is partly because I'm an experimentalist, the correct way to make progress, practical progress, towards the theory of everything, is to look around at the things that we don't have answers to right now. For instance, are there something smaller than quarks? I don't know, is dark matter real? I don't know. If it's real, what is it? I don't know. Is dark energy real? Yes, probably, but I don't know. What is the nature of space and time? I don't know. But these are questions we can explore. And I would expect, and this is my prediction, that, all right, we're going to figure things out at a factor of 10 or 100 times better than we can do now, and we might be able to.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Flamingos, not there, you know, and that is just the case. So now that's what we're doing. We are taking something and we have reason to understand what we know and we can predict a factor of 10 or 100. But I think it is the absolute”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Going even smaller distances going a mile up, things wouldn't be very different but if he goes ten miles up he wouldn't breathe and he'd freeze. If he goes a hundred miles up he would die. If he goes two miles down he would roast. The point being We are like that Australopithecus. We have a realm that we can study and we can even predict to some validity what would happen if we go some distance away. But the farther away we go, the less and less our local prediction really represents the reality of those more distant times. And so basically his theory about the world would be totally bogus. So even if he had the best theory, his theory would not have anticipated the Alps. It would not have anticipated penguins.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “You can work 10,000 meters. That's 60 miles. 100,000 meters is 10 to the 5th. And that's unlikely. But the distance that we need to go from what we can see to the Planck scale, it's not 10 to the 5th. It's 10 to the 15th. So that means in my analogy, think about this guy who's walking around Africa. Now, if he walks 100 feet or something, it looks a lot like what it is now. He can make a prediction about what he sees. And when he goes to that new place, it's probably going to be okay. But if he starts walking 500 miles east, well, he walking around the center of Africa has no concept of, for instance, the Indian Ocean. He would never predict sperm whales or kraken. He would never predict what it's like, the bottom of the ocean is, going north. He's in Africa. He would never ever have a clue about the Alps.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “So, what we are doing now is we are looking at the world with our very best measurements and we are trying to project out a quadrillion times higher and figure out a theory that explains everything. Now I have this, I have a couple of analogies, but I like this. Suppose that you were some Joe Australopithecus two million years ago or something in Africa wandering around somewhere in Kenya. You're about a meter in size. So you can walk a meter meter scale is like your scale. You can walk 10 meters in every direction. That's 30 feet. No problem. You can work 100 meters, 300 feet. You can work 1,000 meters. That's half a mile.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Theory of everything with the emphasis on practical. Because when you read books about theories of everything, when you see podcasts, when you listen to YouTube videos or whatever, they are often written by theorists. And theorists are their big idea people. They're very, very smart. But there's a pragmatism that is often missing in the sense that they say, well, super strings, look, have these little vibrating things. And wouldn't it be cool? But you got to get to the do you know it? So let's pretend super string theory or something like it is correct. The energy scale at which that should occur is of order 10 to the 15 times higher, 10 to the 19 GeV. We can currently do things at 10 to the fourth GeV, give or take. So that is 10 to the 15. Quadrillion times higher energy.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “And that is already saying that we're a ways away from really getting a handle on that. So yes, there could be some bright young ladder lass out there, someone listening to this podcast right now who figures out a way to take super string theory and solve them in tractable ways that makes predictions from the scale at which they currently apply down to measurable scale today. And if that happens, well, then I might retract my question or my concept. There's a reason why I think that probably isn't true. That's probably not valid. So let me, I love this, all right? So let's back up. I'm going to pitch. I wrote this book for Oxford Einstein's Unfinished Dream, and Einstein's Unfinished Dream was to come up with a theory of everything. It was unfinished because, well, it's unfinished. And so the second part, the tagline of that book is practical progress towards a”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “And that is a tricky business. I am not a string theorist, so I can't tell you that that's likely, but I can tell you that they've been working on it since the 80s and they haven't gotten very far. Furthermore, I think it's fair to characterize that string theory is still a vague idea, and that's unfair. But let me tell you why I say that because what they have are approximate solutions to approximate equations.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “The energies that you were talking about, the sizes we're talking about are inside a black hole, which you can intrinsically never see So, you know, you can only see the outside of a black hole, not the inside of a black hole. So, what you said, you did say something that was incredibly important and incredibly correct, and probably won't happen, but that's still good. Okay, so we have two choices when you talk about super strings. Either super strings are correct and they're making predictions up at the Planck energy scale, at which point we have to somehow build facilities that can generate Planck energies. That's possibility one. Possibility two is this theory, which is currently only applicable at Planck energy scales. Someone figures out a way to take those equations and solve them in a way that, say, predicts the mass of the electron.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “I mean, hypothesis, it's correct 100% correct. I don't know what's correct. So I don't care. I mean, you know, it could be correct, but I don't, you know, until it's validated, it's just a wild ass guess. So we have to have a way of validating it. So yes, the empirical side of it is important. I mean, you could wake up tomorrow and have the theory that is the perfect theory, but if I can't prove it, I don't care.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Yes, yes. But, you know, let's say, I mean, you alluded to super strings. I haven't answered that question. I'll table that for a moment. Super strings is a fascinating idea. I don't believe it, but I love it. I hope it's true. And there's a real aphorism. And it says you should absolutely never believe what you think. So even if you think super strings is true, you shouldn't believe it because it hasn't been tested. Let's say super string is correct.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “500 years. But this is like Moore's law that doesn't continue forever. We're not going to every seven years, I mean, every 20 years, get another factor of seven. So yes, I think it's a very long time. That's my prediction. You know, some people are far more optimistic and we can talk about that.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “It took 200 years to go from unifying gravity to unifying electromagnetism. It took 100 years to go from unifying electromagnetism to unifying the electroweak force. Now, you could say, well, gee, that went from 200 to 100, so it's getting faster. But it's also getting harder because the unification scale is of order 10 to the 15, which we can do the math. That's a quadrillion times higher than the highest energy accelerator we can build today. And it was one thing to, you know, we are reaching diminishing returns. We get something like a factor of seven increase in particle accelerator energy every 20 years. And so we have to get to a quadrillion times. Now, if you really did believe a factor of seven every 20 years, then that's we're talking like.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “and so in that sense, once we understand the rules that govern reality, the fundamental rules, that would be a theory of everything. You know, there are things that are unknowable, like for instance inside black holes. We don't know what's inside there, but that doesn't mean that there's not something inside there. So there's a distinction between what we can know and truth. So I do believe that there are the rules. And I do believe that with sufficient time, technology, effort, we will be able to figure this all out. Now, this isn't a thing in my lifetime. It's not a thing in my grandchildren's lifetime or even their grandchildren's lifetime.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “So I hold personally that there are rules that govern matter and energy space time, and they probably are rules that I don't know. There are probably phenomena I'm not aware of. But I do believe that something”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Maybe we'll come up with something really cool. We certainly had some ideas back in the early 80s that we tested and they didn't pan out.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “This point, I would have to say that I do not see a fast progress in the immediate future. I think we're a ways away from that at this point.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “So the gut is short for grand unified theory. We talked about that there were four known subatomic forces, the electromagnetic force, gravity, the strong force, and the weak force. And electroweak symmetry unification merged the weak force and electromagnetism into the electroweak force. So what Gut hopes to do is to merge the electroweak force and the strong force into one grand unified force. Now that leaves gravity outside because gravity is seemingly fundamentally significantly different than subsequently it is hoped that a higher energy we will be able to blend the theory of everything together with all of the known subatomic forces, the strong weak and electromagnetic forces, and then gravity. So as you say, gut is sort of a way station along the way. That's the goal.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “It Right, it's a huge thing, but it was part of the standard model. The standard model had known forces. It had known particles. It had all that, the Higgs boson. The one thing that is true is it was the last unvalidated piece of the standard model. The standard model does not answer all questions, which is why we have unanswered questions in physics. But it was a punctuation point end of about 50 years of discovery and searching where we finally were able to say the standard model, while incomplete, it's mostly right as far as it goes.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “And Leon ran Fermi Lab. So, and he wrote a foreword for one of my books. I talked to him. He said, it was a really funny guy. And the real truth was the book was called the God particle because his publisher thought it would sell more copies But then that got into the mindset of the reporters and so forth, and we called it the God particle. Leon never really thought of it as. Anything to do with a religious or even, I mean, he was an incredible jokester, the goddamn particle.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Well, I don't think it is as important as, for instance, some of Einstein's stuff. I mean, it was an important prediction, like the prediction of quarks was very important and interesting in validating this. The Higgs was kind of like validating that quarks existed. It's an important stepping stone. And I do not wish to denigrate it in any way. But there's ones that change the way we thought about the world, like Einstein did. It wasn't that sort of thing. And there is a funny story. So the reason they call it the God particles was a book by Leon Letterman. And if you read his book, he says, well, we call it the God particle, but we should call it the goddamn particle because it's been causing us so much trouble trying to find it.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Francois and Glair and his colleagues were right back in the 60s. But we weren't sure on July 4th. All we knew was we found a particle consistent. But the thing is with these discoveries, they're often just barely discoveries. It takes a while to go and do the more complex detailed measurements, and that's what we've done.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Been able to basically rule out some of those other things. And by now, we have validated things. We found the mass of the particle. We know the spin of the Higgs boson. It has a spin of zero. We have discovered the Higgs boson decays. It preferentially decays into the heaviest particles it can through energy conservation. Can't decay in the top quarks. It's too light to decay in the top quarks, but it can decay into bottom quarks. It could decay into W and Z particles. It can decay into a weird way into photons. And we have looked for all of the hypothesized decays of the original Higgs theory. And we have validated that it decays in those ways at the rates that theory predicted. And so now in the fullness of time, I'm pretty comfortable saying Peter Higgs and Robert Brouton.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Correct. Although, let's be very specific of what we did then. We found a particle consistent with the existence of the Higgs boson. There were alternative theories at the time that predicted not one, but multiple Higgs bosons. So there's a theory called supersymmetry, which said that there was not one, but five Higgs bosons, the standard original 1964 Higgs theory says there were one. And so all we really knew at the time was we found a theory. We did not necessarily confirm that Higgs was right. We found data that said that it looked like Higgs was right. But until we ran for longer, we would unable to rule out other alternative theories. So that's the deal. Now, in the fullness of time, it is, after all, what, 14 years now later, we have”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Like two days before the announcement at CERN was July 4th. So two days before that Fermilab made a measurement and said we can rule out certain regions, but certain regions we can't rule out. But what we know, and this is important, if the Higgs boson exists, it must be in this region for which we are not capable yet of ruling out. So that's where we were two days before the LHC said. We got it. It was July 4th, 2012.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “And so, wearing our CERN hat, we said, okay, we're going to find that. But we were really, really, really trying to do it. Now, if we had had another two years or maybe three years of running the Fermi accelerator, For me lab would have discovered or ruled out, or in this case, turning out discovered, the Higgs boson because it's a real thing. We would have found it without a question. But we didn't have enough data in July of 2012. We needed a couple more years. Unfortunately, in 2008, or fortunately, the LHC had turned on. It broke. They had to fix it, turned on again in 2010. It ran poorly in 2011. In 2012, they pushed up their sleeves and said, let's do this. And it turned on. And so, you know, there was this Fermilab knew if it didn't have it now, it wasn't, it was too late. Anyways, 2012 rolls around.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “However, the CERN accelerator had ten times the collisions per second and three and a half times the energy. So remember when I said with the top quarks it was like six months for 19 versus one a second There's no question the writing is on the wall the LHC was going to have an easier time of it If it was real. However, but, you know, I'm Fermi Lab scientist, and we wanted Fermi Lab, you know, come on, we want Fermilab to win. Not, you know. So we were busting our butt and we had done what I said. We had ruled out this region. We had certain mass ranges. We knew it wasn't there. And we finally said if there was a Higgs boson, if it existed, which we didn't know at the time, its mass was somewhere between the five recall between like 120 and 145. All right, we'd ruled out all the other stuff.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Yes. So that's the nice thing about this kind of physics because there was a theory that theory made predictions. Now there were parameters in the theory we didn't know. If the mass was this, we'd get this thing. If the mass was this, we get this thing. But we could do the calculation for every conceivable Higgs mass. And so then we could search. Look, well, let's say the Higgs mass is 100 in some units. Did we see it there? No. Then it's not 100. Well, let's look at 103. Is it there? No. So we could do that. Both accelerators could either find it or definitively rule out the predictions of simple Higgs theory. 100% guaranteed.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “That's a possibility. I mean, maybe the Higgs theory was wrong. Until you know it's there, it might be wrong. It's like dark matter. People talk about dark matter, it might not be real. I mean, it probably is, but it might not be.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “So I was cognizant of the fact that the Higgs boson might not exist, but there was a lot of evidence pointing in the direction that it might be. I knew that both experiments, the Fermilab accelerator and the CERN accelerator, would either find or rule out the Higgs if it existed.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “So, this is really fun because the people searching for the Higgs, it's a community. And the entire community knew that the LHC was coming online. So even though many of us had been working on the Fermilab accelerators, a lot of us were transitioning to the CERN accelerator. So we were in the very funny business of wearing our Fermilab detector people hats trying desperately to find the Higgs boson at Fermilab, while simultaneously wearing our CERN hats, knowing that CERN was going to be able to find it if existed. And so, you know, we were a little neurotic, kind of wanted, you know, our old stuff to work. And there was an awful lot of people on both experiments.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “But those hundred thousand to the next level, which are commercial processors that have Basically, our final analysis code, but optimized to run very, very quickly. And what they do is they do a really quick and dirty analysis to say to further refine what's good and what's not. And that computer farm then accepts about a thousand collisions per second. And we record those for further analysis. So that's what's really happening. Of the 50 million possible collisions per second, the fast electronics and then the computers pick the thousand. And then we pass those through analysis software and hand them to the graduate students and they pick through them looking and finding the handful that are the next Nobel Prize. So that's how that works. And that is truly astonishing. Hats off to the accelerator builders, the detector builders, the people who make the software work, the people who make the not gigabytes, not terabytes.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “And what they can do is they can take pictures 40 million times per second. Now, all the data comes streaming off that detector and we can't record it all. It would just fill up all of our tapes and it would be full of all these boring things we don't care about. So what we do is as the beams pass through one another, we teach our detectors to say we only want one where there are certain configurations that might be interesting. Like there's gobs of energy in the detector or there's a gob of energy on one side and nothing on the other side or there's four gobs of energy or whatever. These are called triggers. And so what we have is fast electronics that take the 40 million possible pictures per second. And it says, you know, about 100,000 of those are really cool. We should think about them. And then it passes not all of the 40 million.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “Small one. Small. Atlas experiment is 150 feet long, 80 feet across. It weighs only 7,000 tons, just a piece of cake. You could take the Atlas detector and you could put four of them on a soccer or football.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Right. But one of them are detected. The CMS detector, it's the small one. It is 70 feet long, 50 feet high, 50 feet wide. It's five stories tall. It weighs 14,000 tons.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, in particle physics, we really absolutely want our competitors to do extremely well, not quite as well as we do. Got it. Yeah. So these two giants.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “Good to know that there's friendly competition, you mean the inside. That's awesome. The fact is, they are both amazing, absolutely amazing detectors.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “And the other one is called Atlas, which is the other one, and we don't speak of because no, they're both really amazing.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “At any one crossing, there's maybe 20 collisions. Now, most collisions are absolutely boring. They're boring because they are, they exemplify physics that we know a great deal about already. We've tested it for decades. We know all about it. We don't care. I mean, it's kind of blas ⁇ that we can say, oh, yeah, yeah, we're making a billion particles, subatomic particles every second, but who cares? Because that's just the way of frontier scientists. What you need is you need to pick out the cool ones, the weird ones, the ones that nobody's seen before. And so what happens is these things, these beams collide, and we surround the collision point within the enormous detector. There are two absolutely ginormous detectors at the LHC. One of them called CMS, which is the one I'm on.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “Stripes and wings and everything everywhere. That's awesome. And so as they collide through each other, you know, one collision's here and one's here and one's here. And you can't tell too much side to side because the beams are really small. They're sort of the thickness of a human hair. But you can see along the direction. And, you know, this is about the right size. And so we have detectors around them. And we can actually see, oh, particles came from here and particles came from here. And that's amazing. All right.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “Collision, sort of to a degree. So the beams are, you know, when people think of beams, they think of like laser beams, but that's not really what particle beams look like. Particle beams look like little tiny sticks of spaghetti, except they're much thinner. They're not as fat as a stick of spaghetti. And they're at the LHC. Different accelerators are different. They're about this long. And so you have one of them going one way full of protons and another one going the other way full of protons. And they pass through each other. And as they pass through each other, you should think of this as like a swarm of bees. And this is like a swarm of bees. And mostly the bees pass through each other and don't do anything. But every so often, some of the bees hit nose on.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “Moments in time per second where you would take a shot and inside that moment there might be 20 collisions. So that's why where we get to the billion”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “So, let me just throw some numbers out. All right. So at the CERN accelerator when it's operating, the collisions occur at a prodigious rate. We get about a billion with a B collisions per second. Now, each one of those. Now it turns out some of them are happening at the same time. So there's about order 40 million.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “Because when you make a detector like that, there's what you call background. So you have the background and the good stuff. When we know it was about 50-50. So we had maybe 19 top quarks after working for between six months and a year of collecting data. But now at the LHC, we make a top quark every second. And that's what higher energy and more collisions per second will do for you. That extra energy, you're above threshold, you make a ton of them. And when you compare the 1995 Fermilab accelerator to the current CERN accelerator, it's probably a thousand times of collisions per second. So it went from painstaking, pulling teeth to now top quarks are a background. We try to get rid of them. There's just too many of them. They get in the way of searching for the stuff we really want to search. They are like so 30 years ago.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “And that is true. So, if you want to look at high energy stuff, yeah, you go to CERN now, which is why many of my colleagues, including myself, once we had measured all of the sort of frontier measurements we thought we could make with the Fermilab accelerator, we saw this bigger, more powerful machine with seven times the energy and 100 times more collisions per second. We said, heck yeah, let's go work on that. And to give you a sense of scale, the top quark, which is the heaviest particle ever discovered, discovered at Fermilab in 1995. There were two discovery papers and the one on which I was a co-author. We had worked for a good chunk of between six months and a year of collecting collisions. And there were a lot of collisions. And our paper had 38 top quark candidates, 38. And we knew that half of them were”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “Now, the other side of your thing about making high energy unknown particles, bigger is better. And it is true that the LHC is a very high energy machine. It is about seven times more powerful in terms of energy per collision. It is also about a hundred times more collisions per second than the Fermi Lab machine. So it is true that the LHC can make bigger, heavier Particles that the old Fermilab, the Tevatron, ever could”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “Okay, so that's the antiproton thing. And if we get back to antimatter, we could talk about that because that is way cool. Yeah, super cool.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source