CERN's Doomsday Machine: Could the Large Hadron Collider Actually Destroy Earth?

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2:54The contrast there is completely surreal to me. You have the idyllic setting of Honolulu paired with this formal legal accusation of apocalyptic doom. It's wild. They were suing to stop the Large Hadron Collider, the LHC, from turning on to right? Exactly. The machine was just weeks away from its first attempts at high energy collisions. Their primary fear, well one of them, was that when those initial beans crossed, the collider might create a microscopic black hole. Which sounds terrifying to the average person. Right. They weren't just worried about some fleeting harmless anomaly. They argued this machine

3:55could spawn a stable black hole that would sink to the gravitational center of the earth. Oh boy. Yeah. And then just begin devouring, surrounding rock and magma and eventually consume the entire planet from the inside out. Just eat the whole earth. That was the claim. And they also heavily cited the fear of something called a strangely lit. Okay. I want to pause on strangely lit for a second because that sounds like a totally made-up sci-fi word. But it actually has like really deep roots in theoretical physics, doesn't it? Oh absolutely. It's a very real theoretical concept. Because for anyone unfamiliar, the idea of a strange lit is almost more terrifying than a black hole. Yeah. It reminds me of, you know, that fictional substance, ice-9 from Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cats Cradle. Oh yeah. Great reference. Right. So in the book, ice-9 is this form of water that stays solid at room temperature. And if it touches a regular drop of water, it like teaches that water how to be ice-9. It just converts it instantly. Exactly. It causes this runaway chain reaction that just freezes all the world's oceans. So a strange lit operates on a similar nightmare logic, right?

4:58That is honestly an incredibly accurate analogy. To understand a strange lit, you have to look at the particles that make up normal matter. Okay. So the protons and neutrons in your body, in the earth, they're made of what we call up and down quarks. Right. The standard building blocks? Yeah. But there's a heavier, vastly more unstable quark called a strange quark. And theoretical physics allows for the possibility of strange matter, which would contain roughly equal numbers of up, down, and strange quarks. Okay. So three part mix. Exactly. Now, the hypothesis goes that strange matter might actually be the most perfectly stable state of matter in the universe. Wait, really? More stable than what we're made of. That's the theory. So if it is, and if the LH somehow managed to fuse ordinary quarks into a negatively charged strangely, which is what the lawsuit was terrified of, right? Then it could theoretically attract positively charged ordinary atomic nuclei. And when it pulls those normal atomic nuclei in, it forces them to reconfigure, doesn't it?

5:58Yes. It essentially infects them like ice nine. Just like ice nine. It turns their up and down quarks into strange quarks. So the strange lit grows becomes more negatively charged, pulls in more normal matter and initiates this unstoppable runaway chain reaction. So in the absolute worst case scenario that these guys proposed in the lawsuit, it drops to the center of the earth and just converts the entire 6,000 kilometer deep planet into a hyper dense sphere of strange matter. Yeah, a sphere may be a hundred meters across a hundred meters, the whole planet, the earth, which is violently collapse into a strange star. So you have these two existential threats, the black hole in the strange lit, just laid out in this civil lawsuit. And Wagner, one of the guys suing, actually managed to turn this into a massive media circus. I mean, months after this lawsuit was filed, he sat down for an interview with John Oliver on the daily show. Oh, I remember this. It's legendary. It really is. Oliver, with his usual, you know, brilliant deadpan delivery, he asked Wagner what he actually

7:02thought the mathematical odds were of the LHC destroying the earth. And Wagner's answer is just it's unbelievable. Vagnal is him dead in the eye, complete sincerity and answers that the odds are 50, 50, 50. His logic was literally, and I quote, well, it either happens or it doesn't. Which is just mathematically painful here. Oliver was visibly stunned. He tried to clarify this bizarre reasoning, but Wagner just doubled down. He argued that if an event has an unknown outcome, it's just a coin flip. Wow. Which is frankly a hilarious and fundamental statistical fallacy. Right. I mean, if I buy a lottery ticket, I don't have a 50, 50 chance of winning just because the two outcomes are winner lose. Right. That's not how probability works at all. No, probability is based on the mechanism of the event, not the number of possible outcomes. Yeah. Wagner's 50, 50 logic is a joke. It's a complete fundamental misunderstanding of statistical mechanics. But, and this is a big, here's the part that isn't a joke. Yeah. And it is the reason we're doing a deep dive into this topic today. The underlying math in his lawsuit wasn't just pulled out of thin air.

8:05Wait, really? It had actual scientific backing. Yes. Serious, highly respected theoretical physicists had actually written peer-reviewed papers exploring this exact possibility. Of micro black holes forming in particle accelerators. Exactly. And the scientific community took the public panic and the underlying theoretical physics seriously enough that CERN had to commission a completely independent safety report. They actually had to investigate themselves to prove they wouldn't destroy the world. They did. They had some of the most respected names in the field. People working at the absolute limits of quantum mechanics and relativity sign off on it to definitively answer the public's fears. Well, Wagner's 50, 50 logic might be a joke, but the underlying science is entirely real. So welcome to thrilling threads. Glad to be here. Today, we are taking you, our listener, on a journey into the absolute bleeding edge of particle physics, the fundamental nature of reality, and the genuine scientific panic that was hidden right beneath a seemingly absurd lawsuit. It's a fascinating rabbit hole. It really is. And we've

9:09gathered some incredible sources for you today. We're pulling from historical safety assessments straight from CERN. The ground breaking 80-D physics papers from the late 90s, extensive cosmic ray research, and a fantastic synthesis of this whole scientific saga compiled by the channel Fexal. Excellent sources. Yeah, our mission today is to unpack exactly why a machine-built underground in Europe made brilliant scientists ask incredibly dangerous questions about gravity, about extra dimensions, and yes, about the potential to literally rip a hole in space-time. And we also want to explore what all of this means for your understanding of the universe. Exactly. So to really grasp wife is- It's fall in Jeep country, and during the driving to fall sales event, get a great deal on four by fours that refuse to be contained, like Jeep Wrangler, confidence built into every drive with the most awarded SUV ever, Jeep Grand Cherokee, and freedom that can't be denied, with the open air freedom and Jeep gladiator. After 85 years, it's no surprise that Jeep America's SUV brand get a great deal during the Jeep driving to fall sales event.

10:13Jeep is one more awards over its lifetime than any other SUV brand, even the Jeep Grill or Registered Trademarks of FCAUS LLC. This week at Vons and Albertsons, USDA Choice Tri-Tip Rost untrimmed are 599 per pound, limit for roasts with membership wear applicable, and medium-ripe hassovacados are 99 cents each, with membership wear applicable, plus Kellogg cereals 8.8 to 16.1 ounces, selected varieties, or peppered farm goldfish, 5.98 ounces, are 190.9 each when you buy three, limit three offers with membership wear applicable, visit Vons or Albertsons.com for more deals and ways to save. McDonald's is putting value back on the menu, whether you're craving a big mac, McNuggets or sausage egg and cheese, McGrittles, make it a meal and save. Your favorite is now your wallet's favorite too. Extra value meals are back. Get a big something extra, with a big mac or 10 piece McNuggets, fries and a medium coke all for just $9. Limited time only, promotion

11:15pricing may be lower than meal pricing. This were even entertaining the idea of creating black holes. I feel like we have to start with the machine itself. Oh absolutely. Because the LHC defies almost all human comprehension of scale and engineering. It really does. To understand the genesis of the fear, you must understand the sheer terrifying environment of what CERN actually built. Pay the picture, may I? So the large Hadron Collider is located roughly 100 meters underground right beneath the border of Switzerland and France. Okay. It is a circular tunnel that spans 27 kilometers in circumference. 27 kilometers, that's huge. It's massive, but the physical size is just the beginning. The engineering required to operate it pushes the absolute boundaries of thermodynamics. How so? Well, to guide these beams of particles around this massive ring, without them just flying straight through the tunnel walls, the LHC relies on thousands of superconducting dipole magnets. I want to dig into that superconductivity for a second, because

12:18superconducting magnet is a phrase that gets thrown around a lot in pop signs. But the reality of it is basically an engineering nightmare. The total nightmare, yeah. Because to make these specific niobium titanium cables superconduct, which means they conduct over 10,000 amps of electricity without losing any energy to electrical resistance, they have to be cooled down. Cooled way down. Like approximately 1.9 Kelvin. That is roughly negative 271 degrees Celsius. It's almost absolute zero. Yeah. And they achieve this using an incredibly complex plumbing system filled with superfluid liquid helium. Yeah. It makes the LAC in this very specific sense, one of the coldest, large-scale environments in existence. It's true. It is literally colder down in that tunnel than it is in the vacuum of deep space. Because deep space sits at around 2.7 Kelvin. Yeah. Thanks to the cosmic microwave background radiation. Exactly. The temperature constraint alone is staggering and it comes with massive, massive risks. What happens if it warms up? Well, if even-

13:23So you have a 27 kilometer ring colder than deep space wired with explosives levels of electrical energy buried under the European countryside. That's the setup. Yeah. And inside this ring, operating in an ultra high vacuum that is emptier than interplanetary space, you have two beans of protons traveling in opposite directions. Right. Let's talk about the energy and speed of those protons. Yeah. Break that down for us. So for run three, which is the operating phase that kicked off in 2022, each proton is accelerated to an energy of 6.8 Tera electron volts or TV. When two of these protons collide head on right in the center of a detector, the total center of mass energy hits 13.6 TV. And to reach that energy, the speed has to be pushed to the absolute edge of relativity, doesn't it? Yes. These protons are moving at 0.9999, one times the speed of light. That is just- I can't even picture that. To put that in absolute terms, they are only about three meters per second slower than a photon. Wow. So in the time it takes you, meaning our listener

14:29right now, to just blink your eyes, a single proton has lapped that 27 kilometer ring roughly 3,000 times. It's mind blowing. It is. But here is where I always hit a mental roadblock with this stuff. And where I think a lot of people struggle with the scale of particle physics. What's the roadblock? We'll certain themselves point out that 13.6 Tera energy, the total energy of this massive multi-billion dollar collision is roughly equivalent to the kinetic energy of a single safety pin falling from a height of two centimeters. Ah, yes. The famous safety pin analogy. Right. Like I dropped things with way more energy than that before I even had my morning coffee. Yes. So why would anyone panic let alone file a federal lawsuit over a machine that generates the macroscopic energy of a falling safety pin? It's a fair question. I mean, if the energy is that low, how are we supposed to rip a hole in the fabric in the universe? Okay, so the safety pin analogy is totally accurate mathematically, but it completely ignores the variable that actually matters in particle physics, the density. The total amount of energy in the room doesn't matter

15:33at all. It is entirely about how tightly you pack it into a microscopic suitcase. Oh, I see. Yeah, that safety pin's energy isn't spread out over a piece of metal you can hold in your hand. All of that kinetic energy is concentrated into a space smaller than an atomic nucleus. So you are taking the macroscopic energy of a falling object and squeezing it down into a subatomic volume. Exactly. So it's purely a question of energy density. Like if I gently press a safety pin against your arm, you just feel a slight pressure. Right. But if I take that exact same amount of force and apply it through the tip of a hypodermic needle, it pierces your skin instantly because the force is concentrated over a vastly smaller area. Precisely the right way to think about it. And in the LHC, we are concentrating energy so intensely that we are hoping to pierce the fabric of the quantum vacuum itself. Okay, that is terrifyingly well put. Thank you. And to observe what happens when that energy density spikes, we have the detectors. Right, the machines watching the crash. The sources outlined for primary detectors positioned at the intersection points of the LHC.

16:37You have ATLS and CMS, which are the general purpose giants. Okay, general purpose. Yeah, ATLS uses massive toroidal magnets, which is actually where the T in its name comes from, while CMS relies on a compact Mewon solenoid. Let's clarify how these cathedral-sized machines actually watch a collision because they aren't just giant digital cameras taking a photo. Are they? No, no, they're much more complex. They're built in concentric layers, right? Exactly. The innermost layers are usually silicon trackers. Okay. So when a collision happens and new particles are spawned, they fly outward through this silicon, leaving microscopic electrical disturbances. Like footprints? Yes, like electrical footprints in the silicon. And because the entire detector is bathed in a massive magnetic field, the paths of charged particles curve. So by measuring the exact arc of that curve, physicists can calculate the momentum of the particle. You got it. The tighter the curve, the lower the momentum. Okay, that makes sense. And surrounding those trackers are the

17:38calorimeters. Their job is to literally stop the particles dead in their tracks to measure their total energy. How do they stop them? Well, electromagnetic calorimeters stop later particles like electrons and photons, while hydronic calorimeters are built from really dense materials like brass and steel to stop heavier particles like protons and neutrons. So by combining the momentum from the trackers with the energy from the calorimeters, physicists can reconstruct the exact identity and trajectory of every piece of shrapnel from the collision. Exactly. At TLS and CMS are built to look for anything and everything, including the signature of a black hole. But CERN also built specialized detectors. It did. Alice's design specifically to study the quark-luon plasma, which is the hyperdense primordial soup that existed in the first microseconds after the big bang. What? And LHCB is hunting for incredibly subtle asymmetries between matter and antimatter, trying to answer the existential question of why the universe is filled with matter instead of

18:39having entirely annihilated itself at the dawn of time. Which is a whole other existential crisis to worry about. True. So we have the machine, we have the unbelievable energy density, we have the cathedral-sized layered detectors. Yep. The question hiding behind the Hawaiian courtroom drama is this. Could this incredible machine with all its dense energy actually tear reality and create a black hole? That's the million dollar question. To answer that, we have to look past the collider itself. At my bank, I was literally getting pennies using walfrons, chitching, meat Angela, a well-thrinked cash account client since 2023. It lost my job not having something else lined up yet. I was pregnant with my second. We had to think about how do we make our money work for us. Every month there's this much that I'm getting an interest in. I didn't have to do anything. My money is working hard on its own and I can trust Walfront is taking care of me. With a well-thrinked cash account, earn up to 4.2% APY on your cash. No account fees, no minimums, and no strings attached. Plus, free instant withdrawals to eligible accounts.

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21:07We have to look at gravity. And we have to look at why gravity behaves in a way that frankly is deeply humiliating to physicists. Humiliating is the perfect word for it, honestly. I really is. Gravity is the most obvious force in our macroscopic lives, yet it is the most theoretically problematic. Okay, I want you, our listener, to imagine picking up a small, cheap fridge magnet. You know, like the con you get for free from a local plumber? Yeah, nothing fancy. Hold it right above paperclip, sitting on your table. What happens? Paperclip jumps up and sticks to the magnet. You see it every day, so you don't even think about it. But you should think about it. Exactly. Think about what actually just occurred mechanically. That tiny sliver of magnetized metal in your hand just completely defeated the entire gravitational pull of the planet beneath you. It's absurd when you phrase it that way. It is. A ball of solid rock and molten iron, 6,000 kilometers deep with a mass of 6 sub-tillion kilograms is pulling down on that paper clip.

22:08And your cheap little promotional magnet won the tug of war effortlessly. It is a profound observation and it highlights one of the deepest, most troubling, unsolved problems in modern science. Which is. Gravity is the force that dictates the architecture of the cosmos. It holds whole galaxies together. It curves the fabric of space time. It dictates the orbit of planets. Right. And yet by a staggering almost incomprehensible margin, it is the weakest of the four fundamental forces. Oh, how much? Well, we have the strong nuclear force binding atomic nuclei, the electromagnetic force, governing chemistry and light, the weak nuclear force controlling radioactive decay. And then gravity. And then way at the bottom, practically invisible on the quantum scale, we have gravity. Gravity is approximately 10 to the power of 36 times weaker than the electromagnetic force. 10 to the power of 36, a one with 36 zeros. Yeah. Numbers like that just wash over the human brain. Like they don't mean anything. Let's make that visual based on what the source is provided.

23:10Okay. If you try to represent that difference in strength by stacking grains of sand, where one single grain of sand represents the strength of gravity and 10 to the 36 grains represent electromagnetism, how big is that second pile? It's big. It wouldn't just be the size of Mount Everest. It wouldn't be the size of the Earth, or the solar system, or even the Milky Way galaxy. No. A pile of sand containing 10 to the 36 grains would completely dwarf the entire observable universe. It's staggering. That is how pathetic gravity is compared to the other forces. And this disparity is the ground state of reality. It's a feature of every single atom in your body. Physicists refer to this massive discrepancy as the hierarchy problem. The hierarchy problem. Yeah. And to understand why it causes so much anxiety in theoretical physics, we have to look at the energy scales where the other fundamental forces operate. Walk us through that. The weak force, for example, operates at an energy scale of about 100 giga-electron volts, or Jav.

24:10Okay. The particles connected to this force, like the W and Z bosons and the famous Higgs boson, all have masses clustering around this same general neighborhood. Write the Higgs boson, which ATLS and CMS discovered in 2012, that has a mass of about 125 Jav. Exactly. But, according to the rules of quantum mechanics, specifically quantum field theory, the Higgs boson shouldn't be sitting comfortably at 125 Jav, should it? No, it really shouldn't. And this is where we have to dive into the concept of virtual particles. Oh, boy. In quantum field theory, the vacuum of space is never truly empty. It is a boiling chaotic soup of quantum fields, even in a total vacuum. Even in a perfect vacuum. Because of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which states, there is a fundamental limit to how precisely we can know both the energy and the lifespan of a quantum state. Right. Because of that, pairs of particles and anti-particles can temporarily borrow energy from the vacuum. They pop into existence, interact for a fleeting fraction of a microsecond,

25:14and then annihilate each other, returning the borrowed energy. So space is just constantly frothing with these temporary virtual particles? We call them virtual particles, yes. And the Higgs boson, as it moves through space, is constantly interacting with this froth. Exactly. The Higgs field couples to all massive particles. So, as virtual top quarks or virtual W bosons pop in and out of the vacuum, they interact with the Higgs. Okay, and what does that do? In the mathematics of quantum field theory, these constant interactions act like a drag on the Higgs. They contribute to its mass through what we call quantum corrections. And because virtual particles can have incredibly high momentum, these quantum corrections are mathematically enormous. They should drag the mass of the Higgs boson all the way up to the ultimate ceiling of energy in standard physics. Which is the Planck scale? Yeah, the Planck scale. Which sits way up at 10 to the power of 19, Jeff. But when we actually measure the Higgs boson at the LHC, it's not at the Planck scale. It's not anywhere close.

26:15No, I'm just sitting there, relatively light at 125, Jeff. So, for the Higgs to remain that light, the initial, like, bare mass of the Higgs and the massive quantum corrections trying to drag it upward must be mathematically canceling each other out. Yes. Perfectly. And they aren't just canceling out loosely. The sources emphasize that they have to cancel each other out to a precision of about one part in 10 to the 34th power. It is a miraculous cancellation. Imagine balancing a perfectly sharpened pencil on its microscopic tip of graphite during a violent earthquake and doing it perfectly without it falling forever. That's insane. If there is a mismatch, a rounding error in the 33rd decimal place between the bare mass and the quantum corrections, the Higgs becomes incredibly heavy. And what happens if the Higgs becomes heavy? The weak force becomes incredibly weak. Addams change size. Chemistry stops working. And the universe, as we know, it completely ceases to exist. I have to play devil's advocate here.

27:16Go for it. As a layperson, I might look at that and say, OK, so the math cancels out perfectly. That's just how the universe was made. Why is that a problem? The universe doesn't owe us an explanation for why its constants are or what they are. Well, you were touching on the anthropic principle. The idea that the universe has these parameters simply because if it didn't, we wouldn't be here to observe it. Right. But physicists deeply dislike that answer. In physics, when a mathematical formula requires an unbelievably precise balancing act, without any underlying mechanism to enforce that balance, we call it fine-tuning, or we say the theory is unnatural. So it feels artificial. Yes. It strongly suggests that our mathematical model is incomplete. There has to be some deeper, undiscovered physical mechanism, a new symmetry, a new particle, that naturally protects the Higgs mass from ballooning, rather than it just being a lucky astronomical coincidence. And the mystery only deepens when you compare the scales. You have the weak scale where the Higgs lives, around 10 to the 2G. Yeah.

28:16Then you have the Planck scale where gravity theoretically gets strong, sitting at 10 to the 19G. That is a difference of 17 orders of magnets. That's a massive. A gigantic yawning gap between where the normal particles live, and where gravity supposedly asserts itself. In particle physics, they ominously refer to this vast empty space as the desert. The desert. When physicists see an empty mathematical space that phenomenally large, they assume we are completely blind to a massive piece of reality. Absolutely. And that Planck scale, that fortress wallet, 10 to the 19th G, is the critical threshold for the Hawaiian lawsuit. Because in ordinary standard model physics, the Planck scale dictates the formation of black holes. To create a black hole, you have to compress a massive amount of energy into a tiny enough region that space time actually folds in on itself, creating an event horizon. Okay. In our familiar three-dimensional macroscopic world, the energy threshold required to achieve that localized folding is determined by the Planck scale.

29:18Which means the energy required to make a black hole is roughly a quadrillion times more than what the large Hadron Collider can produce. A quadrillion time. It's not just slightly out of reach. We aren't a few software patches or magnet upgrades away. It is out of reach by a laughable margin. Completely. So looking at the standard picture of physics, the lawsuit answers itself. No machine on Earth, not now, not in a thousand years, could ever pack enough energy into a small enough space to hit the Planck scale and fold space time. The math says it's strictly impossible. Case closed. The Hawaiian judge should just bang the gavel and throw it out. And that was the absolute consensus. The standard model provided an iron-clad defense. Until the year 1998, that year three theoretical physicists wrote a paper that essentially punched a hole straight through that standard reasoning. And who were they? Their names were Nima Arcanihamed, Savastimupalos, and Gia Dvali. The paper was published in Physics Letters B, and it carried a title that became

30:19instantly legendary in the field. The hierarchy problem and new dimensions at a millimeter. Wow, new dimensions. Yes. What they proposed, which became known as the ADD model, named after their initials, remains one of the most beautiful, strange, and consequential ideas in modern theoretical physics. So what did they actually propose? They looked at gravity's pathetic weakness. They looked at the massive desert between the weak scale and the Planck scale, and they asked a revolutionary question. What if gravity isn't actually weak? What do you mean? What if it just looks weak to us because we aren't seeing all of it? This is where the physics gets absolutely mind-bending. The ADD model suggests that our universe has more than three spatial dimensions. Which isn't a completely new idea. String theory has relied on extra dimensions for decades. Right. But the ADD model proposed something radically different about how we interact with them, didn't they? They did. They suggested that ordinary matter is completely confined to a three-dimensional surface. They call the surface a brain, short from membrane.

31:20Correct. So you, me, the chair you're sitting in, the life from the sun, the electrons in your computer, every single standard model particle is permanently glued to this 3D brain. We are trapped flat landers. Exactly. Floating inside a much larger, higher dimensional space, which they call the bulk, we cannot leave the brain. But gravity, gravity plays by an entirely different set of rules. The mechanism behind why gravity behaves differently is actually deeply rooted in the mathematics of string theory. Explain that for us. In string theory, particles are modeled as vibrating one-dimensional strings. The particles of the standard model quarks, electrons, photons are modeled as open strings. They have two distinct endpoints. Correct. And the theory states that the endpoints of an open string must remain attached to a D-brain. They are literally tethered to our three-dimensional reality. They can slide along the brain, which is why we can move in 3D space, but they cannot lift off of it. But the graviton, the hypothetical quantum particle that carries the force of gravity

32:22is modeled as a closed string. It is a loop. It has no endpoints. Because it has no endpoints, it has nothing to anchor it to the brain. Precisely. It is completely free to drift off the 3D surface and propagate into the higher-dimensional bulk. Gravity is the only force that is not confined to our reality. As it spreads out into the extra dimensions, its strength gets enormously diluted. So most of its power is bleeding sideways into dimensional spaces we cannot perceive or interact with? Yes. To help visualize this, the sources provide a really elegant analogy. Let's hear it. I want you to imagine a large tank of clear water. Floating horizontally right in the middle of that water is a very thin, perfectly flat sheet of plastic. Okay, visualizing it. Now imagine you take an eyedropper and drop some colored dye onto the sheet. So the dye represents ordinary matter. It represents us. Adam's light people planets. Right. And that dye can spread across the 2D surface of the sheet, but it can never, ever leave the sheet.

33:24It's trapped. It doesn't dissolve into the water above, and it doesn't sink into the water below. For the dye, only the two-dimensional sheet exists. It is completely impermeable. Nothing from the water can enter the sheet, and nothing on the sheet can escape into the water. Okay, I'm with you. Now imagine you strike the side of the glass water tank with your hand. You create a physical wave of kinetic energy. That wave moves through the entire volume of water through the bulk. Right. It moves above the sheet, below the sheet, and right through the sheet itself. Okay, so if there were tiny microscopic creatures made of dye, living on that sheet, they would feel a little tiny ripple as the wave passed through their 2D world. They would. But because they can only perceive the sheet, and they measure the wave only by how it affects their 2D space, they would think, wow, this wave force is incredibly weak. They have absolutely no idea that the vast majority of the wave's kinetic energy is crashing through the water above and below them, completely bypassing their reality.

34:25The sheet is our 3D universe. The water is the extra dimensions, and the wave is gravity. That is such a good analogy. Unlike our standard particles, gravity propagates through the entire bulk of higher-dimensional space. If this ADD picture is correct, it means that at very, very short distances, before gravity has had a chance to bleed off and dilute into the extra dimensions, it isn't weak at all. Wait, really? Yeah. At a microscopic core, gravity might be enormous, completely comparable in strength to the strong nuclear force or electromagnetism. So the weakness we measure every day with our fridge magnets is an illusion produced by the hidden geometry of the universe. It is a geometric artifact, not a fundamental property of nature. And while that is a stunning, poetic idea that beautifully solves the hierarchy problem by removing the desert entirely, it also opens up a terrifying loophole. A very big loophole. Because if gravity is actually super strong at tiny microscopic distances, it drastically lowers the Planck scale.

35:27It does. That means the energy required a full space time is in 10 to the 19th jave. It might be much, much lower. Right. This week at Vons and Albertsons, USDA Choice Tri-Tip Rost untrimmed are 599 per pound. Limit 4 Rosts with membership were applicable, and medium-ripe Hassovicados are 99 cents each, with membership were applicable. Plus Kellogg's cereals 8.8 to 16.1 ounces, selected varieties, or peppered farm goldfish, 5.98 ounces are 190.9 each when you buy three. Limit 3 offers with membership were applicable. Visit Vons or Albertsons.com for more deals and ways to save.

36:29Fast forward a few years to 2001. Two physicists, Savas Demoppelhoes, one of the original ADD authors, and Greg Landsberg decided to take this beautiful theory and do the brutal real-world math. They published a paper in physical review letters with a title that would have sounded like pure science fiction just three years earlier. Black holes at the LHC. They just said it out loud. They did. This was not just a philosophical thought experiment. They put hard numbers, cross-section equations, and statistical probabilities to paper. Where did they find? They calculated exactly how often microscopic black holes would be produced inside the large Hadron collider if the ADD framework of extra dimensions was correct. Okay. It was a rigorous, testable prediction, ready to be proven or disproven the moment-surn flipped the switch. To understand their calculations and how we get a black hole, we have to look closely at what actually happens in a collision inside ATLS or CMS.

37:34We casually say protons collide, but a proton isn't a solid, uniform, billiard ball. What is it then? It is a chaotic, swarming bundle of smaller constituents. You have two upcorks, one downcork, and a sea of gluons that bind them all together through the strong nuclear force. Physicists collectively call these internal parts Partons? Partons, okay. When two protons hit each other head on at 13.6 Tv, it's actually these inner partons that are doing the colliding, and they only carry a fraction of the proton's total kinetic energy. Usually in a standard collision, these partons graze past each other, exchange some energy, break the confinement of the strong force, and create a messy shower of new standard particles that scatter into the calorimeters. But the ADD picture introduces a massive wildcard, which is, if those extra dimensions exist, and gravity is actually super strong at extremely short distances, then occasionally, two of these high energy partons might pass incredibly close to each other. I have to ask about that passing incredibly close part.

38:35If partons have mass and energy, shouldn't there be quantum repulsion? Shouldn't the electromagnetic or strong forces push them apart before they can get close enough to trigger this super strong gravity? The energy overcomes the repulsion. The kinetic energy of the partons inside the LHC is so massively high that they can push past the repulsive barriers. Oh, wow. If they get close enough, the immense energy they carry, packed into the tiny microscopic volume between them, crosses a critical geometric threshold called the Schwarz-Child radius. A Schwarz-Child radius? Yes. The Schwarz-Child radius is the ultimate point of no return in general relativity. It is the specific radius at which any given amount of mass or energy, if squeezed tightly enough inside it, has to form an event horizon. Because the escape velocity exceeds the speed of light. Exactly. Gravity becomes completely inescapable, and the local fabric of space-time collapses. So, Demopolis and Landsberg argued that if two partons cross that Schwarz-Child radius, the result isn't just a messy spray of standard particles.

39:38The result is a black hole. Space-time simply does what space-time does when you concentrate enough energy. It folds. And their math showed that if the true Planck scale was low enough around one TV, safely within the LHC's operating limits, the collider wouldn't just make one accidental black hole. Wait, it would make more. The probability of partons crossing the Schwarz-Child radius was high enough that the LHC would produce a steady, continuous, measurable stream of micro-black holes. Millions of them a year hiding in the noise of the collisions. Okay, we absolutely need to do some serious deconstruction of the cultural fear associated with the words black hole right here. Yes, please. Because when the general public, and certainly the plaintiffs in the Hawaiian lawsuit, hear that phrase, their minds immediately go to cosmic monsters. They do. They think of Sagittarius A-star, the supermassive black hole at the set of our galaxy that weighs four million times as much as the Sun. Yeah. Or they think of Signus X1 ripping gas off a companion star. Or that iconic terrifying glowing orange ring

40:40from the event Horizon Telescope image of M87. We are deeply trained by sci-fi and pop science to think of an inescapable cosmic vacuum cleaner. But we have to redefine the monster, don't we? Right. Because none of that astrophysics applies to what the LHC would be making. It doesn't apply in the slightest. The cultural perception of a black hole is entirely based on mass. Mass, right? A stellar black hole is born from the catastrophic gravitational collapse of a massive star, maybe 20 times larger than our Sun. Its gravity is overwhelming entirely because its mass is overwhelming. But a micro-black hole birthed in a particle accelerator. It would have a mass of maybe a few Terra-electron volts translated into everyday macrostopic units that is approximately 10 to the minus 23rd grams. 10 to the minus 23rd grams. That is a trillionth of the trillionth of a gram. The physical diameter of its event Horizon would be infinitesimally smaller than the proton that created it. So its gravitational pull wouldn't just be weak. It would be practically non-existent.

41:41Essentially zero, yeah. It would have vastly less gravitational pull than a single speck of dust floating in your living room. It wouldn't suddenly fall heavily to the center of the earth like a lead weight. Not at all. It wouldn't devour the machine. It wouldn't suck in the detector. It would probably be the most delicate, fragile object ever temporarily forced into existence in the history of the universe. And it is crucial to continually ground this in the massive singular condition. Or medicine. The ADD framework had to be right. Extra dimensions had to exist. The gravitons had to be bleeding into the bulk. And the true Planck scale had to sit close to one TV. If any of those string theory assumptions were wrong, the whole prediction vanishes. But if they were right, the lawsuit was asking one very human, very terrifying question. Strip to the hysteria, what actually happens to one of these micro-black holes the millisecond after is born? Right. And the lawsuit relied entirely on the classical image of a black hole as a one-way mouth.

42:41A horizon opens, a stray atom falls in, the black hole gets slightly heavier, its gravitational reach expands slightly, it pulls in another atom, it drops to the center of the earth, and begins eating the planet from the inside out. But that classical picture ignores one of the most famous groundbreaking discoveries in modern physics. Yes, it does. The lifeline thrown to humanity by Stephen Hawking. Yes. In 1974, Stephen Hawking completely revolutionized astrophysics by killing the idea that black holes are immortal. How do you do it? He took quantum field theory, the same rules that govern the virtual particles interacting with the Higgs boson, and he applied them to the severely curved spacetime surrounding an event horizon. He showed that event horizons aren't permanent, one-way streets. They leak. Let's just break down exactly how they leak, because the mechanism is fascinating. We talk about how the vacuum of space is boiling with pairs of virtual particles and antiparticles popping into existence and annihilating instantly. What happens when one of those pairs pops into existence

43:43exactly on the boundary of an event horizon? Well, the extreme title forces of gravity at the horizon interfere with the annihilation process. The pair pops into existence, but before they can recombine and annihilate, one particle is pulled across the event horizon and trapped inside the black hole, while the other particle is thrust outward and escapes into space. Wow. And because the escaping particle has real positive energy, the universe's accounting books have to balance. Energy cannot be created from nothing. So the energy of the escaping particle is subtracted from the mass of the black hole. This process sends a steady stream of radiation outward, meaning that the black hole is constantly losing mass. We call it Hawking radiation. Exactly. And this is where the mathematical rules cut completely against human intuition. You'd logically think a giant supermassive black hole would violently radiate energy and a tiny microscopic one would just sit there quietly. But it's the opposite. Right. Hawking proved the relationship between a black hole's mass and its temperature

44:45is inversely proportional. Smaller black holes radiate far more fiercely. A black hole, the mass of a mountain would glow with intense heat. But a micro black hole, something with the mass of a proton, wouldn't just slowly evaporate over millennia. What would it do? It would violently and instantaneously detonate. It would sit at the absolute extreme end of Hawking's thermodynamic calculations. A micro black hole produced at the LHC would have a predicted lifespan around 10 to the minus 27th of a second. 10 to the minus 27th. Let's give that number some context, because 10 to the minus 27th is utterly impossible for the human brain to picture. It's here. In that infinitesimally small span of time, a beam of light, the fastest phenomenon in the universe, traveling at 300,000 kilometers per second would travel less than the physical width of a single atomic nucleus. It's just staggering. That means the micro black hole is born. And before it can even cross the microscopic space between its own internal parts,

45:45it's gone. It doesn't have time to drift. It doesn't have time to fall. It certainly doesn't have time to swallow in a Jason Adam. It appears. And instantly ceases to exist in a flash of quantum mechanics. And when it vanishes, it doesn't leave behind a quiet void. It produces a sudden, massive burst of particles. Like an explosion. If tiny black holes could form in these high energy collisions, the detectors like ATLAs and CMS wouldn't see a black spot. They would see a brilliant firework display. Oh, what? Blackworks, leptins, photons, gluons, all shooting out from a single microscopic point with unusually high energy and high transverse momentum. And because of the statistical way Hawking radiation works, this explosion would be highly symmetrical. Yes, very symmetrical. It acts based on thermodynamic rules, essentially like a hot piece of metal glowing. It doesn't prefer to emit one type of particle over another. It just dumps its mass energy into all available particle states evenly in all directions. It produces what they call a democratic mix of particles.

46:48A democratic mix, exactly. And that spherical firework burst is exactly what the physicists at CERN were actively looking for. If you saw that perfectly symmetrical burst of all standard particles in the detector, it would be the smoking gun. It would be a massive flashing neon sign saying, extra dimensions are real, the ADD model is correct, and we just briefly touch the bulk. It would win a Nobel Prize instantly. Instantly. But as the sources rightly point out, and as the lawyers for the plaintiffs were quick to highlight, there is a very honest, very raw caveat that must be placed on all of this comforting theoretical physics. And it's a big caveat. Hawking radiation has never been directly detected. No, it hasn't. We have never watched a stellar black holiday evaporate. We have never caught the radiation coming off one. Which is legitimately terrifying, if you think about it. It really is. If you're a plaintiff in a lawsuit trying to stop the machine, you stand up and court and say, wait, your entire defense, the only thing standing between the earth and total annihilation,

47:50rests on a mathematical theory that has never once been empirically observed. Right, that's a tough sell to a judge. The LHC Safety Assessment Group, the Independent Body Surin Commission, featuring heavyweights like John Ellis, was very open about this in their 2008 report. The math for Hawking radiation is built on the absolute bedrock of general relativity and quantum field theory, and virtually every working physicist accepts it as truth. Yes. But theoretical acceptance is not the same as empirical observation. So the horrifying, what if remains? What if Hawking made a mathematical error? What if these micro-black holes don't evaporate? What if they just sit there stable, heavy, and hungry? If Stephen Hawking's theoretical argument with the only defense we had against the Doomsday scenario, there might legitimately be room for a sliver of existential doubt. But it isn't our only defense. The second argument, and the one that truly definitively dismantles the fear of earth's destruction, is older than the LHC, it is older than the ADD paper, and is older than Hawking's calculations. What is it?

48:51It is an empirical argument written in the sky. It's the universe's own 4 billion year old high energy physics experiment. It's fall in Jeep country, and during the driving to fall sales events, get a great deal on four by fours that refuse to be contained, like Jeep Wrangler. Confidence built into every drive with the most awarded SUV ever, Jeep Grand Cherokee, and freedom that can't be denied, with the open air freedom and Jeep gladiator. After 85 years, it's no surprise that Jeep became America's SUV brand. Get a great deal during the Jeep driving to fall sales event. Jeep is one more awards over its lifetime than any other SUV brand, Jeep and the Jeep Grill or Registered Trademarks of FCA US LLC. Ultra high energy cosmic rays. This is arguably the most powerful part of the entire safety assessment. You agree completely. Every single second of every single day, the earth's upper atmosphere is being bombarded by particles from deep space. There's solitary protons and heavy atomic nuclei that have been accelerated by the cosmos to kinetic energies that completely dwarf anything human beings could ever dream of building.

49:53We're talking about particles launched by the shock waves of supernovae. Or whipped up to near light speed in the magnetic accretion discs of supermassive black holes and active galactic nuclei. And to really understand the scale of these cosmic rays, we have to talk about October 15, 1991, the Dugway Proving Ground in the Utah desert. Oh, this is a great story. The Flyzye Cosmic Ray Detector caught a cascade of secondary particles hitting the atmosphere. The primary particle, the triggered it, had an energy level so utterly absurd, so far beyond human comprehension, that researchers legitimately nicknamed it the Oh My God Particle. The energy of that single particle was calculated at roughly 320 million tv. 320 million. Compare that to the LHC's maximum center of mass collision energy of 13.6 tv. It's nothing compared to the cosmic ray. The universe casually threw a single proton at us that was tens of millions of times more energetic than anything the large Hadron-Clyder has ever produced or frankly will ever produce in our lifetimes.

50:57To put the speed of that Oh My God particle in perspective, it was traveling so incredibly close to the speed of light that if it raised a photon across the universe for 215,000 years, the photon would only win the race by a single centimeter. Wow. And this wasn't an isolated one-off event. Particles with energies far above the LHC's capabilities arrived constantly. They hit the atmosphere, they create showers of muons and pions, and we measure them with massive ground arrays. But it's not just the Earth they hit. They strike the moon, and this is a crucial point for the safety argument, right? Because the Earth has an atmosphere to slow these particles down, meaning that collisions aren't always a perfect head-on center of mass collision like in the LHC. But the moon has no atmosphere. Exactly. Cosmic rays slam directly into the dense lunar regolith with their full, unmitigated kinetic energy, creating conditions virtually identical to and vastly exceeding the collisions inside the LHC.

51:58And they strike the sun. But even more importantly, they strike the true survivors of the cosmos, white dwarfs, and neutron stars. Ah, yes. Neutron stars. Neutron stars are the collapse cores of massive stars. Their matter is packed so densely that a single teaspoon of neutron star material would weigh hundreds of millions of tons on Earth. They are the ultimate gravity traps. They are. If these ultra-high energy cosmic ray collisions could create stable, non-evaporating, dangerous, micro-black holes, they would have done millions of years ago on the surface of a neutron star. A cosmic ray would hit the star, spawn a micro-black hole. And because the star is so unfathomably dense, the black hole wouldn't have to wait to find matter to eat. It would immediately start consuming the star from the inside out. Stepping to a physicist at Penn State who worked heavily on cosmic ray observation, summed up the empirical argument perfectly. What did he say? He said, if cosmic ray collisions could create black holes that would swallow the Earth,

52:58it would have happened already. It's so simple, but so true. The moon would be gone, replaced by a tiny black hole. The sun would be gone. The night sky would be completely devoid of white dwarfs and neutron stars, because they would have all collapsed into doomsday objects, yons ago. Right. The fact that we can look up and see the moon, the fact that we can detect pulsars is absolute empirical proof that high energy particle collisions do not trigger apocalyptic gravitational collapse. And the theoretical analysis goes even deeper than just observing the sky. In 2008, physicists, Steven Giddings and Michelangelo Mangano published a dense, brilliant analysis to close even the most paranoid, worst-case scenario loophole in the Hawaiian lawsuit. What did they look at? They essentially said, OK, let's pretend Hawking is completely wrong. Let's pretend a micro-black hole is created at the LHC. It doesn't evaporate. It is perfectly stable. It is electrically neutral, so it doesn't get trapped in the magnetic fields. And it drops to the center of the Earth. What happens then?

53:59OK. Running the worst-case scenario. Exactly. They ran the math on the accretion rate. How fast a black hole that microscopic could physically pull in atoms of iron from the Earth's core? And what were the results? Their calculations proved that because the micro-black hole is so unfavomibly small, its gravitational reach is essentially zero, even completely embedded inside the dense core of the Earth, surrounded by matter. The time it would require to accrete enough mass to pose any threat whatsoever to the planet would far exceed the current age of the entire universe. So even if it was there, it wouldn't matter. Exactly. You know, the Hawaiian lawsuit wasn't ultimately dismissed just because the judge deferred to CERN's institutional authority. It was dismissed because the cosmos itself had already run the exact experiment the plaintiffs were terrified of. It rented on every rock, every moon, every plan in the solar system, every single night for over four billion years. And the result was always the same. We are still here. The Earth has not been consumed. The physics simply does not support the fear.

55:01So the apocalypse was canceled. The public panic faded. The media moved on. And the science was just getting started. The LAC turned on. The superconducting magnets held. The beams crossed. And the physicists went looking for those fireworks. Let's walk to the actual data. Yeah. In 2010, just months after the first high energy collisions, the CMS collaboration ran the first dedicated massive search for microscopic black holes in human history. They were actively looking for them. Yes. They were actively filtering their immense data streams for that specific ADD signature we talked about. A massive, perfectly symmetrical burst of transverse energy radiating from a single microscopic point. Something that looks completely different from ordinary standard model particle scattering. They sifted through the data. And what did they find? They found the background noise. Every single event they recorded was perfectly and predictably explained by the standard model of physics. So no black holes? There were no symmetrical fireworks.

56:02The result was published as the first direct experimental limit on black hole production. They effectively ruled out the existence of microscopic black holes for masses between 3.5 and 4.5 TV across a wide range of theoretical parameters proposed by the ADD String Theory model. And the searches obviously didn't stop there. They continued aggressively through run two. Pushing the collision energies up to 13 TV between 2015 and 2018, run three began in 2022, operating at 13.6 TV. Just to give our listeners a sense of how much data they've combed through, the sources mentioned that ATLA's alone collected roughly 165 inverse femtobarns of proton proton data in just the first three years of run three. That is a staggering amount of data. It is. And I want to stop and define that term because inverse femtobarn sounds like pure science fiction jargon. It does. A barn is a unit of area used in nuclear physics to measure the cross section of a nucleus.

57:03It actually comes from the old joke of hitting the broad side of a barn. Oh really? I didn't know that. Yeah. And a femtobarn is incredibly small. 10 to the minus 15th barns. When physicists talk about inverse femtobarns, they are measuring integrated luminosity. It's a way of counting the total number of collision events over time. Right. 165 inverse femtobarns translate to tens of quadrillions of individual proton collisions. Tens of quadrillions. It is a colossal, almost unfathomable amount of data, more than the entire run to combined. And through all of those tens of quadrillions of high energy collisions, that specific firework signature of a micro-black hole evaporating has never appeared. Not once. And here is where perspective is everything. If you don't understand how the scientific method works at this level, you might look at those null results and say, wow, what a massive failure. They spent billions of dollars built a 27 kilometer machine searched for a decade and found absolutely nothing.

58:04But that's not true, is it? Not at all. In physics, finding nothing is progress. It is a profound and necessary result. It is the universe speaking back to us. The ADD theory made a very specific striking prediction about what should happen at these specific energies if extra dimensions existed at a certain scale. The experiment looked incredibly carefully with the most advanced sensors ever built and saw nothing. That is not a failure. It's a definitive answer. Every year, the LHG runs without producing a black hole firework. The window of mathematical possibility for the ADD framework shrinks. The fundamental scale of gravity, if extra dimensions do exist, has been definitively pushed far past the 13.6 TV reach of our current machine. And the theoretical landscape is evolving in response to these null results, throwing up new roadblocks to the original 1998 theory. What kind of roadblocks? Well, we've got a fascinating paper from 2023 by physicist Matthew Lake, published in Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences.

59:05Okay, what does he say? He suggests that even if extra dimensions are real, the complex rules of quantum uncertainty operating in higher dimensional space time might fundamentally prevent micro-black holes from forming at LHG energies altogether. Oh, really? Yeah. The geometry of the bulk might possess internal quantum constraints that prohibit the folding of space time at these relatively low energies. So the door that the ADD paper kicked open in 1998 might never have been a door at all? Exactly. The mechanics of higher dimensions might be far more complex and far more rigid than we originally imagined. So where does that leave us? Physicists are already looking beyond the LHG to see what the next generation of colliders might reveal. They are. Around 2030, the LHG will undergo a major physical upgrade to become the high luminosity LHG. The energy will stay roughly the same, but the beams will be squeezed much tighter, massively increasing the density of collisions, designed to collect 10 times more data. It's going to be a huge step up. But the real lead forward, the machine that would test the next frontiers of string theory

1:00:08would be the proposed future circular collider, the FCC. The FCC is an incredible proposal. A 2000 and 24 analysis by physicist Haleel Gams and his colleagues estimated the reach of such a machine. And what do they find? They calculated that a 100-TV collider housed in a 90-kilometer ring could probe the fundamental gravity scales all the way up to 45-TV. 90 kilometers, that's huge. It would push our understanding of the Planck scale and the potential existence of the bulk into an entirely new regime of physics. But until a machine like the FCC is actually built, the great enduring mystery remains exactly where it started when we first held up that deep promotional fridge magnet. Right back to the start. The hierarchy problem is still staring as squarely in the face. Gravity is still absurdly inexplicably, pathetically weak compared to the other fundamental forces. That gap of 17 orders of magnitude, the vast mathematical desert between the weak scale and the Planck scale

1:01:10is still sitting there, completely silent, waiting for an explanation. Every single time you let go of a coffee cup and it falls to the floor or you use a magnet to stick a gross relish to the fridge, you are physically interacting with the absolute edge of known physics. We really are. You are witnessing a cosmic balancing act that we simply do not understand. The simplest, most elegant version of the Hidden Dimensions idea, the one that triggered the Hawaiian lawsuit, is under serious empirical challenge. Whatever theoretical framework eventually replaces it will likely have to be far more intricate and mathematically complex than what ADD proposed in 1998. Yeah. But I want to stress that this is exactly how physics is supposed to work. How so? The ADD theory was brilliant, precisely because it didn't just philosophize endlessly. It made clear, testable numerical predictions. It told experimentalists exactly where to look. And they looked. The experimentalists built the machine, they looked, they found nothing, and so the range of possible explanations for reality shrank.

1:02:11Science became more precise. We now know definitively where the answer is not. That's a great way to look at it. The most honest and the most exciting sentence in all of science remains. We do not know yet. And that is the absolute beauty of the scientific process. So let's bring this all back and look at the sheer distance we've traveled today, and our deep dive into the source material. We've covered a lot of ground. We started with two guys in a Hawaiian courthouse, generating a media circus, terrified that a machine buried under the European countryside was going to eat the planet. Great. We dove into the freezing, superconducting depths of the large Hadron collider. We unpack the nightmare logic of strange lits. We explore the invisible, curled up folds of extra dimensions, deep brains, and gravitons drifting into the bulk. It's been wild. And we discovered that the cosmos itself has been running ultra-high energy crash tests on neutron stars for billions of years, keeping us perfectly safe. The apocalypse was mathematically and empirically canceled.

1:03:11Thankfully. But the underlying mystery of why our universe is built this way, why gravity is so incredibly weak and why the Higgs boson doesn't crush the universe, is still very much alive, which leads me with a final thought I want to pose directly to you, our listener. It really all comes down to a question of perspective and how you view the architecture of reality. Exactly. I want you to truly think about this. If extra dimensions are real, if string theory is right, and there's a vast, higher dimensional bulk, physically there, right next to you, all around you, but just completely curled up and mathematically inaccessible to human senses, does that change how you view your place in the universe? The big question. Our way in the end, just tiny oblivious creatures living our entire macroscopic lives, trapped on a flat 3D sheet, totally unaware of the massive gravitational waves of reality crashing through the water around us. I love that thought. I want you to really ponder that. Let us know where you stand on the future of particle colliders, whether you think the FCC is worth building,

1:04:12and what you personally think is hiding in that mathematical desert. Leave your thoughts in the comments, we'd love to hear your take and keep the conversation going. Thank you so much for exploring the unknown with us on this edition of Thrilling Threads. The secret of freedom that can't be denied, with the open air freedom and cheap gladiator. After 85 years, it's no surprise that Jeep became America's SUV brand. Get a great deal during the Jeep driving to fall sales event. Jeep is one more awards over its lifetime than any other SUV brand, cheap in the Jeep Grill or Registered Trademarks of FCA US LLC.