What on Earth is Wrong with Gravity (18 of 20)

What on Earth is Wrong with Gravity

If we could just find these gravitons, then we might at last arrive at a quantum theory of gravity, a universal theory that will work everywhere in the cosmos.
For eight years, Greg Landsberg has been using Fermilab's particle accelerator to try to create gravitons.
These particles, though we haven't quite seen them, so what I'm telling you is...
Haven't quite seen them?!
That's right.
It 's our hypothesis, so we don't quite know if this is true.
on gravitons to see them, so we have to find some other means.
It 's amazing that the way to see the graviton is by NOT observing it, by observing it's missing.

To see something that's missing, Greg is effectively looking for missing energy.
Typically, when you bash things together, the energy of the original particles should be the same as the total energy of all the particles coming out.
But if you were to make a graviton in that collision, then our detectors are certainly not capable of seeing it, so the graviton will take energy away from the collision.
Energy will appear to disappear.
So, the old control room.
I haven't been here for years!
So what this picture tells us...
It 's called event display.
The height of these bars is how much energy is released in this collision in that particular direction.
There's a collision in the middle, and the stuff's spraying out.
What we're trying to do is to sum all this energy, to see if something is missing.
If you look at this display, you see a lot of energy going in this direction, but very little on the other side, and this yellow bar, in fact, represents the fraction of energy which is missing.
So if you see that, that means that something escaped.
That's right.