Particle Fever Page #2

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only shot.

Ah, so the boss comes.

I first came to CERN in 1987.

I was a very young

undergraduate student,

and I remember the first time

I entered the site.

I was a bit scared

by the corridors

in the CERN main site,

so I was almost lost

in those corridors.

For me, it has been

a wonderful experience,

because I had the chance

of being involved

right from the beginning

and to see, really, an

experiment from starting and...

from zero, essentially.

I've seen two inventors

place out of the ten,

and we probably have seen...

I don't think

I can describe right now

the excitement about first beam.

I mean, the entire control room

is like a group

of six-year-olds

whose birthday is next week,

you know,

and there's going to be cake,

and there's going to be

presents,

and all their friends

are going to be there,

and they just, you know...

they just know

it's going to be great.

You know,

they're kind of scattered,

and I can't imagine, 'cause

they're not that big, right?

I've been a postdoc here

for a year,

so I'm a relative newcomer.

But my timing

is sort of perfect.

I mean,

to be on the ground floor

when the data first comes...

it's awesome.

That means I have 5,000 emails.

There's a huge difference

between theorists

and experimentalists.

I mean, when I started college,

I absolutely did not

want to do physics.

Physics meant to me

everything that was boring:

Textbooks, theories, proofs.

But then I discovered

the experimental side,

and the experimental side

is the hands-on aspect.

It's about taking a theory,

which is abstract,

and making it real.

How do you build an experiment

to discover something

that the theory predicts?

And that aspect is what I love.

Of course, when constructing

the whole thing,

we several times thought,

"What if the whole thing

just does not work?"

I really believe now

this will work,

but the next thing is,

will we ever find something?

So maybe we will

just find nothing new.

It would be a catastrophe

for physics.

We would, somehow...

none of the open questions

which we have at the moment

would've been answered.

So the LHC is basically the

most fundamental of experiments.

It's like what any child

would design as an experiment.

You take two things,

and you smash them together.

And you get a lot of stuff that

comes out of that collision,

and you try

to understand that stuff.

Now, in this case,

what we're smashing together

is tiny protons,

which are inside the center

of every atom.

And in order to get them

going as fast as possible,

we have to build

this huge 17-mile ring,

and we run those protons

around the ring multiple times

to build up speed,

almost to the speed of light,

and then we collide two beams

going in opposite directions

at four points,

and at those four points

are four different experiments:

ATLAS, LHCb, CMS, and ALICE.

Now, I work

on the ATLAS experiment.

And ATLAS is like

a huge seven-story camera

that takes a snapshot

of every single collision,

and that's billions

of collisions.

And the hope is that we'll see

the very famous Higgs particle.

But every time we've turned on

the new accelerator

at a higher energy,

we've always been surprised.

So the real hope

is that we'll see the Higgs,

but that there's also something

amazingly new.

You can liken it to

when we put a man on the moon.

It's that level

of collaborative effort.

I would say,

even bigger than that.

This is closer to something like

human beings

building the Pyramids.

Why did they do it?

Why are we doing it?

We actually have two answers.

One answer

is what we tell people,

and the other answer

is the truth.

I'll tell you both.

And there's nothing incorrect

about the first answer.

It's just... it doesn't... it's

not the thing that drives us.

It's not how we think about it,

but it's something

you can say quickly,

and the person you're talking to

won't, you know,

get diverted or pass out

or pick up the SkyMall catalog

if you happen to be next to them

on an airplane.

Answer number one:

We are reproducing the physics,

the conditions,

just after the big bang.

We're doing it in this collider,

and we're reproducing that

so we can see what it was like

when the universe just started.

This is what we tell people.

Okay, answer two:

We are trying to understand

the basic laws of nature.

It sounds slightly more mild,

but this is really where we are

and what we're trying to do.

We study particles,

because just after the big bang,

all there was was particles,

and they carried the information

about how our universe started

and how it got to be

the way it is

and its future.

At the beginning of the 1900s,

it became clear

that all known matter,

everything that we know about,

is made of atoms,

and that atoms are made

of just three particles:

The electron, the proton,

and the neutron.

In the '30s,

other particles were discovered,

and by the 1960s,

there were hundreds

of new particles,

with a new particle discovered

every week.

And there was mass confusion,

until a number

of theorists realized

that there was a simple

mathematical structure

that explained all of this,

that most of these particles

were made of the same

three little bits

we call quarks,

and that there are only

a handful

of truly fundamental particles,

which all fit together

in a nice, neat pattern.

And there was born

the Standard Model.

Eventually, all the particles

in the theory

were discovered,

except one:
The Higgs.

And the Higgs

is unlike any other particle.

It's the linchpin

of the Standard Model.

Its theory was written down

in the 1960s by Peter Higgs

and a number of other theorists.

We believe

it is the crucial piece

responsible

for holding matter together.

It is connected to a field

which fills all of space

and which gives particles,

like the electron, mass

and allowed them

to get caught in atoms

and thus is responsible

for the creation of atoms,

molecules, planets, and people.

Without the Higgs, life

as we know it wouldn't exist.

But to prove that it's true,

we have to smash particles

together at high enough energy

to disturb the field

and create a Higgs particle.

If the Higgs exists,

the LHC is the machine

that will discover it.

Let's assume you're successful

and everything comes out okay.

- Sure.

- What do we gain from it?

What's the economic return?

How do you justify all this?

By the way, I am an economist.

I don't hold it against you.

The question

by an economist was,

"What is the financial gain of

running an experiment like this

and the discoveries that we

will make in this experiment?"

And it's a very,

very simple answer.

I have no idea.

We have no idea.

When radio waves

were discovered,

they weren't called radio waves,

because there were no radios.

They were discovered

as some sort of radiation.

Basic science

for big breakthroughs

needs to occur at a level

where you're not asking,

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