Particle Fever Page #4

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as the best possible thing

I could've been doing

with this time,

or it could just be

that the entire 15 years

might as well have not happened,

had no impact,

and then that's just 15 years

that are gone.

It's not the sort of thing

where there's

a consolation prize.

You know,

it's a fairly binary situation.

I definitely won't feel,

"Oh, well,

"I gave it

a good old college try.

"It's all fine anyway.

It's just trying that counts."

I don't believe that.

I don't believe

it's just trying that counts.

I believe getting it right

is what counts.

Okay, please take your seats.

Now it's time

for the entertainment part.

So as with every

great physics event,

we're going to start

with a big bang,

the ATLAS big bang event,

and that's going to follow

with music all evening,

people from ATLAS, who are

going to be performing for you.

So let's get started.

Take 2,000 intelligent,

ambitious,

type "A" personalities.

You make them work 16-hour days,

high-pressure situation,

lots of stress.

You know, that's the recipe

for disaster.

Or at least it's a recipe for

a reality television program.

But all that physics,

Higgs, extra dimensions,

supersymmetry,

microscopic black holes,

macroscopic black holes,

Z-primes, you name it,

the physics that the theorists

only dream of

is ours to discover.

Thank you.

Oh, yeah

Thanks to

the Large Hadron Collider

Thank you, ATLAS!

I grew up in Turkey

from Greek parents

and a middle-class family,

and then, in the '60s,

we became refugees.

We had to leave Turkey

because of ethnic tensions

between Greeks and Turks

over the island of Cyprus,

and there were a lot

of political cross currents,

left, right,

and I was a young,

impressionable 13-year-old

hearing the pro-left

and pro-right arguments,

so one day I would be convinced

that one side was right.

The other day,

I would be convinced

the other side was right.

And then I was getting confused.

How could both of these things

be true

if they were contrary

to each other?

So I decided to focus on a field

where the truth didn't depend

on the eloquence of the speaker.

The truth was absolute.

Of course, when I started out,

I thought that within

maybe five years

the theories

that I was working on

were going to be tested

and I was going to know

the experimental truth

and move on to the next round

of ideas after that.

Little did I know

that the experiments

would take far longer,

and here I am, 30 years after,

still not knowing the truth.

Peter?

I can show you

here a nice event.

Did you see this from...

- Ah, no.

- Andreas showed me this.

- I haven't seen it.

- This is from yesterday night.

This is now a real

beam gas event.

So you see the tracks

also bent...

- Bent by the field?

- Very nice.

Ah, no, I haven't seen...

In some sense, I started

form the wrong perspective

and in the wrong way,

because I'd been studying

a lot of literature

when I was at high school level.

So literature, art,

philosophy, history,

and very little physics

and mathematics.

I'd also been studying music,

piano,

and so I was very much

attracted by art.

There are many similarities

between music and physics.

Classical music

follows rules of harmony,

which are really rules

of physics and mathematics.

But, also, I was fascinated

by big questions.

That is the possibility

of addressing

and answering big questions

about nature, the universe,

why, when, how,

and when I finished high school,

I thought that physics allow us

to address this big question

in a more practical way

than, for instance, philosophy.

That's why I decided

to study physics.

Yes, we lost

these two there...

I managed to go through, like,

the four gallons of milk

that I had in the fridge, but...

We were just waiting

for collisions,

waiting for collisions.

And finally,

then this helium leak,

which really, uh...

it's really frustrating.

We cannot even go there

and investigate what happened.

You have to warm up the magnets,

and warming up the magnets

needs to be done

on a very slow pace and...

in order not to break them...

then you can investigate

and cool them down again.

The world's largest

atom smasher,

the Large Hadron Collider,

is to be shut down

for at least two months.

CERN, the European Organization

for Nuclear Research...

Scientists at CERN are trying

to put on a brave face.

A faulty electrical connection

between two magnets

led to a ton of liquid helium

being leaked into

the 27-kilometer tunnel.

The first high-speed

particle collisions

were due to take place

later this month.

The goal now

is simply to get this

vastly complex machine working.

F***ing hell, look at that.

This is just unbelievable.

You've got magnets

just sheared off their jacks.

We've actually

put in enough energy

to melt it and to vaporize

a whole tube of...

And the stuff's all covered in

a sort of black, metallic dust.

Completely catastrophic, eh?

Completely catastrophic.

There's no more vacuum

in the beam vacuum,

so can as well open it up and

see whether there's any dust,

because if there's dust,

it means

we have to clean all the way

until it's...

I hope, in the worst case,

we have not to take out

more than 20 or so magnets.

Both my family and my students

detect a definite level of...

let's say pessimism

and disappointment.

The built expectation

that now we were going to know

the truth,

it fizzled and delayed,

and it's just, uh...

I thought

I was stronger than this.

It surprised me.

I did say that I thought

it was a mistake

for CERN to have

this gigantic celebration

for things just when

it just had a few protons

wandering around in one

direction around the ring,

that it was just a bad idea

to have so much hoopla

before anything

was actually happening.

At the time

when people were asking me

if I was going to CERN

to celebrate,

I said, "I'm going to go to CERN

"when there's a reason

to celebrate, you know,

"when things are colliding

into each other,

"when something

is starting to happen,

not for some crappy PR reason."

And that backfired.

That, I think... really,

that really backfired,

and I think

that was a PR disaster.

It was a PR disaster

largely of CERN's own making.

You don't go around, you know,

having gigantic parties

before anything has happened.

So the magnets that have

come out are being refurbished,

and so they're sort of

trundling through

about six magnets a week now.

So that's no longer

the bottleneck.

Now they're kind of

getting to the state

where they're ready to start

redoing the interconnects

in the tunnel,

and they're already about a week

or two behind on that.

Given the complexity...

The other thing

is that they're drilling

these bloody holes

in the magnets.

- Because they, like...

- what I heard this last time,

they were saying that

all their tools are breaking

and that sort of business.

But it begs the question,

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