Particle Fever Page #5

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of course,

you know, what are the risks?

I mean, you kind of basically,

you're going...

I don't know.

We didn't actually think so much

about the collateral effects

of the helium.

- Nobody has.

- Yeah, nobody.

- Yeah.

- Nobody.

Well, there's been

a lot of investigations

into the cause

of the original problem,

and the general agreement

is that we run

at half design energy.

Experimentalists

aren't going to be happy.

Well...

So, yeah...

so the latest schedule is this:

We just put out is D-Day,

beams back on

the 21st of September.

Isn't that a bit optimistic?

Isn't that a bit

optimistic for, uh, this year?

When you're dealing

with something

that is a long-term project...

and the LHC

is a long-term project.

It's a 20-year project.

You can't think about the end.

Ever.

If you start out

a marathon thinking,

"I can't wait

to get to the finish line;

"I'm gonna have my Gatorade

at the finish line;

I'm gonna have my greasy french

fries at the finish line,"

or whatever motivates you...

if you start thinking that

at mile one

and it's, like,

ten minutes into the race,

and you're thinking to yourself,

"Wow, I'm only at mile one.

I've got 25.2 miles to go."

And if you're thinking that

at the start,

then you're done.

Mentally, you are done.

This is what doing

discovery physics means.

This is what doing

discovery means.

Why do people have curiosity?

Why do we care about how

distant parts of the universe,

things that happened

billion years ago,

like the big bang,

why do we find them

that interesting?

It doesn't affect

what we do day-to-day.

But nevertheless,

once you have curiosity,

you can't control it.

It'll ask questions

about the universe.

It will ask questions

about harmonic patterns

that create art, music.

- That's a sculpture?

- That's a sculpture.

Yeah, doesn't it look like

a bunch of broken tiles?

That's what it's supposed

to look like.

And it's, uh...

and when I saw it,

I thought it was just rubble

left over from the construction.

Right, yeah.

You can, in principle,

move it.

So people go up

and move pieces?

- No, people don't.

- But people could.

Why would they have it

so you can move it around

if you weren't going

to move it around?

No, I think you're right.

I think you're allowed

to move it around.

It's certainly

a different experience of it.

I agree.

See, I thought

that that belonged here.

It's just...

it's the perfect spot.

It certainly

changes everything.

- It does.

- Slate and granite.

I guess that's the granite,

and that's the slate.

Hmm.

It's interesting.

There's something

philosophically

about this piece of art

that bothers me.

It's taking a lot of

sort of random things

and making some order out of it.

Yes.

It's trying to make order

out of something

where there isn't any,

instead of taking things

that don't seem ordered

and figuring out

that there is order.

The way we try to reduce

the complexity of the world

is by looking for patterns,

what we call symmetries.

We take all the particles

we know today,

and we attempt to fit them

into some kind

of underlying structure.

Are they the remnants

of some more beautiful

and complete picture

of the laws of nature?

It's like, you go to Egypt,

and you see ruins.

If you look at it the right way,

I could draw a pyramid

and see that

these chunks of stone

are actually the remains

of something very clean

and very symmetric,

very beautiful.

We know that the Standard Model

is incomplete.

We know that there's

other stuff out there,

that there are other particles

that we haven't seen yet.

Dark matter

is a speculated particle

which we think

actually dominates the universe,

and yet we've never seen it

directly,

and it's not part

of the Standard Model.

That's one of those rocks.

We think, possibly,

that that and many other

particles are still out there

and are all part

of a much bigger symmetry,

a much bigger theory

that includes the Standard

Model, but much more.

The most popular theory

is called supersymmetry,

or SUSY for short.

Supersymmetry was a theory

that sort of started to develop

in the late '70s.

Savas was one

of the first authors

of the first theories

of supersymmetry.

It is the unfathomable

depths of...

Supersymmetry is our best

guess of what else is out there,

the bigger theory

that incorporates

our current theories,

the Standard Model.

But for it to be true,

we have to discover

those other particles.

If I could choose a dream

of any theory

that the LHC could find,

actually, I would love

for them to see supersymmetry.

Supersymmetry says,

for every type of particle,

say the electron,

there's a heavy superpartner.

So you have the...

and they have really stupid

names, unfortunately,

called the selectron.

You just add an S to the name.

The squark.

Uh, the sup, the sdown.

Supersymmetry, or SUSY,

is extremely important

for the theoretical community

because it solves

many mathematical problems

with the Standard model.

Now, experimentally, it would be

the experimentalists' dream.

You know, tons of particles

that are just coming out,

and you just don't even know

what to do with...

you know, can't even

write the data fast enough

in order to discover them.

So that'd be my dream.

It used to be

that in the control room life,

it was kind of a luxury.

You know, you could kind of...

you could, you know, kind

of style your hair for the day

because you didn't have to wear

a hard helmet all day.

You could wear nice shoes,

you know,

because you were in

the control room environment.

Now, it's all back to, you know,

bring the dirtiest clothes

that you own to work

because you're gonna be crawling

around in, like,

you know, hard helmets,

steel-toed boots.

Not the most attractive shoes,

but, you know,

I kind of like them.

We're pulling out

the electronics.

We're fixing things that

we didn't actually have time

to get to

during the last shutdown.

The goal of this is

that it would be

in even better shape

for next beam.

Okay, so that is, I think,

all that I have to say.

Hope the theorists

aren't driving you crazy.

Don't listen to them,

by the way,

because theorists,

they can sometimes...

Just telling you.

You got to come back

to the experimental world

so that you can touch bases

with reality.

All right,

I'll talk to you soon.

One of the most basic facts

about the universe

is that it's big.

So you might wonder,

"Why is the universe big?"

There's actually

a single number,

called

the cosmological constant,

that plays a crucial role

in determining

what the universe looks like.

In fact, around ten years ago,

astronomers discovered

a really remarkable fact:

The universe is getting bigger

and bigger

at a faster and faster rate.

But this rate

is a million, billion,

billion, billion, billion,

billion, billion times slower

than what we'd actually predict.

When you're off by

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