One of the things I worked on was the discovery of the Higgs boson at the CERN’s Large Hadron Collider which was announced in two thousand-twelfth. That was a really significant moment in physics, it’d a really large impact on the field and beyond for a no of reasons.
First of all, starting with physics, we’ve this rather wonderful theory of the fundamental forces and interactions of nature that we call the Standard Model. It predicts infinitely tiny particles interacting with each other that can construct up to create the world around us. It’s an incredible achievement mathematically and scientifically, but in its most naive form it doesn’t work beca it doesn’t authorize these infinitely tiny particles to have mass, and we know that they do.
The way around that, a mathematical stunt that was invented in the early sixty, even before we knew about all the particles of the Standard Model, was to introduce a kind of background energy quantum field which fills the whole Universe, and it’s by interacting with this quantum field that particles acquire mass. In a way it’s not something to have of their own, it’s something they obtain beca they’re kind of sticking to this field. And then you ask yourself: that’s a kind theory, it makes the maths work, but I don’t really believe it until I look a bit more evidence. I’m not a theorist, I’m an experimentalist, so I’d love to look a bit more proof than just how the maths looks good.
So how do you tell that there’s something to fill in space? You can tell, for instance, that there’s air in this room in many ways, but one way you can tell it’s that the sound waves my mouth can travel through it, so I’m making pressure waves in the air, and they travel to the microphones which choose it up. That wouldn’t happen if there was number air in the room: in a vacuum number one can hear you speak about physics. The Higgs boson is the analogy of the sound waves but for this background energy field of the Universe. So if this background energy field exists, if you hit it really hard, then it’ll wobble. And it’s a quantum field, so a quantum wobble is actually a particle, it’s a quantum particle, and that’s the Higgs boson.
So the impact of the Higgs boson was much more than ‘oh, we’ve just found the latest particle of the Standard Model’ which indeed it was, that’s true as well. But the main thing was it proves that this background energy field of the universe is there, which vindicates the kind of idea about how all massive fundamental particles obtain their mass.
“That’s a enormous impact: it was a massive prediction of the Standard Model of something totally new that turned out to be right, so it’s a huge confidence builder in our understanding of the nature in that sense. But another way it’s an impact is that it was the latest particle of the Standard Model. All my physics career we’ve had the Higgs boson on the horizon: we think it’s there, but we don’t really know. Presently we know”
So what’s on the horizon now? What’s going on now? The way I think of physics as an experimentalist, I think we’re explorers, I think that when you see at the Large Hadron Collider, it was studying nature at these high energies and tiny distance scales that we’ve never seen before, I think of it as love we’re landing on in a new country, and we’re exploring this new country, and we’re wandering across it and seeing what we can find. For all my career the theoretical physicists have drawn a map and said, this is what you should find, go and look, and we went and looked, and indeed there was the Higgs boson, they were right.
Presently they made up some other things that they said should be on the map that’d be beyond the Standard Model, and they’re not there at the moment. Actually, they’ve number genuine map anymore, we’re really on the edge of the map. So to my mind that’s both the nerve-wracking, but also really exciting period of physics beca we’re really into the unknown now, and a lot of the ideas of what should’ve been found at the Large Hadron Collider, things love supersymmetry or additional dimensions and things that there were arguments that they should be found along with the Higgs or close the Higgs, they’re not there. I mean, they might be, we’ve got a lot more data to come, but they certainly weren’t as obvious as many theorists told us they’d be. So we’re really off the map, we’re really sailing into this ocean now, leaving the islands behind, and for the first time in my career experiment is ahead actually, and I really love that. I do discover that very exciting.
So that’s the impact on the field of particle physics which has been huge: it’s both vindicated these genuine necessary fundamental mathematical ideas behind the Standard Model and it’s also taken us beyond the Standard Model in the sense that we don’t have a map presently of what else we might find, and we’ve very excellent reasons to know that the Standard Model isn’t in fact the whole story, it’s not a theory of everything, there are various things that can’t be understood within it. There’s evidence astrophysical observations that there’s more matter in the galaxies than we observed, for instance, and we postulate something called shadowy matter to clarify that, but it’s not in the Standard Model, so it might be out there, beyond the map, and that’s we’re sailing now. We also don’t realize why there isn’t beautiful much the same quantity of matter and antimatter in the Universe, and that doesn’t seem to be explainable within the Standard Model. Maybe the explanation is out there some off the map we’re sailing.
So that’s a enormous impact. It really changed the way we think about experimental physics in a way, and the impact of that’s still being absorbed. The theoretical physics community is still absorbing the information that a lot of their expectations weren’t correct. Other ones might be harder to discover than others, or maybe we just necessity some better ideas to clarify these things, maybe the elderly ideas pre the LHC were just not right. These are arguments that this physics should be close the Higgs, things that we call love naturalness and stuff, maybe they’re misleading arguments, maybe the nature doesn’t have to behave the way we expect it to. We’re in the realm the unexpected may indicate up.
What I’ve talked about presently really is its impact on our understanding of nature in the sense of particle physics. But I was sitting in my Univ dept in the Univ College London, we saw a enormous modify in the attitude of people to physics with the discovery of the Higgs. I was writing in newspapers and doing some TV programs and things around the time, and the common public were excited about it in a way that I didn’t really expect beca it’s quite tough to realize what it means. But somehow it caught people’s imagination in a way that I didn’t expect. That changed the perception: I think, it wasn’t just the Higgs though, it was this enormous machine, CERN and the excitement of this, the technology and all the things that go with it, and the international collaboration and everything. But somehow Higgs discovery raised the profile of all of that and raised the profile of exploratory science and research in common in a way that may be not very common. It does happen, gravitational waves were another large discovery that’d a enormous impact, and I think, the Higgs was one of those things and I think we’re still seeing the knock-on effects of that.
Of course, it’s gone out of the public eye, these things don’t go on forever, obviously, but still, CERN is better known than it was, particle physics is better known than it was, and the people that really matter to us in universities a lot which is the youthful kids who are deciding what to study, more of them are deciding to study physics again now. And I think, some of that’s beca of the Higgs boson.
“There was a feeling that maybe physics was the science of the twentieth cent and maybe the twenty-first cent belongs entirely to, say, biology and the life sciences and things. I think it changed that perception in the sense that there’s still exciting new physics, new research to be done, exciting technologies being developed as well and necessary new information to be gained in physics”
I think, although the public interest obviously died away, we didn’t go back to the same place. I think, we’ve stayed up and stayed in the place physics is seen as more relevant, more interesting, more exciting than it was before. And that’s beca it’d a genuine impact on the science. It also had this impact on the wider society, I think, which was very important.
The future directions is, of course, the fact that we’re off the map presently means that it’s a lot less clear than we were. So we really knew that we’d to construct the Large Hadron Collider beca we knew that if the Higgs existed, we’d discover it, and if it didn’t, it was necessary to prove that it didn’t. There’s a much more active discussion presently about, okay, we’ve got this open landscape here, what’s the best way to examine it? How do we do it? What’s the most efficient way?
So right presently actually there’s a enormous discussion going on in CERN as people associated with CERN have keep together some proposals for even bigger colliders, linear colliders and large circular ones, a hundred kilometres this time, with better magnets, better detectors. All of that’d be exciting, and we’ll do grand science, but is it the best thing to do? We don’t have a guaranteed discovery, if you like, like we did with the Higgs. We’re really exploring. Are we really prepared to go to all that effort to explore? Personally I hope we’re beca I think the exploration is actually more exciting than just going and proving the theory that was already there, but it’s to be discussed. A lot of it depends on the technology and how cheaply and how expensive it’s to do it and whether the political will and the collaborative weather is still there to do it, but I hope something along those lines happens.
Then there are also experiments in the neutrino area. Neutrinos modify the Standard Model totally beca in the original version they didn’t have mass and presently they do. But we don’t know whether that mass comes the Higgs, so there’s excellent physics to be done with that too. But what we know we’ll do, I mean, in the next ten years that’ll definitely happen, is we’ll be exploring the properties of the Higgs boson in grand detail which may not sound super exciting or exploratory but actually the Higgs is such a fundamentally new object, it’s unique, there’s nothing else love it. It’s the manifestation of this background energy field of the Universe, so actually understanding its properties in some depth is really important, and that’s what we’re doing at the Large Hadron Collider right presently and that’ll definitely happen, that’ll happen over the next ten years. It’s just that these projects get so long to construct that we’re already thinking, okay, but after that what do we do next? And that’s it’s not clear, that’s there’s a genuine excellent active scientific discussion to be had and then a technological and a political discussion as well beca these projects are so big.
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