Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Was the Higgs boson discovery a triumph or disappointment?

Episode Date: December 27, 2022

Daniel and Jorge debate whether the Higgs boson discovery marks the end of collider physics.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Sammy Hagar. Tate McCraig, the offspring, Tim McRaw. Tickets are on sale now at AXS.com. Get your tickets today. AXS.com. Hey, Daniel, you're officially one of the discoverers of the Higgs boson, right? I mean, yeah, me and 10,000 of my close collaborators. 10,000.

Did you really need 10,000 people to discover one particle? We each discovered one 10,000th of it. Does that mean you also get one 10,000th of a Nobel Prize? No, the Nobel Prize went to the theorists, of course. Not to those of us who actually found the thing. I guess it must have been exciting, though, when they finally discovered the particle. It was exciting, but, you know, it happened slowly. It's sort of like taking a flight across the ocean.

You're really excited when it starts out, but by the time it's all official and done with, you're exhausted. You should do what I do, which is to do. take a nap during the flight. Then it's like you teleport it, you know? You teleport your way to a Nobel Prize. Yeah, exactly. So what's the next discovery that particle physicists are working on? Well, I hope there is a next discovery. It's usually about 20 years between major discoveries. Wait, you schedule it? Every 20 years? Why not every 10 years? Hey, I'd like to do one every year, but these things are pretty tricky.

Maybe you just need more naps. Maybe I just need a neck pillow. What's the point of the neck pillow if you're not going to nap? I'm not sure you're getting the physics of napping here, right, Daniel. I'm definitely out of my expertise. And you should just sleep on it? Hi, I'm Jorge, I'm a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel, I'm a particle physicist, and I do have one 500 millionth of a Nobel prize. One 500 millionth? Or don't you mean like one seven billionth since you are part of the

human race? Yeah, but not every human has a Nobel Prize. Actually, I'm no longer a Nobel Prize winner. I used to be because I had an EU citizenship and the entire EU won the Nobel Peace Prize once. But I'm a UK citizen, which means I'm no longer an EU citizen. So I guess we brexited from Nobel Prize winners. Oh my goodness. It affected so many people in so many ways. It lost you the Nobel Prize. I mean, you should write a book about losing the Nobel Prize to Brexit. I had to update my CV and everything. For at least one, 500 million of it?

So anyone who joins the EU is a Nobel Prize winner. Is that what you're saying? I'm not sure it's retroactive. I think you have to be a member of the EU when the Nobel Prize was handed out. How do you know? Is that in the rules? There's probably a bunch of lawsuits about it right now. But welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge,

Explain the Universe, a production of I-Hard Radio. In which we seek to bestow the benefits of human knowledge on everybody, not just members of the EU or the UK or any other silly islands out there. We think that everybody should understand what we understand about the universe and what questions we are puzzling over as we struggle to sort through the crazy details of this universe. All the amazing things that it does out there in deep space and all the incredible things we discover in our particle colliders. That's right, because science is for everybody. We are all part of the human race and this race to understand the universe and how it works and how it came to be so that we can understand more about our context in the cosmos and also hopefully win some prizes along the way. Or at least some chocolate. And it's incredible that we can force the universe to reveal its secret to us by constructing interesting experiments, right?

In some sense, you can think of an experiment as a specific way to make the universe show you the answer. You set up your apparatus so that it tells you whether the universe works this way or that way. And we have lots of different ways to explore the universe and to force it to tell us its secrets. From things out in space to incredible machines we build underground. That sounds great for us, Daniel, but I feel like it feels a little mean to the universe. Like you're forcing it to do something or to reveal something about itself. What if the universe doesn't want? Shouldn't we get consent?

Well, you know, I'd love if we instead just had an Oracle. We could ask the universe questions. and they would just answer to us in our language. That would be awesome. I definitely would prefer that set up to feeling like the universe was our partner in this process rather than our slippery adversary. Oh, man. You consider the universe your adversary.

Very adversarial position to take. Well, some people in my field think of the universe as prey, and we are the hunters going after its seeds. Geez, I didn't know physicists were so violent. But I agree with you. We should just be sitting down with the universe over a cup of hot cocoa and having a nice chat. You're like, quantum mechanics, what's the deal with that?

Then I take a nice deep sip and it just gets downloaded into my brain. Right. Or if it says no, you should maybe respect that it says no, right? I'm going to have to disagree with you on that one. No, if the universe says no, I still want to have the answer. I don't think the universe as a whole, as a physical entity, deserves privacy. Oh, my goodness. I feel like we're on shaky ground here, ethically.

So if someone says the same thing about you, would you? I have to disclose everything that anyone asked you. Because you're part of the universe, technically. So it's anybody's right to know what's the things that they want to know about you. I'm part of the universe, but I'm not the universe. If, however, I was in charge of the physical laws of the universe, then yes, I wouldn't begrudge my denizens from attempting to discover the laws under which they ruled. You know, it's sort of like a Freedom of Information Act.

Should you be able to ask the government about what it's doing and what the laws are? Wouldn't it seem unfair if the government enforced laws? on you and didn't even tell you what they were? Well, that's why they have classified information, which apparently sometimes doesn't matter or that you can declassify it with just your thoughts. Yeah, I don't think the universe should have classified information. I mean, it's not like we're going to war with other universes and it needs to keep secrets. Right, but what if it's patented or what if it's dangerous information?

Well, that is a real concern. And as we do discover the secrets of the universe, we learn not just to understand what it's doing, but also to influence it and manipulate it. And that, of course, we know, leads sometimes to very powerful, very dangerous technologies. So there are, of course, real ethical implications in revealing how the universe works to the wider human race. Well, we are definitely hard at work at exploring the universe and trying to learn more about it, whether or not we have permission or not, I guess. Physicists are charging forward, plundering the universe just to line up their pockets.

Politely investigating the universe. That's how I like to think about it. Obviously, you're just a member of the press. On behalf of the citizens of the universe, we would just like to understand what are the rules we are living by. Thank you very much. And there is a lot to learn and a lot that we have learned about the universe, including what things are made of. We've made an incredible amount of progress, understanding the particles and all of the forces that govern those particles that make up you. The reality that we experience turns out to be very different on a microscopic scale. If you pull things apart, you discover the table you are sitting in front of and the chair you are sitting on.

and even you are made out of these funny little objects that weave themselves together with special rules to create the reality that we experience. But as you zoom down to that microscopic scale, you discover the rules that they follow are really quite different. They are quantum mechanical objects and they can do things that normal objects like baseballs and ice cream can't do. It's really incredible how at the tiny scale, those different rules work together so that our reality emerges.

Yep. And we seem to know a lot about what we're. reality is made out of what the atoms in your body are made out of and how they work and how they interact with each other. So the question now is, what else is there to know? I mean, I know that I'm made out of electrons, quarks. What else is there to know, Daniel? Well, listening to this podcast, of course, we'll know that there's never an end to the questions. There's so much that we don't understand yet about the universe. Sure, we can take you apart and say, you're made of electrons and protons and neutrons, which are made up of quarks. But we don't know.

what's inside those electrons and quarks, if anything. And there's still lots of mysteries that we have not unraveled. Patterns in all the particles that we've seen that remain unexplained. And then even bigger mysteries like is dark matter made of particles? And how does gravity work for particles? There's so much still left to do. Yes, we have talked a lot about the mysteries that are still in particle physics. But I guess maybe in terms of the popular consciousness of the quest for understanding particles,

people clearly probably remember the discovery of the Higgs boson. That was a big deal. That was a big deal. And it was an important moment in particle physics because it marked sort of the end of an era. You know, we have lots of questions about the particles we have discovered. But those questions are sort of like, can we use this to explain other things like dark matter?

Or why is it this set of particles and not some other? But before we discovered the Higgs boson, we had other questions like, how does this stuff actually all work? Before the Higgs boson, we didn't even have a really complete picture of how all the electrons and the corks behaved. So finding the Higgs boson was sort of like finding the last brick in that wall. Now we still have questions about why this wall, not some other wall,

and can we extend this wall and build it in other directions? But the Higgs boson really did complete the picture of the standard model as we know it. And that was a very important milestone. Yeah, it was a big deal because it sort of completed the standard model, which is the set of particles and forces that we think make up all matter in the universe. and how it interacts with itself. And so it was a big deal to find the Higgs boson. But I guess, you know, that was 10 years ago, right?

It was discovered in 2012. That's a long time ago, if you're 10 years old, especially. And so us in the field of particle physics are wondering what comes next. Was the Higgs boson sort of like the last thing we're ever going to discover? Or does it lead us down the path towards future discoveries? And so today on the podcast, we'll be asking the question. Was the Higgs-Boson discovery a triumph or a disappointment? Does it have to be one of the two?

You want to go for the swirl option? Can it be a triumph but still a disappointment? You know, if you have picky parents? I want to triumph immediately with a disappointing aftertaste. Could it be a disappointing triumph? It was a huge deal when they discovered the Higgs boson 10 years ago, and it's hard to believe it that it was 10 years ago because that's kind of when we started working together, right, Daniel?

Yeah, it's been more than 10 years since we've been working together. Though sometimes it feels like shorter. Sometimes it feels like forever, never ending. Daniel and Jorge time dilation. Have you been sucked into the black hole of particle physics? Wait, but we don't know if there are particles inside the black holes. Just dive on in and maybe we'll all find out. But the discovery of the Higgs boson was a pretty big deal in particle physics.

And as you said, it's sort of finished the picture of the standard model, which is kind of our view of all the particles that there are and all the forces that work between them. And it's sort of hard to remember now because we've had the Higgs first. so long. But before we found the Higgs, we weren't 100% sure that it was there. There were other ideas competing theories in play. Some people predicting we wouldn't see the Higgs boson that it doesn't even exist. Some people predicting that we'd see other crazy stuff. So the discovery of the Higgs boson validated one of those research directions, but shut down a lot of other possible theories. Yeah. And so it was more than 10 years ago that it was discovered. And I guess people are

kind of twiddling their thumbs now and wondering, like, what else is the next? Like, are we done with particle physics or is there still more to discover? And in fact, some people are kind of starting to question the whole field of particle physics, right? It's a bit of a recent controversy. It is a tricky topic because these experiments are very expensive. You know, the LHC costs like $10 billion to build. And so you can always ask, like, is that a good use of our money? Particle physicists tend to justify building these things.

by predicting that we will discover things, saying like, if we spend this money, we're very likely to discover X, Y, Z. That can get them into a little bit of trouble if they then don't discover X, Y, Z when you build it. And so some people are wondering if particle physicists can really be trusted to make those predictions or not. So that's the question we'll dive into today. And so as usual, we were wondering how many people had thought about this idea, whether the Higgs was a triumph or a disappointment. So thanks to everybody who participates in these questions. we're very happy to have your ideas before we dig into the topic. So we're very grateful for your participation.

If you'd like to hear your voice for future episodes of the podcast, please don't be shy. Write me to questions at danielanhorpe.com. Think about it for a second. Do you think the discovery of the Higgs boson was a triumph or a disappointment? Here's what people had to say. Yes. It certainly was a triumph, but I guess there were probably some people who were disappointed in, some aspect or other of it.

I would say that's 100% of triumph. No questions about it. I think that it was probably like a disappointing triumph because they found something, but it probably wasn't exactly what they expected to find because it only happened very briefly. And even though it meant the requirements of what they were looking for, it might have been a little bit of a disappointment

because it was really hard to find again later. I think the discovery of the Higgs boson was a triumph because it had been predicted in theory. And so when it was found, it gave scientists more confidence in the theory. All right. Most people think it was a triumph. That's a good thing for your job security. I hope all these folks are voting on my promotions.

But how many of those folks are named Higgs? Like I imagine if your name is Higgs, then it was definitely a triumph. Maybe. If you have no connection to the Bosan at all and now your name is famous, I wonder how that feels, actually. Like my wife, for example, her name is Katrina. And after Hurricane Katrina blew through New Orleans, everybody was like, oh, Katrina, like the hurricane. Are you saying the Higgs boson discovery was a disaster? I'm sure that everybody named Higgs was flooded with emails afterwards.

Yeah, I'm sure it was a heck of a job. But I guess most people seem to think it was a trial. That's a good thing, right? Or I guess mostly you ask people who like physics, not people who need desperate funding for other things. That's true. But you can be a particle physicist and be pro-physics. and pro-discovery and still think that the Higgs boson discovery was a little bit of a mixed bag. I personally felt a little bit of disappointment when we discovered the Higgs boson.

Interesting. I guess we'll dig into that. But first, I guess we'll start with the basic discovery. So this happened in 2012, right? What is it that they actually discovered? Yeah, so it was announced July 4th, 2012. And what they announced on that day was that they had enough statistical evidence to say that the Higgs field exists in the universe. So the Higgs boson and the Higgs field are slightly separate, but they're related. We've talked often on the podcast about how particles are like wiggles in a field. So a photon is a

wiggle in the electromagnetic field. An electron is like a wiggle in the electron field. So if there's a field that fills space, call it the Higgs field, then if it gets enough energy in one spot and it wiggles, then you can say it makes a particle. So the particle for the Higgs field is the Higgs boson. And this field is particularly interesting because it interacts with all the other fields and changes the way particles move so that they have mass. Right. But I guess what does it mean that they discovered it? Like they probably had an idea that maybe it existed. It was in the theory that it could be there. And then so this discovery that happened 10 years ago was confirmation of the theory, right? Or did they just find something out of the blue? No, it's not like they just found

it in their coffee one morning and, you know, it ran screaming to the papers. It was definitely a dedicated effort. We thought that it might exist. We had very clear and crisp theoretical ideas about what it might be. But it's not enough to just say, this makes sense that the universe would be more mathematically consistent if it were this case. You need to also make predictions. Remember, physics is not just descriptive where we say, here's a description of everything we've seen in the universe. It needs to be predictive. It needs to say, if this description of the universe is right, if these concepts are actually real and not just part of our heads, we should be able to predict the outcome of some new experiment.

So the Higgs theory predicts that if you collide particles at very high energy, you can dump some energy into the Higgs field, make it wiggle, create this Higgs boson, and see evidence of it coming out of your collisions. And so that's what we saw in the particle collider. We created the conditions necessary to make the Higgs field wiggle in just the right way so we can show us that it actually exists. Right. You used the large Hadron Collider in Geneva to speed up particles.

to almost the speed of light, smash them together, and then just like the theory predicted, sometimes all of that energy goes into wiggling the Higgs field. And that was a big deal because it confirmed what the theory said, right? Yeah, and the theory predicted exactly how often those protons would collide to give you a Higgs boson, how long that Higgs boson would last, and what it would turn into. Because when you collide protons together, protons are not fundamental particles. They're not like their own little tiny dots. They're little bags of particles. Each, one has corks inside of it and gluons inside of it. So when you smash them together, what's really

going on is that the cork inside one proton is interacting with a cork inside another proton, or a glue on from one proton is interacting with a glue on from the other proton. And that's actually how you make the Higgs boson. You don't collide the quarks inside the protons. You collide the gluons to make a Higgs boson. And so I guess that's why it caused billions of dollars because you had to build this huge facility to create this huge particle accelerator because this kind of thing doesn't happen just like anytime, right? You need some very special conditions. It actually does happen all the time in the upper atmosphere. Cosmic rays hit the atmosphere very high energies and create collisions even more powerful than the ones we create in Geneva. But that's not easy to control. You don't

know where it's going to happen. You can't set up really elaborate sensitive detectors around those collisions because it's quantum mechanical and random. Though a lot of people do that kind of study of cosmic ray physics using really interesting detectors on the surface of the ground. But for our purposes, we need the collisions to happen in a specific place where we can surround them with our very sensitive instruments that detect what comes out of the collision. And so you're right, it's expensive because we had to build a big tunnel inside which we can put our colliding beams and magnets to bend those beams and little devices to kick those beams to make them go faster and more magnets to focus those beams.

And so the whole system costs about $10 billion. dollars. It's very specialized. It's not like that kind of thing you can buy on Amazon for cheap. But I guess you need this super special equipment to kind of create the collisions and then give you the Higgs boson enough for you to see them. But I

guess also at the same time, the Higgs boson is working all the time, right? Like if it's the particle that gives all the other particles a certain amount of mass, then it's working like right now as I move my arm. There must be Higgs bosons flying all over the place. The Higgs field is there all

the time and every particle in your body is interacting with the Higgs field and the field is there the same way that like the electromagnetic field is there in all of space it may not have a lot of energy in it may not be excited but the field exists like you go out to empty space far far away from everything else there's no particles in it there are still the fields in there like the capacity to have particles like a parking lot with empty spaces in it right and so in that same sense the field exists throughout the whole universe whenever a particle moves through the universe, it is interacting with that field and it's that interaction that gives the particle mass that makes it move as if it had mass. And so in that sense, the Higgs field is interacting

with you. And you can also technically say that there are Higgs bosons doing it, but they're virtual Higgs bosons. In the way we can replace the concept of a field as like an infinite sum over virtual particles if you prefer that way of thinking about it. I do prefer that way of think about it, even for in my everyday life. No, I'm just kidding. But I think you're saying that it's a field and so you need

some kind of particle to interact with it, right? And that's where the virtual Higgs bosons come in. Yeah, remember there's sort of two pictures of what happens microscopically with interactions. Either you can imagine that a particle is interacting with the field produced by another particle. Like when you have two electrons,

maybe one of them creates an electric field that interacts with the other electron. That's the field picture. Or there's the particle picture. You say the field is really just a bunch of virtual photons. And so the way two electrons interact is by passing virtual photons back and forth between each other. Mathematically, they're equivalent. Philosophically, they're completely opposed to each other. But in the second picture, you can say that you're passing virtual photons back and forth. So back to the Higgs field, you can say that an electron moving through the universe is interacting with the Higgs field, or you can say

it's got a lot of virtual Higgs bosons bouncing off of it all the time. Fundamentally, it's really equivalent. All right, well, that's the discovery of the Higgs boson. It happened 10 years ago, and you were able to produce Higgs bosons, right? You sort of saw them in the data, and then you said, hey, that bump, that has to be the Higgs boson. Yeah, we saw things happen in our collisions that we couldn't explain without the Higgs boson. It's important to realize also that this is a statistical discovery. It's not like back in the old days, like the discovery of the positron, where there was just one example, and you had a picture of the path of a particle doing something, nothing else could do until you knew it had to be a positron.

In our case, there are other ways to explain any individual collision. You can't look at one collision and say, this one has to be a Higgs boson, therefore it exists. There's always other things that can give the same sort of signature in your instruments. So what we need to do is a statistical analysis to show we see more of this particular kind of collision than we would if we didn't have Higgs boson. So it's a little bit less satisfying because we don't have one we can point to. We can look at a whole data set to say, oh, we ran this thing for three years and the trends. in that data are consistent with there being a Higgs boson and not consistent with there not being a Higgs boson.

All right. So that's the discovery of the Higgs boson. And so now the question is, was it a big triumph? What's it a good thing for physics, for humanity, for particle physicists, or was it a bit of a disappointment? Or maybe a little bit of both. So let's get into that. But first, let's take a quick break.

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Welcome to Season 2 of The Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. All right, today we are debating whether Daniel should keep his job or not. I vote yes. Do we still meet particle physicists? You vote yes. You're not desperate to get into another line of work. I'm having a good time. Absolutely. Yeah, I love being a particle physicist. But I guess there's been a bit of a debate recently online, which of course makes it real, that many particle physicists is not maybe so justified in its search for particles.

It maybe doesn't even know it exists. Well, like every field of science, it depends on funding and who's paying for it are the public, me and you and everybody who pays taxes their money, which comes from their hard-earned paycheck, is going towards this thing? And so it's very reasonable to ask, like, is it worth the money? Should we be spending that money on something else like going to Mars or fighting climate change or whatever? So it's totally reasonable to be asking questions like, do you guys know what you're doing? And do you deserve another big chunk of money to build another collider? Because these things take decades to build. And so the planning for them has to start well before you want to turn

the thing on. And we're sort of in the middle age of the large Hadron Collider. It's not ready to retire quite yet, but we can sort of see that on the horizon in 10 or 15 years. And so there's been a lot of conversations recently about the future of particle physics. Should we build another collider? Is it justified? How would you justify it? What do you need to know before you build it? Do you need a guarantee that you're going to discover something? Or is it enough just to explore the universe? Sounds like you have a lot to say about this topic, Daniel. might be a little too close to home. We're sort of studying this question, I guess, in the light of the Higgs boson discovery

because it was sort of the last big discovery that particle physicists made a big deal about and that got the Nobel Prize and made the news. It was the completion of the standard model and our confirmation of it. So maybe it's worth taking a look back and thinking about whether it's a triumph or a disappointment. And so, Daniel, let's start with the, I guess, the pro case in which, Which way was the Higgs boson discovery a triumph? It was a triumph, first of all, in the sense that it finally accomplished something we'd been trying to do for a very long time. We had the idea of the Higgs boson since the 60s.

And everybody agreed it was a very beautiful way to solve a sort of thorny theoretical problem, understanding the connection between the weak force and electromagnetism. And maybe we can get into that in a little bit. But people have been looking for it for a long time. You know, the Americans wanted to build a superconducting supercollider in Texas in the 90s. and we spent billions of dollars on that before it was canceled. So we didn't get to discover the Higgs boson. And then the Europeans built a collider, the large electron positron collider,

that almost discovered they fought the Higgs boson in the year 2000. And then the Americans took over again building the Tevertron in Chicago that would have seen the Higgs boson if it had been a little bit different, but they didn't find it. And so for the large Hedron Collider to finally discover in 2012 was sort of like the end of an epic journey. Right, because I guess what kept eluding all of these previous colliders was the amount of energy, right? Because they built one back then, but it wasn't powerful enough or it turned out, I guess,

because they thought maybe it was powerful, but it wasn't powerful enough to find the Higgs because you need a certain amount of energy in these collisions for the Higgs to come out. It was harder to find than people anticipated. And so it took a very powerful machine in order to create it. And not just powerful in terms of the energy, but also powerful in terms of the number of collisions per second. because the Higgs boson is very, very rare. When you smash protons together, most of the time you don't get a Higgs boson. You just get more protons coming out.

So to see the Higgs boson, you need lots and lots and lots of collisions. But because the collisions, which happened every 25 nanoseconds, were enough for us to build up the statistical picture of the Higgs boson to claim the discovery. But it's also true that you just needed more energy too, right? That's why the LHC is so big. We also needed the energy. Yeah, the two things go hand in hand.

So it was a triumph in the sense that, like, people had been trying for a long times, you know, saying, hey, if we built this, we'll find it. They didn't find it to say, but if you give us more money, we can build an even bigger one. And then we'll find it, but they didn't find it. And so finally they said, let's go all in and they built the LHC. And they found it. It's sort of like climbing Mount Everest. You know, you failed a few times. You didn't quite make it to the peak.

So you definitely want to make it to the peak the next time. And so when you finally get there, it feels triumphant, right? And it wouldn't have felt as triumphant if you hadn't failed a few times. times along the way. And so I guess it confirmed Peter Higgs theory that there is a field called the Higgs field coincidentally, I guess. And it's a field that kind of explains how particles have mass or feel a certain kind of mass or in a sense inertia, right? Yeah, that's right. And sort of most natural version of our theory, particles shouldn't have any mass at all. They should all be massless. The electron, the quarks, none of these particles should have any mass. If you want to respect all the

symmetries that we think exist in the universe. So it was sort of a puzzle to us like, well, we measure these particles to have mass. How is that possible if in our theory they should all be massless? And in particular, we saw that some particles were massless like the photon is massless, whereas other particles like the W and the Z particles, which mathematically are very, very similar to the photon, have a lot of mass. So there was this puzzle like how do particles get mass and why do only some of them get mass? Right. I guess it was kind of a big question. It's a big question in general, like, why do things have mass? Like, why is it hard to push on things and why does it take a while for them to get going if you push on them? That's a really deep question

in philosophy. Like, what does inertia exist at all? And it's important to remember that a lot of the mass in the universe doesn't come from the Higgs field and the Higgs boson. Like the quarks, they get their mass from the Higgs field, but the mass of a proton doesn't come mostly from the mass of the quarks. The mass of the proton is a lot more than the mass of the pieces that go into it. Most of the mass of the proton comes from the energy stored within it, which also gives it inertia. So that's sort of a larger question that we're going to dig into in a future episode, like what is inertia? Where does it come from anyway? But the Higgs boson is sort of like just one slice of that answer.

It says, well, for fundamental particles like the electron and the quarks, we think we have an idea for why they have mass. It doesn't answer the question of why inertia exists at all. But isn't the interaction with the Higgs field sort of? it looks like inertia for fundamental particles. For fundamental particles, it answers the question. And the mental picture I have is that you have sort of like the true electron, this like theoretical quantity that has no mass and it flies through the universe.

And if the Higgs field wasn't there, it would move like a photon. But as it flies through the universe, the Higgs field is there. And Higgs field interacts with the photon. Same way that like the electron interacts with the electromagnetic field, right? It interacts with these fields. And that interaction changes how the electron move. It's like absorbing Higgs bosons, it's radiating Higgs bosons. And the way that it changes its motion is exactly the same mathematically as if you just gave it mass.

If you said, well, how would an electron with mass move? It moves exactly the same way as a massless electron that interacts with the Higgs field. So that interaction with Higgs field changes how it moves in exactly the same way as if it just sort of inherently had this inertia. All right. Well, then I get the discovery of the Higgs boson in the experience. Berman confirmed this theory, the Higgs field and these ideas about how fundamental particles get their mass. I guess, was it a big surprise that you found it or were people pretty sure that the theory was right? The field was really divided on the question of whether we were going to see the Higgs boson or not.

But there was something really important that we knew, which is that there had to be something else out there. The theory we had just didn't work. It was missing a piece. Without the Higgs boson, it just didn't hang together. So we either had to see the Higgs boson or we had to see something else to explain why the theory didn't break down. So there was a bit of a no lose situation. We were going to see the Higgs or we were going to see something else because the theory we had just wasn't going to work. It was going to fail if the Higgs boson or something else similar didn't exist.

And by failure, you mean like it couldn't explain certain things like why do certain fundamental particles have mass? That's right. That would be a failure theoretically. but also the theory we had was going to fail experimentally. Like there were certain kinds of collisions, ones where W bosons were going to bounce off of each other, where if the Higgs boson didn't exist, our current theory predicted that that would happen at an infinite rate, right? It predicted infinities in our experiments.

And we knew that that couldn't happen. You're not going to collide particles and get like an infinite outcome, right? And so our theory itself was failing at predicting what was going to happen in the experiment. So we knew that we were going to see something new. something interesting, something that wasn't predicted by the theory without the Higgs boson. Either the Higgs boson was there, it was going to rescue those predictions, or something else had to intervene. And I guess it was also kind of a triumph in the sense of that it was a huge project, right?

As you mentioned, there were 10,000 people working in it from, you know, maybe hundreds of countries. And so it was kind of a triumph just for humanity to work on something so big together and the search for knowledge about the universe and then to have it be successful. Yeah. And remember that CERN came out of sort of the ashes of World War II, trying to bring nations together, getting them to work together on scientific projects to build those connections and to make sure those communities are tightly woven together. And so it's a real success that way. It's a very international place. You go have lunch at CERN or coffee. You're going to hear conversations in like 15 different languages. There's all sorts of weird cuisines being drunk and strange hot beverages. It's really sort of a fascinating place. And politically, it's a very sort of successful sociological experiment. Can you bring a bunch of physicists together from around the world and get them to work together? Well, we have our arguments, but we made it work. Yeah, and also it was kind of crazy about it is that you didn't know you were going to find it, right? Like, it could have been that

you looked and looked and looked and didn't find it. It certainly could have been. We had no guarantee that the Higgs itself was there. It's just an idea in somebody's mind. It's incredible that a clever dude thinking mathematically can say the universe would make more sense if it was arranged this way rather than the current idea. And so let's go out and see if that's correct. And to have that actually be the way the universe is, right, that we can like deduce the mathematical structure of the universe just by using our minds and finding patterns, that's really pretty powerful.

That's philosophically very deep. Right. And I guess it's as you mentioned, the end of a long string of similar discoveries, right? Like, that's how you build out the standard model is people would look at the theory and say, hey, maybe we should, we should probably find a particle here. and then you'd go out and build a collider and you would find a particle. I guess that gave you some encouragement

that you might find it. Yeah, there had been times in the past when we expected to see something and then found it, like the top quark or the bottom cork, these other quarks and leptons. There are also times when there were surprises, like the discovery of the muon was a big shocker to everybody.

I have a whole bunch of podcast episodes about the discovery of each of the particles. Go back and check those out because each one is a really interesting history of false starts and dead ends and final triumphs. Right. And I guess maybe a question is, why did it take so many generations of colliders to find it? Didn't you have from the theory at the beginning? Didn't you know how much energy you would need?

Or the theory kind of evolved as you kept coming up with empty hands? No, great question. The theory does not predict how heavy the Higgs particle itself is. It tells us that the field or something like it has to be there. But the actual mass of the particle is just a number. It's a parameter of the theory that isn't predicted. And so that meant we didn't know. exactly how big the collider had to be. It could have been that the Higgs boson was much, much heavier and we wouldn't see it at these colliders. And so people were excited, and at least at the time, it seemed like a huge triumph for science and for humanity, right? It was a big deal. People were happy. Did you shake hands with all 10,000 of your collaborators? Or at least

fist bump, you know? There was definitely a lot of celebrating going on. Even though it had been sort of slowly evolving and we saw it sort of rising out of the fog of the data bit by bit over the year. The day that it was announced was a big moment at CERN. People lined up to be in the auditorium that I camped out the night before to make sure they got a spot to be in the room when it was announced. Peter Higgs himself had flown in for the occasion, though I think he fell asleep during the announcement. Well, I think the man deserved the nap. I mean, he did most of the work, right? He'd been waiting for 50 years for us to follow up on his efforts. Absolutely. I'm sure he didn't need to hear one more talk about the Higgs boson. So there definitely was a sense

of celebration and, you know, something accomplished on that moment. It's good to mark these events in your life, right, not to let them slide by. That's why we have birthdays. Your birthday is not actually any different from any other day, but it's good to mark the passage of time and say, hey, I did it one more year. And so in that same sense, it was good to say, here we draw the line, now we declare discovered, let's congratulate ourselves. Yeah, and so one way to look at it is that the discovery of the Higgs boson was a triumph

for scientists for humanity, but you might also say that it was a disappointment, or maybe the start of the end of particle physics. So let's get into that point of view. But first, let's take another quick break. Have you ever wished for a change but weren't sure how to make it? Maybe you felt stuck in a job, a place, or even a relationship. I'm Emily Tish Sussman, and on she pivots, I dive into the inspiring pivots of women who have taken big leaps in their lives and careers. I'm Gretchen Whitmer, Jody Sweetie.

Monica Patton. Elaine Welteroff. I'm Jessica Voss. And that's when I was like, I got to go. I don't know how, but that kicked off the pivot of how to make the transition. Learn how to get comfortable pivoting because your life is going to be full of them. Every episode gets real about the why behind these changes and gives you the inspiration and maybe the push to make your next pivot. Listen to these women and more on She Pivots, now on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Culture eats strategy for breakfast. I would love for you to share your breakdown on pivoting. We feel sometimes like we're leaving a part of us behind when we enter a new space, but we're just building. On a recent episode of Culture Raises Us, I was joined by Valicia Butterfield, Media Founder, Political Strategist, and Tech Powerhouse for a powerful conversation on storytelling, impact, and the intersections of culture and leadership. I am a free black woman. who worked really hard to be able to say that. I'd love for you to break down why it was so important for you to do C. You can't win as something you didn't create.

From the Obama White House to Google to the Grammys, Malicia's journey is a masterclass in shifting culture and using your voice to spark change. A very fake, capital-driven environment and society will have a lot of people tell half-truths. I'm telling you, I'm on the energy committee. Like, if the energy is not right, we're not doing it, whatever that it is. Listen to Culture Raises us on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Imagine that you're on an airplane, and all of a sudden you hear this. Attention passengers.

The pilot is having an emergency, and we need someone, anyone, to land this plane. Think you could do it? It turns out that nearly 50% of men think that they could land the plane with the help of air traffic control. And they're saying like, okay, pull this, until this. Do this, pull that, turn this. It's just... I can do it my eyes close. I'm Mani.

I'm Noah. This is Devin. And on our new show, No Such Thing, we get to the bottom of questions like these. Join us as we talk to the leading expert on overconfidence. Those who lack expertise lack the expertise they need to recognize that they lack expertise. And then, as we try the whole thing out for real.

Wait, what? Oh, that's the run right. I'm looking at this thing. Listen to No Such Thing on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, sis, what if I could promise you you never had to listen to a condescending finance, bro, tell you how to manage your money again. Welcome to Brown Ambition. This is the hard part when you pay down those credit cards.

If you haven't gotten to the bottom of why you were racking up credit or turning to credit cards, you may just recreate the same problem a year from now. When you do feel like you are bleeding from these high interest rates, I would start shopping for a debt consolidation loan, starting with your local credit union, shopping around online, looking for some online lenders because they tend to have fewer fees and be more affordable. Listen, I am not here to judge. It is so expensive in these streets. I 100% can see how in just a few months you can have this much credit card debt when it weighs on you. It's really easy to just like stick your head in the sand. It's nice and dark in the sand. Even if it's scary, it's not going to go away just because you're avoiding it. And in fact,

it may get even worse. For more judgment-free money advice, Listen to Brown Ambition on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. All right, we are celebrating Daniel's birthday. Happy birthday, Daniel. It's not my birthday. Oh, wait, what? I thought you said it was good to celebrate your birthday every day. It's good to mark those occasions in your life when you've achieved something, you know, you get a new job, you get a promotion, you get a promotion, you get. married, you have a kid, these kind of things. I think it's good to celebrate moments in life. I guess if I celebrated my birthday every day, I would be, what, like 12,000 years old? And if you eat cake every day, you probably wouldn't live as long anyway.

Be a lot of candles to blow out. All right, we're talking about the celebration of the Higgs boson discovery, which was a big deal at the time and it was considered and still is considered a triumph. But now we're going to take the opposite view and think about whether maybe it was a disappointment for particle physics, whether or not we can expect more things from particle physics and whether or not we should keep hiring people like Daniel. And by extension, me, who interviews and talks to people like Daniel. Well, I think it's valuable to take a time machine back to before we discovered the Higgs bones on. And remember that there were lots of other ideas. Peter Higgs had his theory about how particles get mass and how to solve these other technical problems in the

standard model. But there were competitors out there. There were people with other ways to solve the same problem. They give particles mass and to patch up the other problems in the standard model. And we just didn't know what we were going to discover. Wow. Wait, so how did they pick the Higgs boson as the preferred solution to pour billions of dollars into it? Well, when we built the large Hageron collider, we try to set it up so we could discover any of those things. It wasn't just a Higgs boson search machine. It was like, hey, let's explore the universe and see what's out there and set ourselves up to be able to discover the Higgs boson, but we were also capable of discovering other things. It was another theory, for example, called Technicolor, which was like a super

fancy version of the strong force, which you remember uses colors to describe its charges. Technicolor was like a super powerful version of color. And it could also give particles mass. Isn't that a registered trademark? Can you use it? Or is that why it was rejected? Well, it wasn't discovered. The universe doesn't seem to respect it, so we didn't have to worry about those legal issues. I mean, the universe is not in Technicolor? Not as far as we know. Yeah. There were theories, for example, that, like, top corks could bind themselves together into weird particles that could sort of function like a Higgs boson and do its job instead of having Higgs boson. So there were definitely other ideas out there. Why was the Higgs boson theory itself

the most popular, the most widely talked about? That's just a question of, like, what particle physicists thought might be reality is sort of like a popularity contest. But the there definitely were other ideas out there. And so what we ended up discovering was sort of like the most widely expected one, which in some sense, if you're looking to learn things about the universe, can be seen as a disappointment because there was the opportunity there for something crazy to happen, for us to all get surprised. Right.

I know you like to take this point of view. And I wonder if part of it is that, you know, if you consider the Higgs boson discovery to be basically the n-all-b-all triumph of particle physics, that sort of leaves the question of like, why do we need particle physics anymore? And so I know you like to sort of take the point of view that there are still a lot of interesting things to discover out there. And part of it is sort of thinking about the Higgs boson discovery as a little bit of a disappointment because it's sort of confirmed all of our theories, which is I guess if you're a young scientist is bad news.

Maybe if you're an old scientist, it's good news because I think you can retire. Officially that makes me young, I suppose. Yeah, I mean, I like discoveries that lead to more questions, right? You find something in you, you're like, hmm, well, why is it this way and not some other way? Or it gives you a clue about how the universe works that spurs more investigation. The Higgs boson was sort of like the simplest, most vanilla, most boring end to the story that wrapped up all the threads in a way that didn't give us a clue necessarily about what came next. And it could have been very different. We could have found like a really weird Higgs boson.

There was sort of Higgs-like but did things we didn't understand. Or we could have found something totally weird and totally different that solved the same. problem the Higgs did but had been completely unexpected. And that would have been a huge clue that we were on the wrong track and a way to learn about what the right track was. Instead, we sort of like wrapped up all the threads nicely like at the end of every Disney movie without a clear path to follow up on. You're like, how are they going to make a sequel? But if something confirms that you're on the right track, isn't that good? And doesn't that also leaves you a lot of possibilities for the future? Like, why do you have to show that you're in the wrong track to make

board discoveries. Well, in this case, remember, it's sort of like the end of a story. It's the last brick in the standard model. And the standard model itself, the openings, the holes in it were great clues to know where to look to find more stuff. We're trying to flesh that out and then look at it and say, well, what does this tell us? And so it's sort of the end of one story, which is like, how do we fill all the holes in the standard model? So now there aren't any holes in the standard model from that perspective. So we have to pivot and ask different kinds of questions and say, all right, if this is the standard model, we have to ask like, why is it this way, why isn't some other standard model, or ask bigger questions? Like, well, what about the rest

of the universe that the standard model doesn't describe, like dark matter and dark energy? So, it's sort of the end of the line of one kind of question. Of course, it doesn't shut down lots of other kinds of questions that we can ask. But, you know, it's a disappointment if you imagine another alternative world where we had found not the Higgs boson, but something else totally weird and different, they gave us like very immediate, tangible things to follow up on. Right. Well, although I feel like you're saying that it was a disappointment in that it didn't give you more work as a particle physicist, right? Like, if you're a particle physicist and you discover something and confirm its validity, then that doesn't leave much work for you.

In that sense, it's a disappointment for you. But for all the people who worked up to towards confirming maybe the Higgs theory, then it's not a disappointment, right? Yeah. Whether it's a disappointment depends on your. goal. If your goal is to complete the standard model and put it away in a package on a shelf and go like, oh, how pretty, then yeah, that's not disappointing. But if your goal is to understand the nature of the universe, then you want dangling threads to pull on. You know, just to paint the picture more concretely, something else we might have found was something like supersymmetry. This idea that every particle that we have is actually just one of a pair. That for the electron, there's another

version of it. And for every cork, there's another version of it. This is also a prediction for something we might find with a large H-on Collider. And if we had found the beginnings of that, it would have led to lots of really interesting research directions to study all of these new particles and what they do and what it means about the universe. But so far, we haven't seen them. And so some of the people who predicted

that we would see them at the Large Hajon Collider are eating crow a little bit. But I feel like you're sort of saying, like, you know, the goal is to understand the universe. So if we confirm the standard model, doesn't that also mean that we're understanding the universe? and in a way, sort of like confirming that we understand the universe? Why is that a bad thing in terms of understanding the universe?

It's not a bad thing. It's a very pretty picture. But we have other deeper questions, right? It doesn't answer the deepest questions about the nature of reality. It just sort of like wraps up a little corner of it as a way to make progress on the bigger questions about how the whole universe works. And so it means that maybe this area isn't the most fertile ground anymore for answering those bigger, deeper questions. You know, we have to go to other places where we have hints. about how things are not quite working.

Threads we can pull on to try to answer the questions about like, what is the whole universe made out of? What is the underlying theory of physics for everything? Because we know the theory we have now, the standard model is definitely not the final answer. But wrapping these threads up so nicely doesn't give us immediate directions to explore to finding that final answer. Well, I guess the question is,

how does the standard model or knowing that the standard model is right, how does that not help us understand some of these deeper questions? Like if it's right, then doesn't that tell us that that is the nature of the universe? Well, an example is dark matter. We know that there's more stuff out there in the universe than that is described by the standard model. The standard model describes quarks and electrons which build up atoms, but we know that dark matter is not made of those particles.

One possibility is that we discovered at the Large Hadron Collider a Higgs boson, which interacts with dark matter, which gives us like a portal into exploring dark matter. Or we could have discovered super symmetric particles. some of which are the dark matter. So in those alternate scenarios, what we hadn't just discovered like the vanilla Higgs boson and nothing else, we could have been cracking open

this big puzzle about dark matter, right? Which is a really big question in physics. But discovering the vanilla Higgs in exactly this way doesn't give us any access to what dark matter is. Well, I should just say that I'm a big fan of vanilla.

It's my favorite ice cream flavor. So I take offense to just you using it in such a derogatory way. I mean, it's delicious, but you always feel. like you didn't really have dessert. Well, I mean, it's just a matter of taste here. But, I mean, I feel like if you're not finding something related to dark matter at the

Large Haddon Collider, isn't that also good news? That just means you have to look elsewhere for clues about dark matter. Maybe just not in a particle collider. Yeah, it tells you something about what dark matter isn't. But it's more exciting to discover where dark matter is than what it isn't. You mean, you wish, as a particle physicist, you wish that dark matter had more to do with particle physics. Yeah, it's a little bit disappointing, which is.

the question I think we're trying to answer that we didn't also discover dark matter or for example we might have created mini black holes which evaporated and gave us clues about the nature of quantum gravity right what is gravity for particles unifying relativity and quantum mechanics for the first time ever that could have been a possibility but it didn't happen so yes it was a triumph but sort of in the spectrum of other discoveries we might have made it was sort of minor in comparison into other bigger winds. Right, but I guess I just want to, I'm trying to understand the distinction here. It's sort of a disappointment, but maybe only from the point of view of a particle physicist,

right? Like it doesn't open up particle physicists to search for these bigger questions, but that doesn't mean that people can't search for these big questions elsewhere or in other ways. Yes, absolutely. From the narrow point of view of a collider particle physicist, it's a disappointment. There are definitely areas in physics and even in particle physics where other people can follow up on these questions, searching for dark matter in underground laboratories or with space telescopes. We heard recently about interesting discoveries with muons and their magnetic

moments, which gives a hint about how my supersymmetry might actually exist, but it could just be too heavy for the Large Hadron Collider to discover. But, you know, we're in the era where we're asking the question, should the public give us another $10 or $20 billion to build another of these colliders and has an impact on the rest of the community? That's why we sort of put a microscope on the collider physics and say, was this a success? Should we do this again? How much do we have to have a guarantee of a future discovery before we spend another $10 billion? So is it disappointment for you? And 10,000 of my friends. And 10,000 of your friends out of the 8 billion people on this planet. But it's maybe an exciting news for people who are not in particle physics, who are maybe now

have more funding available or potentially available to study their ideas for what these big topics might be. Well, I think there is that myth often that if you cancel a big science project, that that money will then get distributed to other science projects and sort of pits scientists against each other. But, you know, it doesn't work that way. When they cancel the superconducting supercollider, they weren't like, well, who wants this $10 billion? Everybody just come in and take a handful. You know, that money went away. The amount of money we spend as a society is not fixed, right? We can decide to spend more or we can decide to spend less.

So in my view, I think it's always good to spend more money on science. it's an investment in the future. So we don't need to pit the field of science against each other, but we do need to make sure that the science we're doing is well justified and well motivated and interesting. And hopefully a lot of it going to particle physics. You wouldn't be opposed to that. I'll make sure that there's vanilla ice cream in the cafeteria at CERN.

Then I'm on board. Throw in some root beer and we can make root beer floats and I'm all in. This is how politics happens, man. It's all about special interests. It's all about ice cream. All right. Well, an interesting and personal debate here for at least one of us about the future of particle physics and how do you justify future work in it and exploration in it. Daniel, you're a big fan of exploration, right?

I am, and as we make these arguments for new colliders, to me it's not important whether we know we will find something. We were very confident we would find something with the LHC, but to me it's worth it just to explore the universe. You know, we land probes on alien moons and planets to see what's there without knowing in advance what we might. find because we are curious. And in the same way, building these colliders and exploring reality at its smallest scale is always worth the money, at least to me. All right. Well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us. See you next time. Hi Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Tune in to All the Smoke Podcasts, where Matt and Stacks sit down with former first lady, Michelle Obama.

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