Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Harry Cliff: How to Make an Apple Pie ​(#212)

Episode Date: February 4, 2022

Win a copy of Harry’s book, HOW TO MAKE AN APPLE PIE! Click here  Harry Cliff is a particle physicist at the University of Cambridge working on the LHCb experiment, a huge particle detector buried 100 metres underground at CERN near Geneva. He is a member of an international team of around 1400 physicists, engineers and computer scientists who are using LHCb to study the basic building blocks of our universe, in search of answers to some of the biggest questions in modern physics. He also spends a big chunk of his time sharing his love of physics with the public. His first popular science book, How To Make An Apple Pie From Scratch, which will be published in August 2021. From 2012 to 2018 he held a joint post between Cambridge and the Science Museum in London, where he curated two major exhibitions: Collider (2013) and The Sun (2018). He has given a large number of public talks, including at TED and the Royal Institution, and made numerous appearances on television, radio and podcasts. Visit our Sponsor LinkedIn.com/impossible to post a job for FREE! Search for The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts, or go to jordanharbinger.com/subscribe 00:00:00 Intro 00:04:00 Origin of the book cover and title 00:07:56 What was your thought process in writing this book? Was it a science career risk? 00:12:04 Is there too much hype in science? Is LHC worth it? 00:18:15 What is an "historic" experiment and why do you refer to them in the book? 00:23:31 When can you trust a theorist? 00:26:25 What's new about the "new" physics? 00:30:16 How far away are the next breakthroughs in physics? 00:30:43 Justifying big physics: Was finding the Higgs boson worth it? 00:34:34 The next big physics machine - and the one that wasn't (The Superconducting Supercollider) 00:38:32 The latest results from LHCb collaboration. 00:47:15 Is this really "new" physics or simply modifications to the standard model and its forces? Anomolies? 00:53:28 What is the elementary particle missing gap to the Standard Model? 00:55:59 On the miraculous "fine-tuning" of the Universe, and thoughts on the multiverse. 01:00:24 What is Harry's day job? (LHCb) 01:07:57 Can we get to a grand unified theory with existing data? 01:14:45 Can you foresee getting more out the existing data with new computational methods? 01:19:15 What would you put in your ethical will? 01:24:00 What would you put on your billion-year time capsule for the future? 01"26:17 What has occurred in your life that you thought was impossible? What advice would you give your younger self? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey friends, I just finished recording another wonderful episode with my newfound friend from across the pond, Dr. Harry is a phenomenal communicator of science, and he is infectious in his enthusiasm for scientific discovery and communication. He wrote a wonderful book called How to Make an Apple Pie from scratch, and that's today's episode on Into the Impossible. Talked about many things, in particular, the influence that he had. had from this one kind of throwaway line from the Cosmos series, the famous popularization of science by none other than Carl Sagan, the late husband of past guest Andruyan, put a link to her episode in the show notes and father of Sasha Sagan, put a link to her notes, her episode

from our conversation in 2020 in the show notes as well. And this book is kind of a callback. What do they call that? when you gave a shout out to a concept, a meme, what have you in the popular Mimosphere. And in Harry's case, it was this kind of line that, it was this line that Carl Sagan said. If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. So Harry goes through the fascinating history of the elements, the chemical elements, which really leads us on a tour, not only of chemistry, but of the particle physics that underlies chemistry.

And furthermore, he goes into great detail on the fascinating discoveries that he and his colleagues are making at the large Hadron Collider. You'll find that incredibly fascinating. I did as well. And he's just so delightful and so much fun to talk to you. I know you're going to love this episode. Please leave a review. We have almost 400 reviews total from around the world. Just received one from Australia calling me also.

of flattering names, so I know it's not one of my brothers or something like that. But if you would, please leave a review, and you can do that. I'll have a link to the Apple podcast feed, and you can leave a review no matter what podcast app you're listening on. That would be most helpful. And I want you to just enjoy the majesty that is this wonderful book by this young, brilliant writer from the UK, Harry Cliff. Harry Cliff. You find links to get to know him better in his social media feeds, which he's quite prolific at.

And I hope you enjoy this episode of the Into the Impossible podcast with yours truly. Professor Brian Keating, UC San Diego's Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination. Come on, let's go into the impossible. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors, Hal. Hello, everybody. Today is a big day. It is nearing the end of the year, and we are nearing the end of successful, hopefully, some would say successful, completion of another year of pandemic podcasting. And today we are joined by a marvelous young scientist from the United Kingdom in the pandemic capital of the world, as he describes it. Dr. Harry Cliff. How are you today, sir? I'm well, Brian. Nice to talk to you. How you doing?

It's wonderful to talk to you. So we, as you may know, on this podcast, love to interview deep thinkers. And most of the people that write books that we have come on and authors in physics and even outside of physics are, you know, more theoretically inclined. And it's rare that we get an experimentalist to come on. And I think of yourself and I've had on, James Beecham, who's a collaborator I know, but very few other experimental particle physicists. And so I thought it would be great to have you on for a long time, but now more than ever, because for one thing, you recently released results and you led some of the release of these results, and we'll talk about those from the LHCB, which alternatively stands for beauty or bottom or, I don't know, Brian, I like this wonderful book.

This book is a phenomenal book. I'll try to bring it out and show it to everyone. Now, this is the U.S. version, the cover. And Harry, as you may know on this podcast, we always do the thing that you're forbidden to do, which is to judge books by their covers. So I want to ask you, what is the origin of this book's cover and title and the recipe within? You're the first cookbook author I've ever had on. So, Harry, let me judge the book by its cover. covered. Yeah, well, I mean, so the title is how to make an apple pie from scratch. And actually,

the title in a way was one of the last things to come to me. I've been thinking about writing this book for a long time. And you're right that I think a lot of people who write popular science books, they tend to be more on the theoretical side. Because I think they're sort of, they're the people who are thinking more in this sort of abstract, whereas quite often experimentalists are down, you know, with a spanner, doing the sort of nuts and bolts stuff. So part of what I wanted to do with this book was to tell the history of particle physics, nuclear physics, astrophysics. But from a sort of experimentalist point of view, so there's a lot more experimentation and observation in the book

that maybe you would necessarily get in other accounts. But in terms of the title, it was one of these things where the book is essentially about where does matter come from, what are its origins, how far back through the history of the universe can we go in understanding where it comes from. But I spent a long time trying to figure out

a kind of accessible hook for the story. And it actually came to me when I was walking through my local subway station in South London. And they have this whiteboard there where they have a thought for the day that's written up. And sometimes it's like a kind of trite thing from a self-help book or sometimes they have a sort of, they're a bit more elevated and it's some philosopher.

But this particular day was a quote from Carl Sagan, which he uttered, I think at the start of episode nine of Cosmos, this big blockbuster 1980s TV series where there's this slightly strange scene where he's sitting actually at the dining table of Trinity College, Cambridge, at the high table, this big oak-paneled medieval hall. And there's this like musical score and his apple pies brought out to him. And he looks at the camera with a little twinkle in his eye and says, If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch,

you must first invent the universe. Thank you very much. The point he's making is that even this really mundane object, if you really want to understand it, you've got to go right back through the history of the universe, right potentially to the Big Bang. And so this was sort of, I thought, aha, this is like a great way into the story. So the book is really about the origins of matter,

but framed through this kind of idea. that we're looking for the ultimate recipe for an apple pie and in terms of the cover then the publishers ran with that and inevitably an apple ended up on the on the cover given its association with Newton and gravity and all the rest of it yeah it's delightful and just to note i have had on a sagan uh cassa sagan who is karl's daughter and uh for her wonderful book for small creatures such as we and her mom, Carl Sagan's widow, And Druryan. So they were both on and Anne is still involved with the Cosmos project. And they've done more, I call them the first family of the universe.

And we'll get into some of the topics of your book in just a bit. But just to point out that as a communicator of science, and I aspire to be that as well, I wonder, did you feel nervous? You know, is it okay to ask you if you had any reservations trip? You're not a professor yet, if that's within your desire set of desirables. I wish you the best in that. But I wonder, did you feel a little bit frightened? If that's okay to ask you, I'd like to know writing this book was a risk, and I commend you

on taking it and the courage to do so. Did that enter into your thought process at all at this stage in your career? Well, not really. And I suppose the reason for that is I've had a bit of a strange career. So after I finished my graduate degree, I, in all honesty, I was sort of in two minds about whether I was going to stay in physics. And one of the reasons I stayed in was this incredible opportunity came up through Cambridge University, where I'm still based, and the Science Museum in London. So I actually spent seven years post PhD half and half between science communication and research. So I was doing, you know, half the week at the Large Hadron Collider, the other half the week at the Science Museum doing exhibitions.

and a lot of, so I did a lot, you know, communication science has actually been a big part of my career professionally and I've sort of learned a lot in a sort of established professional institution through doing that. So, and that's sort of, I think, part of why I assume my boss values me in part at least because of that. So she, I was, I'm very lucky that my research group and university have been very supportive in what I want to do because you're right, it's more unusual, I think, for someone who's at a sort of postdoctoral fellow level to be doing stuff like this and it tends to be something when people are a bit more established. So I think where, yeah, you're right, it maybe would be more of a risk for if you were a sort of straight researcher,

but I think it made a lot of sense for me because of the particular career I've carved out. And I'm very keen going forward that this, I think, you know, communication science is part of what keeps me excited about the science itself. So it's something I want to carry on combining. So in that sense, it made it made perfect sense. Yeah. And, you know, obviously Carl Sagan himself was almost penalized in a sense for his, for his public outreach, at least that if you consider lack of membership in the U.S. National Academy of Sciences to be a, you know, a punishment or something to be upset about. Because, you know, famously they considered his, you know, his conduct as a promoter of science and a popularizer of science,

almost detrimental, almost to salesman for their taste. And he was famously not allowed. And even though he established so many things and wrote very deep and eloquently in scientific journals, had a very high citation count, started new journals, interdisciplinary, as we'd call them now, and contributed things like the planetary society, which does actual research. So I think it's a shame. Hopefully things like that have changed, although maybe they've gone too far the other way. Now we have people that are just professional communicators that are the face of science, people like past guest Neil deGrasse Tyson.

It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds. That's why I chose GoogleFi Wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month. Now that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore Google Fi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees.

Google Fi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Not saying negatively, but there's just an association that he always tries to deflect, that he's actually doing the signs, which he's not. So I think people like yourself, and as I aspire to be as well, are to be somewhat, somewhat commended, at least for the courage to do it, although in my case, I'm a tenured professor. Although when I wrote my first book, my department chair said, we won't hold it against you, but we're not going to help you out. We're not going to give you any benefit. And this book of yours reminds me of, again, my audience sometimes hates it when I name drop, but, you know, otherwise you're just listening to me and rhapsodized. about what I've done. So I want to say, it reminds me a lot of Jen 11's book, which is a very

personal book, her first book, How the Universe Got Its Spots. And Jen is a wonderful friend and a great guest. And I want to, you know, kind of take the audience through it. I never like to give away the book. I want people to buy it. I'll actually give away this copy that your publisher was so kind to send. I'll actually give this away to folks in the U.S. because I bought the audiobook instead as well as. But this book is really kind of a cry to Cure, the French would say in some better version of that accented version, which is that, you know, it's one sense an inspirational glimpse into how we know what we know, but it's also a call to the future.

And I worry, you know, about the presence of hype, and maybe we'll start the meat of the conversation there. The presence of hype in science is somewhat, you know, looked upon disfavorably in this book of yours and that we're trying to maybe convince, you know, sell past the sale. In other words, saying, oh, we should do build the future circular collider perhaps or something else, and we have to justify it. How do you react to people that say, you know, what good is this? You know, what good is the LHC?

What is it really done for us as a people? Yeah, I mean, it's a valid question because these projects, obviously, they come with huge budgets. There's several answers to that question. I mean, the LHC justifies itself on number of grounds. I mean, from the sort of, I think if you ask most scientists, the basic answer is the reason we do particle physics and cosmology and, you know, astrophysics, ultimately is because there's value in knowing about the world and we want to understand the world we live in. And that has huge value. It's part of what makes us human, that curiosity about, you know, the universe around us.

And I think that has always got to be the primary argument for doing these things ultimately. And the question is, does society value fundamental knowledge enough to, put its money where its mouth is and build these big projects. But of course, that that isn't the only argument because, and actually, I suppose it's part of why I think communication of science is so important because fundamental physics, astrophysics, these are subjects that they do have spin-offs and applications, but that isn't why we do it, right? And so the real, if we're generating this knowledge, the only reason to do that is if we're going to share it more widely. It shouldn't just be for our own entertainment as scientists. It's got to be put out there to the public because they've paid for

it ultimately. But in terms of, you know, there's sort of the classic arguments. One is that, you know, if you build something like the LHC, you have this big, complicated machine that when it was being designed, the technology didn't exist to build it. And you have to innovate in terms of, say, superconducting magnet technology or computing technology. And then these, developing those technologies for these publicly funded projects, then goes off and has direct spin-out applications in the world. And, you know, the classic one that's always trotted out is the World Wide Web. which was invented at CERN by Tim Berners-Lee as a way of sharing information on computer networks, and then, of course, you know, has a huge impact on the wider society.

Like a very practical example of this I saw a few years ago where I went down to visit a superconducting magnet firm who based in the south of England. And they take a lot of contracts from particle physics. So these are magnets that are used in the accelerators to steer beams of particles around the ring. And what they said was quite interesting, which was usually when they take a contract from CERN or somewhere like it, they make a loss. because the amount of money that's being offered versus the technical challenge they're being asked to overcome is, is there's a mismatch, basically. But the reason they do it is because solving these really hard problems, they always learn something, which then has an application elsewhere. So they've just developed, they've been working with this new type of superconductor called niobium tin, which is a high field superconductor that's going to be used in the future upgrades of the LHC and the future circular collider if it's built. And it's a very difficult material to work with, but they learned to manipulate this material.

then directly from that project with CERN, they were then building proton therapy machines, so cancer therapy machines that previously would have been far too, you'd been enormous building size things. They could now build a compact one that fits in the back of a van because they'd worked on this CERN project. So that's just one example, but there are kind of, you know, you can find stories like this all over fundamental physics. But then, because the other argument, the bigger one, I suppose, is you never know what applications, the actual knowledge you discover and may have. And it's, you know, the Higgs is, I suppose the Higgs boson is the most famous thing to come out of the LHC so far. And it's even 10 years later, really hard to think, you know, what use

the Higgs might be. But, you know, there's lots of lessons from history. If we go back to, say, the 1930s when nuclear energy, nuclear physics was being discovered. And Ernest Rutherford, who is, you know, the world expert on the nucleus. And, you know, he famously said, you know, if you were thinking about getting energy out of the atomic nucleus, you're talking moonshine. In other words this is in like 1932 and he says that you're never going to get anything out of nuclear energy it's just a sort of scientific interest sort of for our scientists and then he's proven so spectacularly wrong within the space of you know 13 years so scientists themselves are often not the people who are best equipped to understand what the impact of their own work is going to be and so those are

all the there are all these arguments i think why we do this stuff and you know that's ultimately why i think for me why we should build the next accelerator is because there's really important questions that we need to answer. But that is not, you know, but also you're going to get all this other stuff that comes with it, we hope. Yeah, I always say, you know, the Nobel Prize has a component of it given to Higgs and only one other person. We can get into that later, perhaps. But the Higgs has a component that the recipient should be rewarded in part for conferring the greatest benefit to mankind. And obviously, the first Nobel Prize was to William Renshin, who talked.

briefly about in the book and for the discovery of x-rays and then that was used to benefit, you know, medical diagnostics, et cetera. You know, but I say, you know, often if the Higgs boson, you know, properties of it are really relevant to the benefit or detriment of your life, I have some good psychotherapist that I'd like you to meet. And yet, you know, oftentimes the problem with basic research that you and I traffic in is that it does produce technology. And then people expect the, you know, the jackpot to keep paying out, not just with Nobel prizes, but with technology. And I want to take a statement that I really love this book, Harry.

It's such a great book. I found out, you know, I loved your interview. You did with Lex Friedman, our mutual friend, and he called you one of the greatest scientific communicators. And I didn't realize how great a writer you are, but it was really such a delight to go through this book because it's actually a stealth kind of chemistry book, as I say, in the tradition of Jen 11,

but also in the tradition of Isaac Asimov, who was a great writer, but both of science fiction, but of science fact. And he was a chemist, and his book, through the history of chemistry, really hooked me on science, and I back as a 12-year-old, and I hope that this will do the same for other young people, as was your intent. So you're to be commended on that. One of the things, the themes that comes up is the concept of a historic experiment. And you mentioned just recently Rutherford, and you called him his experiment,

you know, one of the first historic experiments. Talk about what that means. What is a historic experiment? still historic experiments. What is that nature? Why are they so crucial in your opinion? Yeah, I guess by historic experiments, I suppose we're referring to these moments where, you know, someone gets hands on with nature and discovers something really profound. And there are a number, I go through quite a few of these in the book. You know, actually one of the earliest ones I think I mentioned is quite a sort of fun one, which is Antoine Lavoisier, who is what seen as

as one of the fathers of modern chemistry or the father of modern chemistry. And he did this experiment where he had this, he sort of done a lot of work on combustion and chemical reactions and also the sort of early version of the periodic table, or at least at least the first list of chemical elements. And he was sort of became interested in do animals combust their food? In other words, is there a form of combustion taking place inside animals. And he did this experiment famously where he put a guinea pig in this bucket of ice effectively. And essentially he built a calorimeter, an energy measuring device. And he measured how much. much ice, the guinea pig's heat melted and used this to work out that it's sort of energy release was roughly, you know, concordant with what you'd expect from combustion and sort of concluded that this is sort of what's going on in respiration. It's also interesting, the origin of the

term to be a scientific guinea pig. This was the original guinea pig. But, you know, so there's ones like that. In terms of the sort of physics, there's, you know, there are several of these throughout the book. I mean, probably the experiment that begins what we would regard as modern particle physics is J.J. Thompson's discovery of the electron. So this is the first fundamental particle that was ever discovered. It was discovered in 1897. And it's amazing really when you consider that Thompson did this experiment with really pretty, I mean, okay, not basic equipment, because actually for its time, there's a lot of craft involved in making the equipment that he used. So he had this, this was, he used this glass tube, a cathode ray tube, which was hand blown by this very

skilled technician called Ebenezer Everett, who he worked with. But it was a eventually an experiment done by two people in a university laboratory with very little resources or money apart from their own skills as experimenters and craftspeople. And they discovered, you know, the first real proof that there is something smaller than the atom. And this is the beginning of our proper understanding of, you know, why chemistry is the way it is, but also the structure of matter that goes on. And you think about, you know, the last particle to be discovered so, you know, to date is the Higgs. And that took a machine that's 27 kilometers long, cost 12 billion euros to build. There's thousands of people were

working on it so this incredible change in scale but so i suppose you have you know you have that at the one end this you know very modest historic experiment that really changes their understanding of the nature and today the lhc i think the discovery of the higgs will in the centuries time when we look back be regarded as another one of these historic experiments but the scale is now unimaginable to what thompson could have thought of you know in the 1890s for sure absolutely and um i look at as an experimentalist i try to see you know, by what physical evidence can we do what David Hilbert said in this notion of compression? In other words, how many previous theories or conjectures can be eliminated by a new theory? And I think in the case of, you know, like Priestley and LaMoisier, etc., getting rid of things like phlogiston,

which you talk about, obviously you need to talk about, you know, cooking and combustion, if you're talking about your cooking recipes, and, you know, how they eliminated these types of things. And there are many such examples throughout the book, one of which, you know, kind of dovetails. I interview, as I say, you know, some of my best friends are theorists, and I interview them on regular occasion. And, you know, one of the things I always wonder about

is when do you know if you can trust a theorist? I don't mean, like, you know, are they going to swipe your car or something like that? But how can you trust, you know, what they're saying, when half the time they get their own predictions wrong or maybe undercut what they're capable of revealing in this compression algorithm that Hilbert speaks about. For example, you talk about kinetic theory and Brownian motion in the book. And of course, Einstein's contributions to that were crucial and decisive. And yet he really, in that paper, calls upon experimentalists to test out.

And I think you mentioned this French physicist, Peron. And then that was later, you know, verified that, you know, eventually many decades later leads to, you know, success, Nobel Prize, etc. But then, of course, he also used the equations of GR to returidict or to explain the anomalous procession of the percolonium and mercury. And on the other hand, he was very much in error about the implications of GR when it came to gravitational lensing, when it came to strong gravitational lensing, when it came to strong gravitational lens, to gravitational waves, when it came to the expansion of the universe. So how do we know when to trust this guy? I mean, I have a conjecture. I want to get your reaction to it.

I want you to grade me. I believe you should trust a theorist almost all the time if they make a prediction, a returiction. In other words, they explain existing phenomena and it makes sense. On the other hand, if they say that something that can't be done, as namesake of this center that I co-direct, Ruther C. Clark said, when an elder but distinguished scientist says something is impossible, he's almost always wrong.

So how do you know when to trust your theorist colleagues, you know, et cetera? How do you know that they're appropriately taking into account existing data and evidence that we have, but also, you know, standing on firm ground and then maybe extrapolating when they're too, when they're too timid and they don't realize what the implications are? How do you know when to trust a theorist? Like if you were alive back in 1905, would you have trusted Einstein? I think it's a really interesting question. I mean, I think one of the things in modern science that has happened is because science is so much bigger and it's so much more developed than it was 100 years ago.

There's a much higher degree of subspecialism than there was. So, you know, 100 years ago. So Thompson, who discovered the, discovered the electron, he was actually a mathematical physicist by training. He was a theorist, really. But he kind of, you know, became, he was rather strangely appointed the head of the Camdish Laboratory, its experimental laboratory, which is actually a bit of. everyone was very surprised about because he was actually famously clumsy, often would break his own experiments. But nonetheless, you had someone there working both as an experimenter and as a theory. So he was coming up with ideas and then himself testing them, which is very rare these days. I mean,

at the LHC, in high-intue physics, there's a kind of hierarchy or a, you know, a kind of taxonomy of different sorts of people. You have, even within experimental physics, there's the people who are the sort of hardware experts, people like me who do data analysis. Then you've got the theory side, you have the phenomenologists who are sort of using the fundamental theories to try to connect to experiment directly. But then you've got the people doing the really sort of fundamental big picture stuff. And it's not, these people can't always talk to each other, you know, very, very easily because they don't speak the same language. So, you know, people that I work most closely with a phenomenologist who are sort of the closest theorist to experimentalists that there are. But, you know, if I was going to go and talk to a string theorist, I would have no idea what they were saying. So a lot of this has to be, in a sense, it sort of does have to be taken on trust. Because, you know, Because if you're an experiment, there's no real way you can actually assess, you know, someone's theoretical ideas. It has to be based on, you know, do I trust this person? Do I know their reputation? What do other people say about their work?

Do they seem like they're kind of methodical? What's their track record? So it's a kind of complicated thing, actually. And it's a crucial thing at the moment. I mean, maybe we'll get onto this. But what's happening in LHCB at the moment, the experiment I work on, is we're seeing these anomalies, which seem to disagree with the standard model. our current best theory of particle physics. And one of the big questions is, is it that, you know, there's several possibilities

when we're seeing these things is that one, it's genuinely like new physics and it's a big breakthrough, but there's a lot of much more mundane ones and it could be an experimental error that we've made on our side, but it could also be a theoretical effect that's been missed because the calculations that from the theory side that are being made are very complicated and you have to take into all kinds of difficult calculations in order to do them. And, you know, there's a lot of doubt about, you know, you know, a famous one that came out this year, for example, was this muon measurement from the Mium G-minus-2 experiment at Fermilab. And the big debate there is, again, they see this discrepancy

between the magnetism of the muon in their experiment and what theory says it ought to be. But then there's another theory prediction that's much closer to the experiment. And they have different techniques for calculating various effects. And, you know, it looks at the question there is really, which theory do you trust? The experiment seems pretty solid. So it's a hard, it's a hard question. I guess ultimately the answer is nature will find you out in the end because, you know, even if you're, I think it's Feynman's very famous quote about, you know, it doesn't matter if your theories, doesn't matter how smart you are, doesn't matter, you know, who made the prediction, what their name is, what the reputation. If it disagrees with the experiment, it's wrong.

And eventually experiment will find, find out who will settle, you know, the argument, I suppose. But it's not, there's not an easy answer, I don't think, actually. Well, you go through in a very tender detail, you know, as I said, the history is, of chemistry and leading up to the final reductionist, you know, clarion calls of the 1900s and obviously concluding with the role that the LHC has played and even speculating where we can go farther. And, you know, as I'm reading it again, I'm feeling inspired and depressed, inspired because of how much we know and how much we know that we don't know, but also So the notion that the next apples on the tree are very high up in that it's going to be very difficult to make progress experimentally.

And if that's the rubric, as Feynman says, and I agree with Feynman, obviously, even though he was a theorist, I agree with that deep connection. And yet it's depressing because in a sense I do feel there is a lot of hype, and especially in both of our fields, in experimental cosmology. where we're now kind of gearing up to build a next generation, so-called stage four CMB experiment, to measure the polarization, the B-mode polarization of the CMB, looking for a single number effectively, which is the amount of gravitational wave energy, primordially in the early universe attributable to inflation. What worries me is that inflation might not have happened, or it might have happened at a very low energy scale that we can never detect,

won't produce, and I'm not saying we won't get ancillary benefits, obviously the Simon's Observatory and Simon's Array that I co-lead. These are projects that are also, in some sense, you know, searching for that as the primary target, and we can do a lot of other physics as well, but that the other physics is not why we would build it. Just like I don't believe that, you know, building, you know, the LHC was built, you know, primarily to discover the Higgs. And now that it discovered that, there's other justifications, but the justification that bigger is better, it seems to ring a little bit more hollow in this era of constrained, but no, budgets are always constrained. And you go through the calculations of how much it would really cost and how little that is in the grand scale.

And then a delightful science fiction, you know, vignette at the very end, which I won't spoil because I just loved, I love listening to the audio book. I thought that was delightful to hear your voice. But when you, you know, have to sell it. As Feynman also said, I hope you never in his famous. you know, the first principle is not to fool yourself. He also says, at the end, I hope you'll never compromise your principles to get money, meaning that, you know, to get the experiment that he claims necessary to validate a theory that you won't, like, oversell it.

Because, as he said, one of his depressing moments was when the scientist said, well, if we told them, you know, the reality, they'd never fund us. So when the apples are so much higher up, the next level beyond the Higgs is so far away, how can we justify it? And is that not depressing to you? Yeah, well, I, it's definitely a challenge to, to make the case for these projects, for sure. I would say that it's, I mean, and I make this point in the book that the next machine, if there is a next machine, the big question we're trying to answer now is what is the Higgs boson in essence? So we, the Higgs has been discovered.

It seems to be the one that's predicted. But, you know, there are reasons for, there are strong theoretical reasons for believing that an object like the Higgs boson. Higgs should not exist. It should not be possible. And the, the main goal of the next machine will basically be to study the Higgs at the highest details possible. And this is, this question is actually, you know, it's sort of the question that this mex machine will have to, we'll be trying to answer is sort of the fundamental shift, I think, that's been happening in the last 10 years. It's associated with that. And I don't know how technical we want to get, but basically this is this problem known as the fine-tuning problem or the hierarchy problem to do with the Higgs, which is that-

The more technical, the better, actually. Well, more technical, better. Yeah. So, okay, so the Higgs boson is a vibration in this thing called the Higgs field. And the Higgs field is unique amongst the quantum fields that we know about the make up the world around us in that it has a uniform non-zero value everywhere in space. It's like the whole of space has this kind of amount of higgsiness that fills it. And that sort of amount of energy in the Higgs field is responsible for the masses of elementary particles. It's also, and the structure of the fundamental forces that we observe in the universe around us. But there's this weird thing that this value that the Higgs field has, see, to be incredibly unlikely. And if you do a sort of naive calculation using quantum field theory with some assumptions about, you know, how far in it up and energy you can go to the plank scale, you find that there should really only be two natural answers to how strong should the Higgs field be. And it's either that it's off, it goes to it gets pushed to zero, or it gets whacked way up to the plank energy, this enormous energy scale. And in either of those two scenarios, we wouldn't be here because in the case where the Higgs field is off, electrons for one have no mass. In fact,

all the fundamental particles would be rearranged and the whole universe looked totally different, but there would certainly not be structures that we would recognise. So we could not exist in such a universe. And the other option is where it's at the plank scale, then everything gets so heavy, it collapse into a black hole. And again, you have no structure. And we have this, to achieve this weird value, which is in particle physics units, the value of the Higgs field, we think, is about 256 giga electron volts, more or less. I think that's right. And the, whereas the plank scale is something like 10 billion billion giga electron volts and zero is zero. So it's sort of why is it this very small value, which isn't this enormous scale and it's also not zero? And the only way to do this

is to finally tune the fundamental constants of nature to a ridiculously unbelievable extent. So this big question, one of the main reasons for believing that there would be new particles at the LHC beyond the Higgs is that there's an expectation there needs to be some new physics associated with the Higgs boson that stabilizes the Higgs field. and allows the universe as we know it to exist. And so far, at least, all the searches that have been made at the LHC have not yet turned up the signs of the predicted new physics. So there's this question, you know, is the universe, and this sort of leads to a bifurcation in how we think about fundamental physics, you know, we have this weird feature of the world. Can we explain it in terms of new phenomena?

When we zoom in, zoom in, we'll discover there are new particles, new dynamics that will explain this fact. Or do we have to somehow, we start relying on anthropic arguments, you? you know, in terms of multiverses where the Higgs field, Higgs field has different values in different parts of the multiverse and we live in the bit we do because it's the only one we can live in and so on. And that sort of goes to the really deep into the heart of what we mean by, you know, the kind of questions we can ask in science. Because I mean, I think a lot of, I don't know, I think a lot of people start off at least with a distaste for the multiverse because it sort of says, well, you can't answer this question because it's probably set by some

multiverse argument, which we can't test and can't, you know, do any experimentation to see if it's right, but we'll just have to sort of take it as assumed. So what this next machine will do is settle that argument one way or another because actually the LHC is at this point was made to me by Nima Arkani Ahmad when I interviewed him for the book that the machine that everyone really wanted was the superconducting super collider, which was this American project that was being built actually in the early 90s and late 80s in Texas. And it was going to be 80 kilometers long. It was going to go up to an energy about three times higher than the LHC. And it got canceled because of budget problems and political problems and that the LHC is sort of almost like a sort of smaller compromise,

the sort of consolation prize in a way. And actually it doesn't really go up to the energies you need to really test this problem. So basically, you know, if you want to sort of the Higgs, basically with the Higgs, we've seen this thing, but we can't, we haven't got the resolution to zoom in on it and really study it in detail and understand, you know, is it actually made of smaller things? Is the Higgs a composite particle, for example, which would explain this problem potentially? And we can't, we can do that a bit. the LHC but we can't settle it.

And the next machine's job is really to settle this question. That's the big, that's the big selling point. And there are a bunch of other, there are lots of other things that can do, dark matter, matter, antimatter asymmetry, you name it. You know, the thing about colliders is they're very, very rich places to do science, because you can ask a huge number of different questions with a collider. And, but, you know, if you think this question with the Higgs is an important question to answer, I think a lot of people would say on its own, that's the reason.

for doing it. And the other stuff is more, you know, that's when we know we'll get an answer to one way or another. And we may not like the answer that we get, but it will at least settle the debate. And we may also get answers about dark matter, about loads of other things potentially, but there's no guarantee of that. So yeah, that's the scientific argument for doing it. And it really comes down to, I think, do you think this question is important enough to justify these experiments? But I think if you say that it's not, then you're sort of saying, well, okay, we're going to give up on this of fundamental physics to an extent. I mean, there are things you can do at low energy experiments that can give you sensitivity

to what's going on at higher energy scales, but you know, only in a sort of usually in quite restricted sort of scenarios. So if you say we're going to stop at this point, well, you know, we're kind of having to sort of in a sense say, well, that's the end of this, this kind of exploratory science, at least for the time being. So I think that's why we still have to push and make the case for this. And maybe we get onto this, but I mean, the other big argument that may be there, This still depends what happens at the LHC is these anomalies again.

And if these anomalies turn out to be confirmed, they are indicating the existence of particles that could be with, well, almost certainly would be within the NAG range of the next generation collider. So that would be a kind of guaranteed win if these anomalies turn out. But maybe we'll talk about that in a bit. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, let's go there. So today, the CERN Courier published a nice interview with Edward Whitten, who at no point will be a guest on this podcast. I've already asked and been rejected.

Ema has promised me he's going to come on, but it's proving harder and harder as time goes on. But in this interview with the CERN Courier, which I'll have a link to on the show notes, he says, you know, it's for, you know, people love to say if such and such will happen at an energy scale, not too much above the LHC. energies and you go through in the book you know how hard it is to go up by you know 10% let alone you know three times six times 25 times so that the you know he claims the dream would be to get a concrete clue from the current experiments about what is the energy scale for new physics beyond the Higgs particle and the interviewer asked the follow-up question could the flavor anomalies be one such clue and he says there's multiple places the possible anomalies in B physics observed at CERN are extremely significant

if they hold up. So I want to talk about that. And your recent results from October, in which you reported a number, it's very, you know, I was going to get a tattoo of this. R sub K was superscript 0 sub S and R sub K superscript asterisk plus, which were detected at several sigma. What the heck is this?

What are these numbers? What do they mean in simple terms that we can get detailed? in just a bit. But what is the basis of this? First of all, what's a B and what is B physics going to tell us? And how could it imply, perhaps, a clue to the existence of new physics that's testable with the current technology that we have, not some future collider? What is B physics and what are these strange symbols? So, well, B stands for beauty, which is the name, which is usually applied to one of the six quarks by B physicist. So we tend to call the, what's usually called the bottom quark. we call the beauty quark for strange historical reasons, I guess, because we'd rather be beauty

physicist than bottom physicists. And these, this is the, it's the fifth heaviest of the quark. It's the, so there are six quarks in three generations, two in each generation. It's the heaviest down type quark. So this is the very heavy version of the down quark that's inside protons and neutrons. And these things are really interesting because they are relatively long lived. So they, because of the way they interact through the weak interaction, they live for, in particle physics terms, a long time, about one and a half trillions of a second on average before they decay, and they can decay into most of the particles in the standard model because of their mass. And that gives it, they makes them a really rich sort of area to do physics. And they're made in huge numbers in the LHC collisions. So when you

bang protons together, because protons are made of quarks and gluons, you tend to make lots of quarks and gluons, including billions and billions of these beauty quarks every year. And the particular area I work in is in very rare decays of these beauty quarks. So you create one of these things, lives a little bit of time, trillions of a second or so, and then it decays. And there are particular decays that are extremely rare, by which we mean that, you know, if you have a million beauty quarks, one of them might decay like this. And there's a particular set of processes where basically a beauty quark transforms into a strange quark, which is the sort of next lightest version of the down quark. So it's the sort of next one along in the generations. And emits either a muon

and an anti-muon. And a muon is a heavy version of the electron, basically. an electron and an anti-electron. And what we've seen at LHCB over the last, well, sort of getting on for seven years now, is that if you take a ratio of how often a beauty quark goes into a strange quark and two muons, and divide that by how often it goes into a strange quark and two electrons, this rate, this ratio, you can predict very precisely in the standard model,

and it should be one. And the reason basically is that electrons and muons are kind of, like copies of each other. They're identical in every way. They interact with the forces with the same strength. They have all the same properties. The only way they're different is their mass. And the muon is about 200 times heavy than the electron. But other than that, they're identical. So because all the forces interact with these particles at the same rate, you also expect, or the same strength, you also expect beauty quarks to decay into muons and electrons equally. So they should, you should get the same numbers of these different decays. And what we've seen consistently

in a number of different data sets and with different teams of people measuring them and different decay processes, we're seeing that the muon decay seems to be happening less often than the electron decay. And the reason this is a really powerful measurement is because I sort of talked about theoretical uncertainties. And one of the problems with these decays is not just a measurement, but also predicting theoretically, say, how often should such a process happen? But because you take a ratio between these almost identical processes, all the theory uncertainties cancel. So you get a quantity that is this really pristine, very precisely predicted number with a very small uncertainty, and everyone agrees that this number should be one to several decimal places.

And if it isn't one, the only way that you can explain this is if there's new physics. And what we've seen consistently over time is that this number is below one. It comes in at around on average 0.8, 0.85, something like that. What we've done over years is we've measured different types of these decays. Basically, the difference between them is that the difference between them is that the beauty quark, you don't see the beauty quark on its own. It's always coupled up with other particles, usually an anti-quark. So it can be, you can have a beauty quark with an up quark, for example, or an anti-up quark technically. Or you can have a beauty quark and an anti-down quark or a beauty quark

and an anti-strange quark. And this spectator quark, which doesn't actually do anything, it just kind of sits there and while the beauty quark does its thing, that means you observe different particles in your detector because what you see is the composite state, not the fundamental particle. So what I measured with a student mind, John, Smeaton over the last few years has been two of these decays, basically one of which is a beauty quark with an up quark and the other one which is a beauty quark with a down quark. And what we found using all the data that's available from LHCB so far is that again this number comes out below one, it, agrees really well with the other anomalies that have been seen. And this is sort of, you know,

gradually strengthening picture. With anomalies, what usually happens is if they are a, there's this question in particle physics is, you know, you might see an effect that's two sigma away from your standard model predictions say, well, two sigma effects come and go all the time. You do loads of measurements. Some of them will wander away from your theoretical prediction. And when you get an anomaly like that, what happens as you add data usually is it disappears. It goes back into, back to the standard model. And we've seen this historically in 2015, there was this big excitement over this thing called the die photon bump, which was a wiggle in a graph that turned up in Atlas and CMS is data.

A wiggle. In 750 publications. Yeah, yeah. It was. I don't know how many were actually published, but. It was amazing. Yeah, I mean, this little bump in a graph, yeah, theorists went absolutely nuts, and the archive was flooded with explanations to what this thing was.

And when they added more data a few months later in 2016, this bump disappeared. It turned out to be a statistical fluke. And that hasn't happened. When we've added data, almost always what's happened is the effect has strengthened. And this isn't just in these ratios. There are other things you can do. You can look at the angles the particles come out at. You can look at the absolute rates.

How often do these things happen? All of these things disagree with the standard model. And those other measurements have theory, uncertainties associated with them. So it's not quite so clear. But what I think is getting a lot of theorists excited is that all these anomalies appear to be coherent in the sense that you can explain them all simultaneously with a relatively simple new addition to the standard.

or adding a new particle of some new force particle usually of some type. And I think it's that's why people in B physics, people who know about B physics are getting more and more excited. And the latest result that we produced is just another bit of evidence that strengthens this case. And the, the kind of the real question now is, are these anomalies genuine new physics or is there some conspiracy of systematic effects, theoretical errors that that are somehow fooling us into thinking we're seeing something. And that is the big question now. Because if these anomalies are real, it's like, it's a super big deal.

This is, this is the, this will be the first time that we have seen, I'd be a bit careful, but I think it's not totally unjustified to say the first time we've seen something new in fundamental physics, in particle physics that wasn't predicted in advance, you know, by the standard model since the 1970s, right? Because pretty much all the discoveries that have. been the major ones, the W, the Z bosons, the Higgs boson, the top quark, you know, all these things were anticipated before they were found. They're part of a coherent picture, whereas this is something absolutely new that isn't part of the standard model. And if it's real, it's going to tell

us something very profound about the structure of the standard model itself, why the particles that we see in nature exist. And possibly it could also be connected to dark matter, this problem with the Higgs, who knows, but it's going to open up a new window. So it's a kind of really exciting moment and a very high stakes moment because we still don't know yet, is this real? Is it some conspiracy of mistakes? And we don't think it's a mistake. These measurements are, you know, huge care is taken. They've been cross-checked by different teams within the experiment. But what we really need now is new measurements that can kind of confirm the picture one way or another and new theory as well to help us check whether there are theoretical errors there.

One question I have is, you know, to what extent are these really like fifth forces and new forces versus modifications of, you know, the existing, you know, symmetries that we do believe exist. They're anomalies in that sense. So they're anomalies in something that's preexisting. You know, in what sense is it like saying, well, Einstein's GR is a new force? I mean, it seems like, no, there is one underlying force. We just didn't understand it. There's some anomalies, mercury and other things.

So to what extent is it really accurate when we talk about these things to say, effectively that they are producing some new fifth force. So I guess the concrete question is, yeah, are these really fifth forces, new forces? Are they modifications, anomalies, corrected anomalies, in existing forces? In other words, is the fifth force talk all kind of a little bit of hype? No, it's not hype for the very simple reason that all of the forces we know about interact and they must interact because of the symmetries that generate them in the standard model with the leptons, the electron, the mua and the tau with equal strength. And you know, you can't modify the weak force and explain these anomalies that way.

So the, and the weak force has also been tested very thoroughly. We know the form of the weak force, the strong force, the electromagnetic force. So it's no, it's not a modification of the new forces. It's got to be something. It's got to be a new, technically a new gauge boson of some type. And there are a couple of, the couple of leading candidates. There's something called a Z prime, which is effectively a bit like the Z boson of the standard model.

heavier with different sorts of interactions coming from a different sort of symmetry, or it could be probably the more exciting option is something called a lepto quark, which is again a boson of some type. It could either be a vector or a scaler, so either it can be spin one like a force particle, or it could be like the Higgs potentially, which is a spineless particle. So in terms of new force, it depends a little bit what you mean by force, but colloquially, you know, if it's a boson, it's a force, I think. So it's not illegitimate to say it's a new force.

But I mean, the thing that's, I mean, a new force is cool and that's exciting and that's great and everything else. And it's a short, it's a short way of explaining what we're seeing. But if the thing that's really exciting about this is not so much that there's a new force. I mean, the reason we've never seen this before is if it is there, this force is very weak and only becomes manifest of very short distance scales, you know, which we're probing at the LHC, which is why we're only seeing it now potentially. But the thing that's exciting about this is if it's really there, it's probably telling us something pretty fundamental. about one of the big mysteries of the standard model, which has kind of been ignored for quite a long time, which is this fact that the matter particles come in three generations. So we see in nature that the universe around us is what we can observe at least is made of the first generation of the first generation, is made of the first generation of the first generation, and the new one and the neutrino for the most part. So it's made up protons that make up atomic nuclei and electrons. And they're in the first generation. And then there's the second generation with the charm and the strange quark and the muon and the neutrino that goes with that. And then in the the fourth generation, the top and bottom quark and the tau. And we don't know why there are three generations. And there were attempts to explain this in the 70s and 80s with grand unified

theories. These are theories that unified the strong interaction with the ElectraWeak interaction and quite often also included the matter particles in that as some bigger symmetry group. And this, those sort of theories went a bit by the wayside because they predicted that protons should decay. And experiments that were done in the 80s and 90s showed that protons do not do. decay at the rate at least that these theories predicted. And the energy scales of grand unified theories is enormous way beyond the scale we can probe at colliders. But because these forces, if they're there, treat the different generations differently, they clearly interact with the second generation in a different way to the first generation. We can say that if it's a real

thing. It's telling us something about why there are three. And the sort of the exciting ideas with these leptocharks is that there actually is a new symmetry that kind of explain, basically what actually these models effectively say is that the reason we have leptons and quarks is actually the electrons say is actually a fourth type of quark which is part of a sort of bigger symmetry group along with the others and so this is getting i'm getting i'm not really playing myself very well but in in the strong interactions fundamental physics you have the charge of the strong interaction is called color and there are three colors red green and blue and the quarks carry color the electron and the muon the tau don't and they don't that's why we're

why they don't interact with a strong interaction. Well, these new theories that include these leptocharks treat the elitons as having a fourth color, which, and this this bigger symmetry breaks down at low energy into the strong interaction that we're familiar with and a leftover bit, which is actually ends up being part of the electromagnetic force. But, I mean, this is a long story short, basically is it kind of will be part of a bigger, more symmetrical unified theory that explains probably something, well, certainly something about the structure of the matter particles, but quite likely as well about the unification

of forces in some in some sense as well so it's it's a big step forward if indeed it's confirmed but that's the big if but it's so i mean that was a long answer to your question but it's not hype to say this is a new force but it's actually more exciting than that i would argue the next question i've had on my mind for a long time is that uh we know of one elementary boson that has spin zero only one in the universe we think maybe the inflaton also is spin zero and with the existence of the Higgs, I think that led some credulity or hope at least that we could have more credulity in the Higgs existence. We have spin one-half fermions, and then we have spin one and hopefully maybe even spin-two bosons, respectively photons and gravitons. But there are no spin-three-haves

fermions. Or what would you even call them? Are there theories and other ways to test? Why in this missing, you know, gap. You talk in the book about the formation of light elements, you go back to Gamov and the Burbages, who are my late, great colleagues here at UC San Diego, talk about that, and Hoyle and Fowler, and this missing gap. Is there a missing gap analog that precludes the existence of a spin three halves elementary particle? Well, so this is now not really my area, but I do know a little bit about it in the sense. So I think the spin three half particle, if it's there is it's predicted by super symmetry, for example. So it's the super version of the graviton. So in supersymmetry, you have the symmetry between bosons and fermions and the fermions

in the standard model or get bosonic versions. So the fermions have spin half and they get spin zero partners and the bosons, which has spin one, get spin half partners. And the graviton, the super graviton or gravitino, I think is usually referred to, gets a spin three halves particle because the graviton has spin two. But I mean, as you know, the last. 10 years, supersymmetry was the kind of the hot topic when the LHC switched on. And a lot of my colleagues were very excited that we were going to see super particles being produced at the LHC in such huge numbers that our data flow wouldn't be able to cope with it. And actually none of these things showed up. So, I mean, that isn't to say that supersymmetry is wrong,

because, you know, supersymmetry can exist at any energy scale. The reason for thinking that it was accessible at the LHC was to do with this argument about the Higgs boson and fine-tuning. And naturalness and so on. And that was why you expect it to turn up at the LHC's energies. If you don't buy that argument, though, supersymmetry can be at any scale, including all the way up to the plank scale. So these spin three halves things could be out there. So far, we have no evidence of them, but we'll have to wait and see. But yeah, no info so far, at least I'm afraid. But they're certainly possible. Very good. And then next, I want to pivot to the extremely early universe in which many things

occur, including something that, at least in the context of stellar nucleosynthesis, you talk about as almost miraculous. And indeed, Hoyle himself called the formation of carbon within the cores of hot young stars as a type of miracle, this famous beryllium resonance that you described. Are you troubled at all by some of the, you know, by these fine-tuning issues? I mean, very famous ones involve things that you talk about in the book from, you know, the formation of the lightness elements and the various timescales and the, and the necessity for the Sakharov condition that requires conversion of anti-quarks into quarks. It's, you know, by these sphalerons, which you do an extremely good job of describing. how many mystery how many miracles can can one science tolerate you know when we you know

I've had on you know intelligent design advocates I've had on you know about atheists and this is either an embarrassment or you know and even in this article by Witten that I'll link in the show notes you know he talks about well now he's he used to be really against the anthropic arguments but now he's coming to see you know especially if the landscape is true and how many miracles and landscapes and multiverses can one field tolerate. Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, I suppose, you know, the ideal situation would be that take the beryllium resonance that is responsible for the production of carbon in red giants.

Like, you know, this is pretty finely tuned. And if you move the resonance energy one way or another, then it all goes wrong. And there's a similar resonance in oxygen that if you had a resonance at a certain energy, all the carbon in the universe would turn into oxygen straight away, there'd be no carbon. which be a problem for us. So that Hoyle famously had this, this kind of moment after the discovery of these, of the brilliant resonance when he was at Caltech with, with Fowler, you know, this sort of amazement at the state of affairs that allowed the elements that we know and

love and are made from to exist. I suppose the ideal would be that, you know, from the fundamental theory of quarks and gluons, you'd be able to calculate why this brilliant resonance is inevitable, you know, in some sense. But we're not, as far as I understand it, our nuclear theory isn't at the stage where we can we can really we do that and address that question. I mean, I think that there's a in terms of the multiverse and landscapes and fine tuning, is perfectly philosophically coherent to say that there may well be features of the universe that, you know, happen just because of random chance because we can only exist in the universe

we do because of the laws of nature being conducive to us existing. That's perfectly fine. And I don't think it's anything wrong with making those sorts of arguments. I suppose the problem from my point of view is that I don't think they lead you anywhere. If you accept that view, it's not clear to me where you go after that, apart from to say, oh, okay, it's the maybe it's the multiverse, but, you know, I make this point in the book, which is that, you know, the multiverse is a perfectly rational idea in the sense that every time we discover something new about the universe, you go back to Copernicus, say, where, you know, the argument is, is the earth the center of the universe?

Is it special at the center of everything? or is it orbiting the sun? And then, you know, we kind of realize that's the case. And then we zoom out, we realize the sun is one of the number of stars and the sun isn't particularly special. It's also not the central universe. And then we realized that the Milky Way, which was, which in the 19, early, you know, early 20th century was thought to be the entire universe. You realize it's not the entire universe. There are other island universes, i.e. other galaxies out there. So a whole of the history of science has been this gradual realization that where we live is not unique or special. So why should our universe be unique or special? But there's a big problem

there, which is that universe by definition is the thing we live in and it's the only thing we can observe. So we can't tell if the multiverse is there. Maybe we can make clever theoretical arguments based on string theory and inflation and what have you. And that's fine. But in the absence of evidence for those things, it's experimentally, again, you're in a bit of a bind. So I think it's fine to make those sorts of arguments. But personally, I think we should only really go to that place where we've exhausted every other possible explanation. So that's in a sense why this question about the Higgs is important.

You know, we could some people might be happy already to say, oh, the Higgs is value. It's fine tuned. It's just because of the multiverse. And okay, fine. Then you stop answering the asking the question. But then that may not be right, right? There may be new physics and dynamics out there that we haven't discovered that explains this fact. And if we accept the multiverse argument, then we stop looking for those answers and the subject dies.

So I think we, we have to acknowledge these things are possible and they could well be right. But I don't think we should be too ready to accept them before we've really exhausted every part of our imagination and ingenuity in trying to find alternatives. And they should really be a last resort. I want to pivot now towards, you know, what I love the most about how to make an apple pie from scratch is kind of the Gulliver's travels aspect where you're kind of going around the world and meeting all these people from astrophysicist to gravitational wave physicists to experimental fellow particle physicists, making anti-hydrogen. to make anti-apple pies. And I just love that about it. I want to ask you, what attracts you and what intoxicates you? What do you love the most about what you do?

And to get there first, tell me, Harry, what is it that you do? I'm not reviewing you. You haven't applied to UCSD for a position as far as I know, although your colleagues here would probably love that. What do you do? So I work on the LHCB experiment, which is one of four big experiments, on the LHC ring.

So I'm a member of a team of about 1,400 people, mixture of physicists, computer scientists, engineers. And what the experiment itself does is it studies these beauty quarks or not just beauty quarks. It doesn't load of stuff, mostly beauty quarks, but also other things as well. My day job is really data analysis. So my main activity is looking at the data that

comes out of LHCB and trying to glean things about the behavior of beauty quarks in particular, these rare decays. So if you watch me doing my day to day, We're mostly sitting in front of a terminal window with some code open. And so there's a kind of various aspects of the job. I mean, one of the things I've been doing just this week is we're preparing for run three of the large Hadron Collider.

The LHC has been in a shutdown for the last two years. And during that period of shutdown, LHCB has been more or less completely replaced with new detector components in order to allow the experiment to read out data at much faster rate. So the LHC collides protons 40 million times every second. Previously, we were only capable of reading out one million times a second. So basically, you know, most of the data, we were immediately throwing away before we did any kind of analysis of it. And the new experiment is going to be able to read out at the full LHC collision rate. And to do that, one of the things that we now have to do is in real time for every collision.

You have to have an algorithm that analyzes collision by collision and looks for the thing that you're interested in. So is there a beauty quark decaying into one of these rare decays, for example? And this is what we call a trigger in particle physics. So I spent a lot of the last week writing a trigger or various triggers actually for a load of these different rare decays. So when we start taking data, hopefully in the spring, we'll start to get more data added to the pile so we can check out these anomalies. So that stuff is actually what I've been doing there is relatively simple. It's basically coming up with some requirements. So you say the particle's got to have a momentum bigger than this and its energy's got to

be bigger than this and it has to be pointing in this direction and use various of these sort of kinematic properties to decide whether you're seeing something interesting. The other, I mean, down the line, what we'll do is use machine learning. So we already do a lot of this on the offline side when we're analyzing data where you train decision trees, boost decision trees, neural networks to you basically classify your collisions and sort of say, does this thing, the main one of the big problems is you have a huge volume of data and the things you're looking for is a very rare. So you've got to sift these little specks of gold dust from this huge pile of dirt in essence.

And the way we do that is using pattern recognition machine learning to sift this stuff out. That's another big part of the job. And then there's also the – that's probably the easier bit of the job. The harder bit is when you're trying to make a measurement. And the measurement I've just been working on to give you a sense that this ratio of electrons and muons, it took about four years to make this measurement. And the reason it takes such a long time is because to measure this number precisely and be confident that you've not missed some systematic bias,

you have to take into all kinds of different possible effects. These experiments are huge and they're incredibly complicated, and there's all kinds of things you have to account for and correct for in order to actually make the measurement you want to make. And that's where most of the work really is, actually, ultimately. So it's chasing down hidden biases, problems with your simulated data, effects you might have missed. And that's the day job.

I mean, in terms of what it looks like, a lot of it is writing computer code, Although that usually actually only happens once you've thought the problem through and think you might have a solution or an answer. And then other than that, it's discussing with your colleagues and trying to figure out, you know, we're seeing this weird effect. What is it? What's causing it? What do we need to do to address it? Make every get-together chill. This Memorial Day, get up to an extra $1,000 off select top brand appliances like LG. Plus, get free delivery at the Home Depot. Tackle pool towels and camp laundry with a large capacity washer. and host in style with a fridge serving craft ice, mini craft ice, cube dice, and crushed ice.

Shop appliance savings now through June 3rd at the Home Depot. Offer valid May 14th through June 3rd, US only. Free delivery on appliance purchases of $998 or more at the C store online for details. Yeah, so, all right. It's frequently said, as Isaac Asimov once mentioned, that the most traditional or typical scientific reaction to new surprising information is not Eureka. I have found it, but that's freaking weird. I think what I actually said, because my next book is actually about this exact topic,

which is going to be about anomalies and the role that they play. Because there's anomalies in particle physics at the moment. There's also anomalies in cosmology, as you know, well, the Hubble Tension, these other things that are going on. And it's, we seem to be this age of weird effects, you know, that could be the sign of some massive profound shift or could be some cock up in the experiment or the observations. Yeah, but I mean, I think what he said, the most exciting phrase to hear is, is that's fun, not

Eureka, but that's funny, because, you know, that is ultimately those moments where you go, oh, that's not why I expected, that they can be the ones that end up being really profound if you're lucky. Yeah. All these tensions and anxieties, I say, what we really need is not a bigger collider or a telescope. We need a psychotherapist for the entire fear. That will help us get over our incredible fears, et cetera. So in kind of the last segment, I wanted to discuss, you know, kind of the large picture future.

You know, as we said, you know, building a Milky Way galaxy size collider is not really practical, et cetera, et cetera. I often wonder, Harry, I don't get your impression about that, if we're not overlooking, you know, kind of the low energy limit that, that, you know, already exists. And, you know, if I had told you, if I told, you know, I don't know, Weinberg, you know, 50 years ago, you know, and he wanted to test things like this, and he had his dreams of a final theory, which is one of the books I got upon graduation at Case Western Reserve University in that time and the SSC was going to be built, you know, he speculates about this, this future theory. And if I had said to him, look, you know, the SEC is going to be canceled. Don't worry, you know, the Higgs will be found. But, but, you know, would he despair? And then the second question would be, how would he react if I said, look, Stephen, you're not going to get an SSC that collides, you know, two protons together at 9,999, 9,999, you know, 1,000 billionths of the speed of light. But you are going to get a collider that takes two 10 to the 56, you know, mass objects and collides them together at, you know, one-third the speed of light. You know, could you, can you settle for that? meaning, you know, we're going to be doing, you know, colliders of pure neutronic material.

We don't even have to pay for the neutrons. They come for free. You know, in other words, like, can we test a low energy limit of these things with existing data or even upcoming data, not even looking at Lisa or something like that, but LIGO, you make this really fun point, which is true, is that there's always a temptation to upgrade your instrument, so much so that some people think, you know, just never run the, instrument just kept upgrading it because when you win by a factor of eight by doubling the sensitivity in ligo it's pretty tempting hard to get factors of almost an order of magnet anyway long-winded

question but looking back in your you know former countrymen there at cambridge sir isaac newton he proved you know color unification if you will of light by how you know two prisms and then he blocked out you know the blue light and saw what came out was not white light when he had two prisons Anyway, are we missing out on unification or this obsession, as I always call it, are we putting the toe, the theory of everything before the gut? We don't even have a grand unified theory, correct? So what can we do with existing data or near future data? Can we just keep running LHCB and then Alice and out will pop cool new results? Or can we look back in historical data or cosmic data to do the same?

Yeah, it's a really good question. Actually, I had this discussion recently. I was talking to a colleague at Imperial College who works on these anomalies as well. And I was sort of asking him, you know, what does this make you think? He's a more sort of senior established academic about the future. You know, does this get you excited for the future collider, for example, these anomalies? Because if these anomalies are right, then the particles, the forces that go with them, the particles are probably slightly higher energy than the LHC, although they could be accessible at the LHC potentially.

And he said, well, I don't want to have to wait for the future circular collider because I'm going to be dead before this thing delivers any data that's going to tell us. So basically, and that's, you know, I'm not that old yet, but even, that's even sort of true, I mean, by the time the FCC tells us something about these anomalies, I will probably be retired. So if you want to have a career where you find something out, you've got to look at what data you've got available already. And there's a lot we can learn from the LHC still. So, you know, first thing, we've got to confirm these anomalies one way or another. I think that will probably happen quite soon in the next few years, we'll get an answer. And we can do that by making different sorts of measurements

that the ones we've already made with the existing data. And I'm just starting a new project, which is going to look back at the data we've got from 2012 to 2018 and extract new information from it. There are also, with these much larger data quantities that we're going to have in the next decade, we'll be able to measure these processes really precisely. We'll be able to infer lots of things. If we rule these anomalies in and they turn out to be real, there's a lot we can do at low energy to figure out what the beast is. I'm now I use this analogy in the book, which is, you know, what we're sort of doing at LHCB, if you think about it as like you're trying to find a rare animal like an elephant, say, in the jungle, and you have this thick, dark jungle. There's two

different ways you can do it. One is you go into the jungle, you wander around, you see if you bump into the elephant. And that's what it's sort of a direct, what we call a direct search. It's what, it's what Atlas and CMS do at the LHC. They directly produce new particles. They detect then they go, aha, there's the Higgs, there's whatever. But actually, there's another way of doing it, which is this indirect method, which is rather than going and looking for the elephant, which might be deep in the jungle, it might be really hard to find it, there might be one of them, and you're not very likely to stumble across it.

If instead you look for evidence of the elephant that it leaves behind, like footprints on the ground, broken branches, animal droppings, whatever, then you can start to build a picture of this animal without ever even seeing it. And actually, if you go back through the history of particle physics, particularly, pretty much every particle since the electron, well, it's not quite true, but in certainly the last few decades, every particle that we've seen was really discovered indirectly before it was seen directly. There was evidence of the Z boson 10 years before it was found directly in a collider.

So really what happens is these sort of indirect experiments discover particles and then colliders confirm them to some extent. And so what LHCB can do with its data, this force, if it's there, will modify loads of different. It won't just act in one area. It will modify lots of different processes in subtle ways. And by measuring all these different bits of the forest floor effectively, we can start to build up a picture of what is this animal like. And that's the job that we've got in the next decade or so.

And at the same time, actually, as these anomalies are getting stronger, Atlas and CMS are kind of waking up to the fact that this is actually quite serious business. And they are now thinking very hard and starting to make measurements looking for these force particles directly in the collisions. Because these particles are rather unexpected. They're not the sorts of things that were the sort of vanilla new physics options. So a lot of the searches that have already been done don't really touch the parameter space where these things live. So there's a lot you can do with the direct search data as well.

So there's a very strong chance we'll learn something. We learn a lot in the next decade without new machines. It may be that we get a very good picture of what this thing looks like, but we don't find it directly. And then that will give us a really clear target. So we say, okay, we can tell from all these measurements, this thing, probably has an energy, a massive 5 TV or whatever. And we're going to need a collider with this sort of design that collides these particles to produce it.

And we can focus the next sort of the future of the field in that sort of way. So I think, yeah, there's a lot you can do at low energy. And as a, you know, even though I work at high energy collider, the energy scales of beauty quarks is actually much lower than the LHC. You don't need an LHC to do beauty physics. And indeed, there's, there's an experiment in Japan called Bell 2, which is currently taking data on a much smaller electron positron ring, which basically. basically is specifically to make beauty quarks.

That's all it does. And it studies these things. And that's another area we may get some more information. That experiment is going to try to corroborate what we're seeing at LHCB. And that will be the clincher, I think. That will be the thing that really convinced everyone. If two independent experiments see the same effect, totally different technology, it's game over.

You know, this thing's real. So yeah, that's just in my area. And this is true. I think in, you know, dark matter searches, for example, at colliders, where the old sort of ideas about WIMS tended to be particular types of, particularly energy scales, quite high masses, you know, in the hundreds of GV or TV scale. So far, that's not shown up, but there's lots of models that say, well, maybe dark matter lives at lower masses than we thought, which is hidden in our current

data sets. We need to go back and re-examine our assumptions about the properties of these things. So, yeah, there's a lot you can do at lower energy, although I'm still talking really about the LHC, which is the highest energies we have. but we don't necessarily need to go to higher energy to learn a lot more. Exactly, yeah. Although, you know, be careful with those elephants because, as John von Neumann said, you know, with four parameters, I can fit an elephant,

and with five, I can make him wiggle his drum. So maybe that brings up the last topic about, you know, the role of computation in the work that you do. I mean, most of it, you're not building, you know, the collider itself, and much of the work has been done. And so a lot of the work does come down to, to new advances in CPUs, GPUs, and so forth. You know, we always joke in your field, you get like our year or lifetime of the experimental

data, which might be a few petabytes in cosmology. You get that in an hour or two or a couple seconds maybe, but you throw away, you know, 99.99%, you know, kind of the same ratio as you have for the speed of light, accelerating a proton. But, you know, you guys throw it away. We keep it. do you think we could get more out of the existing data, if we could make it more efficient, would that rely on improvements in computing or storage, something really simple, quote, unquote? Because as I understand it, you know, most of the advances in computing power immediately get sucked up by new, clever uses of those supercomputers.

So the Moore's law isn't really panning out as much. Could there be advances with, you know, quantum error correction, you know, codes? Or could there be a way to not have to sacrifice so much of the data? and get to keep it so that you don't have to build a bigger accelerator, you just use more of the events that occur. Yeah, that's a really good question. And it's a problem that we grapple with all the time. So, like, actually, I was grappling with this myself just last week, because this new data they're going to get in in 2022, this trigger that I was writing to try and select these rare decays, what I found, well, there's basically, you know, you're allowed a certain amount of bandwidth.

You know, you're allowed a certain amount of, you know, kilobits per second that effectively that come out of the experiment. And you can't go over that because you start to, you know, basically everything will get overloaded. And I was finding I was having to put very harsh requirements on the particles that I was looking for in order to keep the data rate within the allowed bandwidth. And that means you're throwing away a lot of useful information. And, you know, at the moment, it's quite hard to avoid that because you've got lots of triggers, lots of people doing different things with the same data, so they all have to fit within a budget and so on.

I mean, there's increasing interest. I mean, one of the things that's, this is the big challenge, really, of LHCB in Run 3 is how do you get this data rate out of the experiment. And the bottleneck really is, you know, processing power and storage ultimately. And the more of that you can have, the more of the data you can record. But, you know, there are clever things you can do. And, you know, one of the things that's happened a lot in the last 10 years, you know, when we started out, we were just doing these very simple cut-based requirements. More and more now, it's machine learning that's much more efficient that can select the data, the signal much more efficiently and reject the background

and much more efficiently. And in the future, I think, you know, one of the things that people are working on is actually, although these things already run in real time, they kind of run on what we call reconstructed information. So if you imagine a collision and particles go everywhere. And the first thing that happens is the reconstruction runs and it joins, like you have these dots in the detector where a particle, when it joins a line through and it reconstruct trajectories, momentary energies, all kinds of things.

So there's a quite high level information that's fed into these algorithms that already says there are 100 particles in the event. Here's a list of their mementor and energies and their charges and stuff like that. But what would be great is if you could have a machine learning algorithm that doesn't have to have that reconstruction, it just looks at the raw hits in the detector, just the unprocessed digital information, and can see patterns in that directly and shortcut all of that processing. I mean, maybe that's something I think that's interesting, and it's maybe where you can make big gains in the future.

There's also this other problem as well, which is, you know, if you're throwing away 99% of your data, you're doing that on the basis of things you think you're going to see. So I'm, you know, it's a particular acute at the other experiments, because we actually do know, we're looking for beauty quarks mostly. So we can predict what they're like and that's fine.

But if you're at us and CMS and you think, okay, well, I've got this model of dark matter that I want to look for, fine, you can write your algorithm to look for that. But what if dark matter is a bit different to what you thought? What if it's a lower energies or it has different lifetime

or, you know, decays in a different way? way than you expected. You might miss that completely. And so that that is another issue and that's a harder problem to solve. But yeah, for sure, I mean, computing is more and more the limiting factor for these experiments, more than the hardware, the detector hardware itself and both in terms of data processing, but also the other thing we need a lot of is simulated data. We need to simulate the experiment to calculate all kinds of systematic effects and correct for efficiencies. And as you get more data, you need more simulation. And that becomes a real problem.

as well. So, yeah, it's a, it's a huge challenge and people working very hard to address it. People who know a lot more about computers than I do, I should say. Oh, that's great. Well, you know a lot about a lot of things, and therefore I want to take advantage of your very generous discretionary time that's left than I have. You've been so generous, but I love to ask these existential questions, which I call the impossible thrilling three. So, Harry, if you're willing to go into the impossible, please let me know, and we can begin that process right now. Yes, I am willing.

Okay, well, you're a young man, but there is a concept of an ethical will, and an ethical will is in contradistinction to your material will, which will hopefully not be activated either one until you at least reach the biblical age of 120 years old. But an ethical will, and that's the age Moses, was before he failed to get into the promised land, and we all, you know, have struggles with the promised land in some sense. And he left an ethical will to the descendants, the Hebrews of which I am one. But also Alfred Nobel left an ethical component of his well, as I said before, had to confer a benefit to all mankind, not just have a benefit to the scientist who discovered the effect.

Anyway, I want to ask you, is there any piece of wisdom, ethical knowledge that you would bequeath to your biological but also your ideological errors when you spring forth this mortal coil at the age of 120 if not later. God, right. Ah, that's a interesting one. I think, God, there are so many. I mean, there's a practical thing. I think particularly when I was earlier in my career, I spent a lot of time worrying about the future. And this happens in academia particularly because you have these like short-term insecure contracts. You never really know where your next paycheck's coming from. we spent and that that can be very I think kind of um it can be quite paralyzing some of the time and I think one of the things I've got better at as I've got older is just chilling out about it and so

it comes from a sense of position of privilege I guess that I kind of you know you have all these things if I don't get another contract what am I going to do with my life you know I'm going to end up on the street which is course like you know for someone who's sort of highly educated is not really a big risk actually you're always going to be okay maybe okay maybe you won't get to do the exciting things that you were doing before but but things will be okay. So I think that for me has been quite an important lesson, just to try and enjoy what you're doing when you're doing

and not worry too much about the future. I think that's a thing that I've, at least I try to live by that, although I'm not always very good at it, because I think a lot of academics, I think by nature are quite anxious, like worrying sorts of people. And if you go on, you know, academic social media,

there's an endless avalanche of negativity. I think it's quite, it can be quite a depressing place to be. And you're a few positive, and we'll have a link to that, obviously. Yeah. But, you know, I think that's something, you know, appreciating what you've got when you've got it and being grateful for, you know, it's very easy, I think, to take for granted the opportunities you get. And, you know, I'm sure everyone has this. Actually, when I worked the Science Museum, I remember arriving there and so many people I met were just griping all the

time, you know, oh, you know, this is, we've been worked too hard, we're not getting paid enough, et cetera. And some of those things are genuine complaints. But in the other hand, I did sort of think, you guys are mad. Like, you're working at one of the most amazing institutions in the world. and you basically get to play for a living. This is great. And I think that's also true. Yeah. And that's also true of science, I think.

I hope most people go into science because they love it. You don't go into it generally, I think, to make lots of money. You know, certainly not in the UK, maybe more in the US than here. But, you know, and if you don't love what you do, while you're doing it. So I think it's sort of a bit of gratitude and appreciating the opportunities you get. And that's a big lesson because I think it just makes life much more livable. Yeah, I always am reminded there's a year. YouTuber in the UK named Ali Abdul, and he was a physician, and he went to Cambridge Medical School.

It was tops in his class, et cetera. And then, you know, he's become this YouTube sensation with millions and millions of followers around the world, and he makes, you know, thousands of times more literally than he made as a doctor in the UK. And he would ask his colleagues when he was struggling to see what he should do next with his life. He said, you know, if he won the lottery and had a million pounds a year or whatever, which is even less than he makes, you know, would you stay a physician? And almost all of them said, I would leave that afternoon, you know, never come back. Whereas we as scientists, you know, you're a living proof of it. I'm a public employee in the state of California. You know, we do it not for free, but, you know, it's not as much as we could do,

you know, turning your skills for evil and working for the cyborg, as I'm sure you could do. Okay, next question. Now we're going to go even further into the future. How are you ready? We're going to go a billion years into the future with your late great countryman. Arthur C. Clark had in the Sentinel, which became 2001, a space odyssey, the movie by Stanley Kubrick. And there's a scene with these primates, and they come upon this monolith, this structure that has all sorts of weird kind of properties and it looks massive and they try to hit it with a bone.

And then all sorts of things happen. And later on, this shows up on the moon. and we're not really sure what it is. It could be a warning. It could be a time capsule. I'm going to assume it's a time capsule and ask you the following question, which is not unlike what Richard Feynman once said. It's called the cataclysm question.

And his question was as follows. If in some cataclysm, Harry, all scientific knowledge were to be destroyed and only one sentence passed on to generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I don't know if you know what he said, the answer is, but I am curious as to what your answer would be to that very question. Well, that is a very good question. So obviously, Feynman says that everything is made of atoms. That's his bit of knowledge. And it's hard to beat that, really. I mean, I'm trying to think of

something different to say. Maybe it would be the scientific method. It would be, you know, we can learn about the world by making hypotheses, testing them, see if the evidence supports the hypothesis or not. I think that, because, you know, you go back to the history. of well it's not even a history of science a history of thought and that idea is not you know not around until relatively recently this idea of making observations rather than just kind of having prejudices or beliefs about the world without which is which you are not really supported by any kind of rigorous process of testing i think that that in itself if you were to follow that kind of process in any area will allow you quite quickly to make discoveries and maybe if we'd figure that out

a bit sooner we'd discover things more quickly so maybe that's an alternative yeah is the question. Good thing you didn't put, you know, I'd put on a CD-ROM, you know, with some sounds of nature or something. I actually asked Andruyan, the late, the widow of the late great Carl Sagan, who's had to make an apple pie from scratch segment of Cosmos, inspired your wonderful book. And she said something from the book of Mecca, which is to act justly, love mercy, but not walk humbly with your God, which is the end of the Mika quote, because she's an atheist, and I thought that was kind of cute. Okay, last question, Harry, before we break and give you some time off on a Christmas season, Christmas Eve, Eve, Eve, there in an evening

in the UK. The last question now is we're going to go backwards in time, my friend, and we're going to go back utilizing Sir Arthur C. Clark's so-called third law, which states the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible. And that's the origin of the name of my podcast. I don't want to ask you, Harry, accordingly in your life, what sort of mysterious aspect of life perplexed you as a 20-year-old? And yet the current version of yourself would give advice to surpass go beyond, have the courage to go into the impossible. So I'm asking you advice to your 20-year-old self. Oh, God, I don't know if I'm any wiser 15 years later.

It's a bit of a depressing thought. God, what would I say? That's a very good question. I think, I mean, one of the things that missed, I think I both beguiled me and excited me, but also sort of missed, I found mysterious when I was, when you're 20, you're in your middle of your undergraduate, you're learning about, you know, physics. And you have this amazing experience. It's sort of like you get the greatest hits of human thought all compressed into the

space of a few years. And it's this really exciting story. And I think what I kind of came away from it is, you know, with it was the fact that we can learn, we have been able to learn so much about the world that it is, it appears to be explicable and the, you know, mathematical law describes the way that the universe ticks. And I think that is a very, very mysterious thing. But I'm not sure it's anything I have any greater insight into now. But I mean, in terms of sort of advice, year old though you're a very wise 20 year old though well i don't know about that i don't know about that um but i mean yeah i guess it's sort of you know about this pursuit of curiosity i think i think that's the sort of thing i would encourage myself to not lose sight of because i think there's you know there's times where

you kind of go through your career where you kind of feel it's a bit disillusioned and i think you know actually continuing to ask questions and be interested in the world around you is really important in pushing you forward so i think i think that's a maybe that's a bit of advice i'd pass on but i don't really know whether I have had any great profound insights. Maybe ask me again in 30 years or something. I hope you'll come back before then, Harry, and maybe even get together in person someday and share a pint and a slice of delicious apple pie.

Your recipe is still in the Electra Week phase transition portion of the recipe. But as the very first cookbook author to come on The Into the Impossible podcast, I want to thank you for your generosity of spirit. your time, your writing, your communication, your science, and your inspiration. Hopefully there'll be a young lad or lass out there who will find this book at just the right moment and go in and even surpass you, as you say in the book. And I often say, our job is to make ourselves obsolete. So, Harry, where can people find you and find your wonderful book? Well, you can find me. I've got a website which is harrycliff.com.uk. If you just search for Harrycliff, you'll find it. I'm on Twitter.

at Harry V. Cliff, which I occasionally tweet things. I haven't been so good recently. I also have my doorbell. And you can also, the book you can find in all good book shops. So if you search for how to make it up a papyr from scratch, you'll find it. It was a real pleasure talking to you, Brian. Thank you so much, Harry. Happy holidays. Thank you, you too. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars. Catch the Jonas Bros.

Return to the Yamava Theater stage on April 30th, the powerful vocals of Demi Lovato on May 17th, and the signature Southern Country Rock of Eric Church on July 19th. Tickets on sale now at yamava Theater.com, only at Yamava Resort and Casino, celebrating its 40th anniversary. UN? Must be 21 to enter.