Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - The Elusive Higgs Boson: Frank Close (#238)

Episode Date: July 10, 2022

Frank Close is Professor Emeritus of Theoretical Physics, and Fellow Emeritus at Exeter College. He was formerly Head of Theoretical Physics Division at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, vice President of the British Science Association and Head of Communications and Public Understanding at CERN. He was awarded the Kelvin Medal of the Institute of Physics for his 'outstanding contributions to the public understanding of physics' in 1996, an OBE for 'services to research and the public understanding of science in 2000, and the Royal Society Michael Faraday Prize for communicating science in 2013. He is the only professional physicist to have won a British Science Writers Prize on three occasions. Author of 20 books about science, the latest "Elusive: How Peter Higgs Solved the Mystery of Mass", marks the 10th anniversary of the discovery of the Higgs Boson. On July 4, 2012, the announcement came that one of the longest-running mysteries in physics had been solved: the Higgs boson, the missing piece in understanding why particles have mass, had finally been discovered. On the rostrum, surrounded by jostling physicists and media, was the particle’s retiring namesake—the only person in history to have an existing single particle named for them. Why Peter Higgs? Drawing on years of conversations with Higgs and others, Close illuminates how an unprolific man became one of the world’s most famous scientists. Close finds that scientific competition between people, institutions, and states played as much of a role in making Higgs famous as Higgs’s work did. Topics Discussed Include: The mystique and character of Peter Higgs A brief history of CERN and the LHC The influence of Freeman Dyson. What part did the Nobel Prize play in motivating Peter Higgs? A brief history of particle physics and super-colliders. The Large Electron Positron (LEP) Collider, precursor to the LHC. The Nobel Prize for the Higgs Boson: Was it given fairly? Who deserves credit? Frank's advice to his younger self for going into the impossible. 📺 Watch my most popular videos:📺 A New Contender is Here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6A6myur--c Frank Wilczek https://youtu.be/3z8RqKMQHe0?sub_confirmation=1 Weinstein and Wolfram https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI0AZ4Y4Ip4?sub_confirmation=1 Sheldon Glashow: https://youtu.be/a0_iaWgxQtA?sub_confirmation=1 Neil deGrasse Tyson https://youtu.be/1kxgK6J4S5Y Michio Kaku: https://youtu.be/3to9ymn-XKI Sir Roger Penrose: https://youtu.be/AMuqyAvX7Wo Be my friend: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php ✍️ Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast.php A production of http://imagination.ucsd.edu/ Support the podcast: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Produced by Brian Keating & Stuart Volkow P.G.A Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The same advice I'll give to the students right here and now that are coming through their PhDs. There's going to be a time in the future when the textbooks will be filled with stuff that is yet to be discovered. Somebody has to discover it. Why not you? Welcome everyone to another phenomenal, unparalleled edition of The End of the Impossible Podcast featuring Nurse Truly, Dr. Brian Keating. emerging from the pandemic bunker in which I have dwelled, emerging only to check my shadow and to talk with genius guests, like today's guest. Frank Close, an order of the British Empire member. I think that makes him a night. I'm not sure. It's all very difficult what they do over there.

He's a fellow of the Royal Society, a particle physicist and emeritus professor of physics at the University of Oxford, author of a dozen books, including Half-Life, the Infinity Puzzle, and more. And this book is about an anomaly. A particle named after a person. No other basic particle physics that we have is named after a person. And it's slightly ironic as we discussed because Higgs himself, Peter Higgs, who is knighted now, hates the fact, or at least originally hated the fact that he got so much attention. In fact, on the day of the announcement on the Nobel committee call to tell him he had won the prize. Higgs was off dining in a restaurant without a cell phone so he could not be found and that was very much by design. I found a Frank's

biography incredibly interesting and wonderful for us to bring to you. So this is a controversial episode. This has a lot of commentary from people on Twitter and on YouTube about the propriety of the prize being awarded to just two individuals and I pressed Frank about that. He wasn't you know, completely disassociated maybe, you know, from the selection process. We don't know. Maybe he did help select. Maybe he didn't. That's kept confidential unless you're like me and publish it in a book. But in this case, he did really kind of a thorough job documenting who he thought should have gotten it, why the experimentalist didn't get it, why my late great professor, Jerry Garelnik, or friend of the show, Pascas, Carl Hagan, didn't

get it. I don't know if I agree with all those, but of course I'm always trying to respect my guest's perspective. So now I want you to sit back, relax, enjoy this voyage into the impossible in our think like a Nobel Prize winner sub-series that we do on this podcast. We also have a break-off podcast. That's all you care about. Find that on iTunes. And enjoy this trip into the impossible. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the five-bay doors, please, hell. Today is a day that will live in infamy if we're listening to this on July 4th. or thereabouts. It is the 10th anniversary of the announcement of the discovery of the Higgs boson.

And today we are joined by a renowned physicist, an officer, I believe, at the British Empire, a fellow of the Royal Society, Emeritus Professor, Exeter College, Oxford, University of Oxford. And that is Frank Close, who's joining us all the way from Oxford to discuss his phenomenal new book. Frank, how are you doing today? Fine, thanks. You wrote this wonderful new book. It's called Elusive, How Peter Higgs Solved the Mystery of Mass. And we're going to talk about that.

We're going to talk about the book. We're going to talk about Peter Higgs, the mystery behind them. We're going to take some audience questions. I remind folks, you can always submit questions to me on Twitter, Instagram, and on my YouTube channel in the community section. That's where I took a lot of questions for Frank and I to discuss later. discussed later. But we always begin with what you're never supposed to do, Frank, which is to judge a book by its cover. And we're going to judge this book by its cover. So we'll show the cover

of the book. It's called Elusive. And I want you to describe how you came up with the title, what the subtitle means, and what the cover design is meant to evoke in the mind of the reader. Well, the title elusive actually has two meanings. It was 48 years between the original ideas that led to the discovery of the boson and its actual discovery. So the boson itself was very elusive. In the case of Peter Higgs, who's effectively biography that's set out to be, though as we'll see, something's changed along the way, he also was elusive at many levels. in particular the fact that by the time the boson was discovered in 2012, there was a lot of speculation that he might win the Nobel Prize that year,

but clearly that was too soon because the 2012 prize was already, if you like, in the cab. But the intense media reaction showed him what it would really be like if and when the prize came his way. And the following year there was a huge amount of speculation that he was going to win it. In fact, so much so I don't think bookmakers would have taken any way. wages on it. And he disappeared on the day of the announcement. He went off to have lunch at his favourite seafood bar, about three miles away from his home in Edinburgh, and didn't tell his colleagues at all where he had gone. So the Swedish Academy, who conventionally contact the winners to alert them before the public announcement is made at midday, they couldn't find

him and as a result the whole announcement was delayed for half an hour until they decided to go ahead anyway so he did a disappearing act on the big day if you like and the story is which he confirmed that after lunch I mean he didn't know anything at all about this where he was and he then came back home he went to an art gallery to take up some more time and a lady in a car stopped and said, Peter, congratulations on the award. And he said, what award? I mean, he was joking. He knew what he was about, obviously.

Why he was so elusive is one of the questions which one might want to think about. But that's the reason for the title, both of them. And when I think about, you know, Peter Higgs, it's almost impossible not to decouple kind of the mystique from the man. I might have called it, you know, inscrutable, except for the first. fact that your title is a better, a better play on words, because of course the discovery of the Higgs boson eluded experimentalists for, you know, five decades, potentially not being very much in the can at all bookmakers. But I wonder, you know, from the demeanor that he's known to have

and the kind of mystique around this discovery, which is inscrutable in itself to describe, you have a gift as you did in your previous book, an antimatter, for describing very complex subjects in very easy to understand, but not simplified, not dumbed down. I always hate that pejorative. Oh, you're good at dumbing it down for, no, I don't think I'm going to dumb it down. As Feynman said, you know, you should be able to explain it to your grandmother. But he also said when he won the Nobel Prize, a reporter asked him, you know, what did you win the Nobel Prize for. And then Feynman said, if I could explain it to you, pal, it wouldn't be worth a Nobel Prize. So let's not take these guys too seriously. But in the case of Higgs,

do you think that his inscrutable nature kind of allowed people to project onto him whatever they wanted, quite unlike Stephen Hawking, who you talk about in the book and we'll get to Hawking and my late great friend Freeman Dyson later on? But do you think his inscrutable character allows you to basically project onto him, you know, this godlike characteristic that he kind of took on, and he least of all seemed to want it. Well, it's certainly true the last bit, as you said, that he least all seem to want it. When you read elusive, you will see that the idea of him being a godlike character is not really one that I present. I mean, we're not talking Stephen Weinberg here.

We're not talking Stephen Hawking. People who did a lot of frontier work in their career over many decades. In the case of Higgs, as he said to his student back in 1964, a student came back from summer vacation, found a note from Higgs on his desk, which said, this summer I had the only really good idea I've ever had. I mean, to be fair, how many of us could say we had a good idea anyway. And indeed, that was the only thing in his physics career that he did, and almost literally so, in the sense that I think he wrote maybe a dozen papers in his career, of which the early ones were more on molecular biology, which is where he started off as a student.

ironically, working just down the corridor from Rosalind Franklin, who was discovering the structure of DNA. And he wrote a paper which actually was quite significant in that field, along with two collaborators. That was the only time in his whole life that he wrote a paper with anybody else. So he wrote a dozen papers all by himself, and of that dozen papers, all but three, had no impact at all. almost literally, well, that's slight exaggeration.

One of them had some interest in the quantum gravity community, but by and large, they made no impact. Of course, three of them were, and that is what he is known for. So he is an elusive person at many levels. What was the start of the question you were saying about him that you wanted to know? Well, I think you basically answered it.

I mean, his inscrutable characteristics, you know, made him kind of a blank tablo rasa for those of us to project this onto him. Oh, yes, that's right. It was you're saying, you know, how did someone get projected on him? I mean, that's an interesting question. I can only answer it really from the British side. I mean, that at least I can understand around 1980, when the momentum to build what? became the Large Trident Collider, was certainly growing in the scientific community.

And after the superconducting Super Collider, Texas got stopped effectively by Congress, the LHC, if it were to be built, it would become the only game in town. And this required, of course, the CERN member states to agree that this was an expenditure worth doing. And in those days in the UK,

the government was very, well, not necessarily anti-science, but they were really questioning value for money. And the idea of Britain being involved in what eventually amounted to effectively the equivalent to 10 billion dollars worth of expenditure, although it's got to be shared between like 15 member states and more, was a thing that gave them pause. And there was a serious possibility that Britain would even withdraw from CERN. And so the scientific community, not surprisingly, you know, very concerned about that.

this. And then a couple of things happened. One thing actually was Leon Lederman writing his book called the God Particle, which captured media attention. And the media became interested because of that aspect of things. In the UK, the fortunate thing that happened was that the Minister of Science, a man called William Waldegrave, perhaps unusually for politicians who in Britain tend to not be very scientifically cogent. He issued a challenge to the scientific community to say, look, I've heard about this Higgs boson, what's it all about? I should just say, incidentally, that Peter Higgs grew up in Bristol, which happened to be where Woldegraves' constituency in Parliament was. So there was a link there. So we issued a challenge the community to say, if you could describe

the Higgs boson on a single sheet of paper, it might help me. make the case in government for funding of this. So I was one of the many people who entered this competition. I didn't win it. But I, at the start of it, put something similar to what you said at the start. I said that Feynman had made this remark that I think it was if you can describe the Nobel Prize in 30 seconds, it's not worth a Nobel Prize. So I said, being asked to describe profound concepts on a single sheet of paper reminds me of Feynman's challenge,

though I noticed you didn't specify the font size. But I said to him, however, I will take up your challenge on condition that you will do the same thing for me with regards to the Maastricht Treaty. Now, most of your listeners will not know what I'm talking about there, but these are the days when Britain was contemplating joining the European Union, which we've now disastrously left. and the Maastricht Treaty was a huge, incomprehensible document with all the legalese in it. Anyway, Waldergrave later said to me very kindly, we neither won each other's challenge, I think was how he put it. But so Higgs became sort of known by name, at least through that competition in part. The media picked up that something was going on and came and interviewed him. And two things I think became clear.

One was that although he was very good at lecturing to students in a research environment, for example, or in university lectures, he was not the sort of person who easily would stand up and present things in a public forum. And so the idea develops to have him sort of helped in a way. And that's how I got involved later, which was that the idea was that I would go on stage with him and interview him, if you like, help him bring the story out. And we did half a dozen of those over a period of two or three years, which actually spanned the time before the boson was discovered. then I happened to be with him immediately before the announcement at CERN, then I interviewed him again a month or so afterwards and a year afterwards. So through this series of interviews, I began to get a sense of how he personally had felt about the original idea,

what then became of it, waiting 48 years to see the whole thing happen and so forth. And at some point along this route, I thought, you know, this is something at some point I should write about because I'm living through history. And Peter Higgs is not the sort of person easily who would present it himself. And this is the sort of thing that I've always enjoyed doing. So that's probably when the idea became, grew up. But the question that stuck with me, which really is the question you opened at the start, why was it that Higgs became such a sort of well-known, character. And I think at a certain level, it's probably just the mundane nature of his name. I mean, if it had been Weinberg or Reinhstein or Rutherford, that's the sort of names that scientists have.

But Higgs is a sort of name in Britain. It's like a yeoman, a person of the earth almost, like symbolizes the common person. Right. And I'm sure that as a psychological level, you know, If somebody called Higgs can do this, so can you. That's what a feeling. So a man of people in that strange way. And you point out, although we had some Twitter kind of controversy, which is not at all rare, that's the only particle named after a person. And then someone said, well, no, boson comes from the physicist's great Indian physicist's Bose.

And so it's not really only anyway, we don't have to get into that. But one thing. To be fair, I think the statement that was made, if this is in the publicity handout, it's the only single particle name for a person. I mean, bosons are collective, as I say, like penguins, the more the merrier. That's right. And I often talk about, you know, my favorite particle is not the proton or the neutron, it's the crouton. But also I was reminded of the pion, which also is a delicious particle. But you point out in this book that Hawking was very doubtful.

And he, of course, made a $100 wager, which your fellow Oxfordian, is that how you say it, Frank, oxfordian? Or oxonian. Oxonian, Sir Roger Penrose, multi-time guest on the podcast, fellow Nobel Prize winner with Peter Higgs. He told me the safest thing in your life to do is to make a bet with Stephen Hawking. Because no matter what, you would either be right the first time or, give him enough time and Stephen would change his mind. Stephen made a bet and you describe it in such wonderful prose.

This book is a book written for physicist as well as non-physicist. And I say it's written for physicist because you, for the first time in really my memory, you dissect three papers at great length. Not in the audio book, which I listen to, which has this melifluous voice read by a wonderful reader, not Frank, although you have a wonderful voice too, Frank. But at any rate, the audiobook is lovely, but the audio book doesn't cover the treatment of the papers that Higgs wrote, the two papers, famous papers that Higgs wrote, and I believe another one by Ginsburg. And it was kind of a precursor about the Nambu-gozon, a goldstone boson. We'll get to that all. But this is all to say that Frank gives plenty of a red meat. I shouldn't say that because I know there's a lot of vegan. There's plenty of rich tofu to digest. for physicists because what you do is you walk the reader through the papers that led to this prize.

And I think very few, although with the exception of Oxonian Sir Roger Penrose, he basically won his Nobel Prize for his wonderful paper on the properties of Black holes with his characteristic diagrams and so forth, as well as a lifetime of contributions to mathematical physics. But this is all to say that this is a book for scientists too. And my audience is the most brilliant in the known universe. And so for those of you who are technically minded, you'll really enjoy the pedagogical approach that Professor Close does provide to dissect these monumental papers in a way that is satisfying, understandable to the expert.

This is not really written that the appendices are not written for the lay audience. The rest of the 260 pages or so are written for the lay audience. And it is a delight to read. It starts with Peter's early years, goes through his biology training. You meet all these people that have won and lost Nobel prizes like Rosalind Franklin, but you also come to a section where he's interacting with the first guest ever on the podcast, which was Freeman Dyson. And Freeman was a great friend.

He used to spend his summers here in La Jolla, or his winters here in La Jolla. God knows you wouldn't want to leave Princeton in the middle of the glorious summer. but there's a chapter where you go into a really kind of pivotal moment in Peter's life, and Peter Higgs's life, where he meets with Freeman and he gets his invitation to travel up the coast from North Carolina, I believe, Bryce DeWitt to all the way up to the Institute for Advanced Study. Talk about the impact of Freeman Dyson. I miss him terribly, and I know that you knew him. But talk about the impact of that chance encounter with a peer, but really someone

who is regarded as almost otherworldly and not just for his Dyson's fears. Talk about the import of Freeman Dyson on the Higgs story. Well, I'll just start actually by saying the first time that I met Freeman Dyson, it was in the days when he had written that wonderful book called Disturbing the Universe. And he and I met in Adelaide, Australia, where we had gone as part of celebrations for the centenary of Bragg the younger being made professor. And he and I and Paul Davis gave three popular talks on three successive days. I happened to be the first day, Paul II and Freeman Dyson the third.

And we gave these talks in a huge hall, which probably could have held 500 people. So, you know, my talk, I was very proud when I saw maybe three or 400 people there, and Paul Davis likewise. But when Freeman came to give his talk, not only was the hall completely full, but the corridors were filled with students all trying to get in. And it turned out in part, obviously this is part because it was Freeman Dyson, but the university had they had made a typo in the title of his talk. And it had been put out as disturbing the university. Which he would also do on occasion. Yeah, but to be fair, you know, Freeman was a revolutionary thinker.

Yes, he will. But yes, so this, where Freeman enters this story, I suppose it's in two parts. So he doesn't appear in the first part. I mean, he in 1947, I guess it was, was key, in my opinion, to really identifying why it was possible to renormalize, that's the big word for, make viable, a quantum theory, of quantum lection dynamics, for which he never shared in the past. prize, which is one of the great missing prizes. And along the way, at that time, Schwinger, who did share one of the prizes, convinced everybody that a key part of the renormalization

viability process was that photons, the carrier of electromagnetic forces, have no mass. We put that on one side. We can come back to that later. So Freeman was in there in the start. By 1960s, He was at the Institute in Princeton. And Peter Higgs, 1964 is the year that everybody thinks was the year when it all happened. And that is indeed the time when Higgs and Broughton-Angler and Geryl and Kibble and others were sort of stumbling on what became known as what I call the mass mechanism, not the Higgs mechanism, the mass mechanism.

But it was too. years later in 1966, where in my judgment the key paper, the one that Higgs wrote, in which it included what's now called the Higgs boson, and in particular gave the quantum amplitudes for its decay into various processes, which turned out to be key to its eventual discovery. He wrote that while he was on sabbatical at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. And, And he worked on that. I think it's fair to say, and probably we can discuss this also. I don't think, I mean, as of 1964, apart from a handful of people, nobody took much notice at all about this.

So we move on to 1966. And what Peter told me was that he was worried, people, I think, probably among this small group of experts, It's questions about how solid the arguments really were and so forth. There were subtle questions of which gauge you did the calculations and so forth. And so Higgs planned to write a strong mathematical big paper which would establish the theoretical foundations of the whole structure. And that's what he set out to do in Chapel Hill. And in the course of that, and this is the biggest surprise that I probably had in the

whole of the research of this is that he said that he set out to answer all these criticisms. He produced a very mathematical manuscript about gauging variance and how it works in different ways, and then thought that this is going to be very impenetrable. And so he thought he ought to add some sort of simple pedagogic examples. And so section three in that paper, which discusses the decays of six. the scalar boson, the massive scalar boson, which I'll call the Higgs boson here, in particular into two massive vector bosons, such as we now know the W and Z bosons are, but they were not known at that time. He included that in the paper. And by chance,

that 50 years later turns out to be key, a fact which he was totally unprepared for unaware of. But anyway, he wrote the paper and Freeman Dyson was on the mailing list. Peter Higgs was visiting Bryce De Witt's group in North Carolina, which really specialized in quantum gravity. The Higgs had been interested in gravity. That's why he'd been invited by DeWitt to visit. But by the time of 66 came around, Higgs had got interests in these things. So Bryce DeWitt's mailing list sends out preprints. and Freeman Dyson, who's interested in everything, read this,

and said to Peter, if you're up in the northeast, come by the institute. And so that moment, Higgs said to me, that was the first indication that I had that what I was doing was of interest. Because, I mean, Dyson is one of the, or was one of the sharpest and clearest sounding boards of what is a good idea. and I think, to be fair, when the Dyson suddenly called me up to the Institute that way, I'd think, ah, so what I am doing has some interest. So that was the first clue for Higgs, and he went up there. And the actual occasion was interesting, because the way it worked at Princeton was that although the people at the Institute had no formal responsibilities for teaching or so forth, they were, if you like, left their own devices.

nonetheless they had to satisfy their peers that what they were doing was worthwhile and they had what they called the shotgun seminar. So the invited speaker, on this case Higgs, would give their seminar after tea. But before tea, whoever was the unlucky winner of the unlucky dip and said it's your turn this week would give us spontaneous talk.

And on this particular occasion, it happened to be Friedman Dyson, who gave that, talk, which was actually about the structure of matter and subtle questions, and we're talking 1996 here. What's the difference from the solid and a gas or the solid and the liquid and so forth, and phase transitions? And so then they came to the tea break, and Peter's going to give the talk afterwards with all these distinguished people there. And during the tea break, somebody comes up to him who's read a paper saying, oh, I think you're wrong. You know, there's three very

distinguished people have pointed out a big error in your work, which was not the thing you want to hear when you're going to give a seminar. But anyway, it turned out during the talk that he convinced the audience. And Freeman Dyson was, I think, very important for providing that first piece of confidence that this was something that meant something. Yeah. And all young scientists need that kind of, you know, recognition or even just encouragement from colleagues, from mentors and friends. I was struck kind of by the lack of, sort of, you know, including his, you know, sort of, I don't want to say reclusiveness. I think that gives a negative connotation, but the inscrutable nature of him. I don't recall any real discussions of his students or his academic family lineage, his

ancestry, either before or after. Was he known as a teacher? I know you talk a lot about in the book, how he was kind of this really just, not disheveled, but a little bit out of place talking with journalists and initially trying to give a talk to a public or press audience and basically launching into a physics lecture. What was he like as a teacher? Did he have students? Does he have students? What was he like as an educator? I'm told the students loved him. He was a great pedagogue. I mean, basically he, I mean, he's 93 now, so he's no longer active at all.

But he was, I would think, to say caricature is not the fair description. But he symbolized what you might call the classical old English pedagogue scholar who would spend their life studying books. and then lecturing about them. And that was certainly the style. With regards to students, there was one particular student that he had, David Wallace, who I mentioned in the book, who is actually an exact contemporary of mine.

David was an undergraduate student at Edinburgh University where Peter happened to be. I was an undergraduate student in St. Andrews, which is also in Scotland. And at the end of my time, I fortunately won a scholarship to go to Oxford to do my PhD. And had David Wallace gone in for that scholarship, he would have gone to Oxford, not me, and the whole of the world would have been different. But there we are. David stayed at Edinburgh.

And he later became a very distinguished physicist in condensed matter in his own right. But he was a student of Peter Higgs. And we're now talking his first year, 1967 to eight. I guess. And in the first year, Peter's style, as in many places, was to give prospective research students a reading list to go away and look for. So David recalled how he was in the library, and he saw a paper by Stephen Weinberg. This was the paper that Weinberg wrote in 1967 called a model of leptons, in which he, to some degree, independently read his discovered what became the SU2 cross U1 standard model with two massive bosons, the W and the Z

in there. And he was aware of the mass mechanism because he had talked to Peter Higgs in a mutual visits of Brookhaven the year before. And Wallace saw this paper and it was very excited by it because he noticed that Peter Higgs was prominently cited in this and it ultimately built around at something that Peter Higgs had done. And at the end of this paper, Weinberg speculated that using this mass mechanism, it might be possible to make a viable theory of what we now call quantum flavor dynamics. Now, Wallace then ran upstairs and showed this paper to Peter Higgs and said, this looks a great problem to work on, to prove

whether or not this model is indeed renormalizable. And Higgs basically thought this was not a good idea. And I think that that was a wise judgment. And David actually now agrees with that. Because look historically what actually happened. Stephen Weinberg gave a similar problem. Weinberg told me this when I was researching the infinity puzzle about 12 years ago. He gave to a problem, the problem to a student to,

to test the renormalizability. And after a period of time, it became clear this was not going to be feasible, the student who couldn't get through it. And Weinberg said to me that he also was never able to do it, because the techniques that eventually were used were called, he was not happy with. So if you have something that Weinberg himself was not able to do, and indeed was only eventually done by Herod Toft,

in a tour de force in his thesis in 71, in part building upon the fact that teeny Veltman had built already a huge infrastructure. I think it was just as well that David Wallace didn't set out to try and prove the renormal ability of this theory. So that was one of Higgs's problem. Higgs said that that was the smartest student that came through Edinburgh in the whole of his time there. And he felt that even somebody like that, it would not have been a good idea to give that as a problem. Yeah, that's kind of you judge your students, you know, maybe early on when they are naive and new to the subject, although I guess in the U.S., it's different than the way things are in the UK. But, you know, it does seem like he's, he has had this great influence. And, and yet, like Feynman, who also famously turned down accolades and honors, such as he never would accept Fiam would never accept a, an honorary degree.

because he felt that demeaned the prestige and the fact that people who had actually earned the degree earned it. And so Peter turned down knighthood at least once, right, as you talk about. And, you know, I wonder he really seems to be, you know, unlike many people, maybe even yours truly, aspired to it at one point in my career, almost obsessed about it. Now maybe the bloom is off the rose somewhat for me, having studied it. more detail. But with him, do you think, you know, all the legend, all the lore, you recount in the book, him not being available for the phone call, going to a seaside restaurant and, and, as you discussed, do you think that, you know, ultimately this, this decades-long quest, do you think that

ultimately, you know, where do you feel like the Nobel Prize actually figured into his thinking, his motivation, if at all? I don't think there was any motivation for Nobel Prize when he did what he did. The analogy that I give to what he actually did was like Gary Player, the famous occasion when supposedly Gary Player, after holding this almost impossible put on a golf course, somebody supposedly said, oh, that was lucky Gary. And Gary says, yes, and the more I practice, the luckier I become. I mean, in the case of Higgs, when you look back over this whole saga and career,

you could say he was lucky. Well, yes, he was, but it's more than just luck. You have to be ready, being in the right place at the right time is lucky, but you have to be able to take advantage of it. And in his particular case, to draw the Gary Player analogy, he had been doing the work for the previous two or three years. He had really been trying to understand really what's going on with this business called gauge invariance and the link, if any, that it had to the photon being massless or not.

And so by the time, you know, 64 wound round, he probably understood that as deeply as anybody, probably other than Julian Schwinger, who had started the whole saga. So he was in the right position by chance when a paper by Walter Gilbert came through the mails or in the in the in the fizzreve which said it was impossible to get around there was a technical blockage in theory called the goldstone theorem but it was possible to get around this technical it would it was possible to get around this technical blockage in a non-relativistic world because of certain technical features but those technical features were not present in a relativistic world and therefore it would not be possible to do it and higgs because of

the reading he'd been doing knew a particular example in the relativistic world which contradicted Gilbert's statement. And so now it was a matter of really understanding what Gilbert was talking about because he had a counter-exampled of this so that he could then write the first paper to show that there was potentially a way through this blockage. And so he was in the right place at the right time and well prepared. So that was where the luck came in if that was lucky. So yeah, when I think about, you know, this, this, you know, contribution, I was reminded, and I think you might have even mentioned it at one point in the book. You know, there was a quote by Alan Sandidge back in the 60s and 70s about cosmology as a search for two numbers,

namely the Hubble constant and the deceleration constant, what they thought was a deceleration constant, then discovered by past into the impossible guest, Brian Schmidt and Adam Reese, along with Saul, Pramutter, winners of the 2011 Nobel Prize to be a negative deceleration, aka acceleration. But the quip by sandwich of the search for two numbers kind of echoes in this book is the search for one number, which is the mass of the Higgs. And can you explain why a heavier particle like the W&Z, sorry, like the top quark and other elementary particles. Why were those discovered earlier prior to the Higgs? Is there a reason that the lay audience can contemplate and understand why that occurred

out of order sort of in terms of energy scales? Well, I mean, going back to the 64 when it all begins, it's probably sobering to we call how relatively primitive particle physics was at that time. I mean, the biggest accelerator in the world was, well, in the electron world, was probably at Stanford in California, a two-mile-long linear accelerator, which was powerful enough to probe inside the proton and reveal the quarks. The quarks, incidentally, were first proposed in 1964. It was a big year, 64.

I think the big bang theory was sort of established in 64 as well. well. So in Brookhaven and CERN, they had the largest proton accelerators, which were a few hundred meters probably in diameter. And the energy scale they could reach was probably a few tens of GV. The most massive particle that was known at the time was maybe no more than twice the mass of the proton to G.E.V. So into this scenario, you have the first emergence of ideas that there might be things which we now call W and Z bosons, the carriers of the weak force, whose masses were calculated theoretically to be of the order of 80 or 90 GV. And the first person really to get to that stage was Shelley Glashow in a paper in 1961.

which was by and large ignored for a couple of reasons. From the experimentalist point of view, who is going to be interested in producing particles of 80 or 90 GV? I mean, they were clearly a theorist's fantasy. You don't have things 40, 50 times heavier than anything we can do at the present time. From the theorist's point of view, they thought, well, this is a waste of time because this theory is all very well, but it can't work. And it can't work because we know from Schwinger and Dyson,

and all that renormalization stuff, that the reason why quantum electrodynamics is viable is because the photon has no mass. And the theory of the weak force would be complete nonsense, because for that, the WNZ have a mass. Therefore, what's the point? But we now know, of course, because of the mass mechanism that you can get around that, but that was still for the future.

So the WNZ, I think the belief that we're on, right track came in 71. I mentioned how atoft and Veltman showed that thanks to the mass mechanism is indeed possible to create a viable theory. You can start off pretending the W and Z have got no mass like a photon, use the mass mechanism. They get the mass, but everything works nicely. At which point people realized there may be something to this. And that is what inspired in particular, Carlo Rubia, who was then a senior scientist at Cern and Harvard, and later became DG at CERN, to propose converting one of the big proton accelerators to a collider of protons and antiprotons. Because in the annihilation of a proton and its antimatter

counterpart, there could be enough energy that if you were lucky, you could produce W or Z bosons. And in 83, 84, the W and Z were found with just the right masses. So now it was clear that definitely we were on the right track and 80 and 90 GV was still huge but it was now within range. That then gave enough confidence to build at CERN the large electron positron LEP collider, which was the 27 kilometre ring with electrons going one way, positrons the other annihilated head-on so they produce in a small region of space 90 GV of energy. And if you're lucky, that will occasionally materialize as a 90GV massive Z. And that way you're able to study this. I think 10 million Zs were produced over the next decade or so.

And by measuring their properties very precisely, things began to be noticed. First of all, that the theory worked because the properties would describe perfectly about 1%. But once you got more precise, you started noticing subtle detail. Now, at that time, the quarks that have been discovered, five of what we now know, six quarks were known. The bottom quark with a mass of only four GV was the heaviest then known. People suspected that there needed to be a six quark to complete the pattern called the top quark. And the deviations in the properties of the Zed showed by quantum field theory that the top quark is there affecting things in the background, if you like, because of quantum uncertainty.

And the deviations could be understood if the top quark was somewhere 150 to 200 gV in mass. At Fermilab, they then in the 90s had the biggest proton accelerator in the world by then, which was approaching an energy of up to about a T.E.V, a thousand GEV. about one-tenth of the size of the present Large Hadron Collider. And in those experiments, they were able to produce the top quark and found its mass, what is it, 185 or something like that. You could then put this determined mass back into the calculations, and you found that the part of one in a thousand or so,

there was still a deviation, which was the first clue that there's a Higgs out there, probably, with a mass somewhere between 110 and 130. And so that is what led to the large Hadron Collider at which the particles eventually found at 125 bang in. So along the story, it's really been quantum field theory and quantum uncertainty all the time, that you're able to also look across the horizon of energy to see what lies beyond, thanks to quantum uncertainty. But then you need a bigger energy source to be able to actually get there and see the thing for real. Yeah, exactly.

And I think, you know, if we look at the, you know, discovery, and I think, you know, now we should probably pivot to the, you know, the mastodon in the room, as as Roger likes to say, you know, which is the Nobel Prize itself and why it's caused so much, you know, controversy on one hand and elation on the other hand. But I think let's start with, you know, the search itself before we pivot to issues of credit and et cetera. And you're very careful in the book to talk about the mass. mechanism and really Peter himself, you know, for a long time was, was very much, you know, kind of, I wouldn't say embarrassed, but he didn't like the name, you know, really being associated with him. And he even referred to it by this ungainly, you know, seven-letter nickname, including my late great professor at Brown University, Jerry Gerolnik, and his colleagues and past guest, Carl Hagan on the podcast, including their initials. But let's talk a little bit about the

experimentalists who were so key to this. And the fact that none of them really participated in the Nobel Prize itself, some felt that was a slight, especially since there was an open quote-unquote slot in the Nobel Prize list of three winners, which is I've talked about is one of the the second most cruel aspect of the Nobel Prize, perhaps, but second only to the posthumous elimination of Nobel Prize winners. But anyway, talk about what was the reaction? I mean, you were at CERN, you participated in many of the events surrounding it and subsequent to it. And now we're at the 10th anniversary, as we say, July 4th, 2022 is the 10th anniversary of the announcement. Talk about the, you know, kind of the, I don't want to say lack of recognition.

Obviously, it was key. But how did the experimentalist take it? I've heard privately that some were very much miffed and, you know, they don't want to go on the record because, of course, you know, it's such a nice story as it is. but talk about the impact of the experimentalist not really receiving the recognition, the people like Rubio, who you talk about in the book, received uniquely so. And it's been 10 years probably not going to happen, right? So talk about that impact on experimental physics in general and why there was this dichotomy, perhaps. Well, I mean, if you're asking about should the experimenters have shared the Nobel Prize or what have you,

I mean, that's the question you have to ask the Nobel Committee as to why they made the decisions that they made. I won't take my phone calls anymore. Oh, I see. Okay. I mean, I can tell you what I suggested back in 2012 when the boson had finally been discovered. And there was already the question about where's the Nobel Prize going to go. And there already seemed to be a general sort of agreement. Well, because they discovered Higgs's boson, then Higgs is going to be in there.

And there are three places and where's it all going to go and so forth. And by that stage, Robert Brout, who was one of the co-discoverers of the mechanism with Anglare had died. And so there was sort of on the theory side of the question. Well, there's two parts of this. The experimental discovery, or even further back, the design and construction of the machine. So there's an engineering issue. There's a physics experiment issue and there's a theoretical issue. I argued on the theory side that if it was going to go to theorists,

I saw an opportunity here that Angler and Brought were the first people to publish the mass mechanism, and Angler was the only survivor there, then Higgs was the only person among all of these who drew any attention to a massive boson, and by accident maybe had given the indication of how to identify it where it produced, which left one spot. And I argued that that should go to Tom Kibble. For two reasons. One, I mean, he was the third party on a paper that wrote with Garelnik and Hagen,

which was published two months after this. So, I mean, yes, they did this independently, but the bad luck is, you know, you don't get prizes for coming in second. That's the regrettable reality. But he'd been involved with that. But in my mind, I think the most singular theory contribution in the whole was actually in 1967 in a paper that Tom Kibble wrote on his own, which showed how to keep the photon massless while giving masses to these other particles. And that might sound a bit trite, but it's not. But up to that stage, what all of the work had been doing was highly theoretical. It was showing how to make a mass mechanism in principle.

And Higgs had shown that if nature uses this, the test is that there will be this boson with certain characters. But precisely how nature used this and where and how to build a theory, it was Kibble in 67 who showed how to do that. And it was Kibble's paper that stimulated Stephen Weinstein. to write his model of leptons. And he cites kibble very prominently in that. I also know that kibble also inspired salaam to the importance of this whole business, which explained why it was when I was a student before I knew all about this stuff and it was still very fresh. Salam always referred to it as the Higgs kibble mechanism. So kibble, I think, was singular. So I wanted him to be the third of that. And I was at a dinner on Kibble's 80th birthday.

And I think, I can't remember who it was, but somebody from the physics Nobel committee was at that din. And he had read the Infinity Pustle Walk, and he said to me, well, Frankie said, how do you think we should deal with this? And so I said, well, I said, I've made a lot of argument in my book. I have read your book from cover to cover. I thought, well, no pressure there. I then said, I said, look, I said, this is my solution.

There's just been announced a new, I think it's called the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, which has designs on being an engineering analog in stature of the Nobel Prize. And I said, I think the Queen Elizabeth Prize should be awarded to, you know, Lynn Evans, on whoever on behalf of the actual facility, the machine that they have, built. The physics prize should be awarded in some combination to the experiments and or or CERN for the discovery that they've made and that Angler as the survivor, Higgs and Kibble, should be awarded the prize for chemistry. And that wasn't a facetious remark, because my regard is that the application of everything they did really explains why we have

structure. And indeed, Rutherford got the prize for chemistry. So anyway, the Nobel guy said to me, if that happens, Frank, I will nominate you for the Peace Prize. So there's no shortage of controversy surrounding any Nobel Prize. But I think in this

case, because there were so many that rightfully could have claimed paternity for it, and also because Higgs seemed to shy away from that, you know, my, as I said, my late grade teacher, Jerry Gerylnick, who with Hagen and Kibble were intimately involved and did actually have a massless boson that later became, you know, swallowed up and did take on mass. I think, you know, there is rightfully kind of, you know, this, this claim. And I, of course, now feel like the Nobel Prize does almost more

harm than good, but maybe not quite. Don't tell the 12 Nobel Prize winners that have been on. But let me just intersect. I mean, I'm not sure there is really any big controversy over, having made the decision to award it to theorists, I think I understand why it was awarded the way it was. But the fact that the third spot was left blank, that Kibble didn't include the award, was actually probably a profound recognition that although Robert Brought was now dead and you can't award prizes posthumously, he was recognised. In fact, he was mentioned several times

in the oration at Stockholm. So I sort of feel that he was there in absentia as the third place. But beyond that, who else in theory are you realistically expecting that it should go to within a constraint of three people? And with all due respect to the Rowanic, Hagen, even Tom Kibble, there isn't anybody else. There's two Russian guys whose name, for the moment,

escapes me, who were students. Polyarkov and Migdal was it? That actually had discovered the mass mechanism in Russia back in 63 and had been talked out of it by senior professors. And indeed, Jeffrey Goldstone, whose paper on the massless boson problem is what's stimulated the whole business. And the solution of the whole business, of course, was you add Maxwell's equations in, include electromagnetism. Well, Jeffrey had also done that back in 61. I guess we're talking roughly now.

And I think, well, as you are very much aware, this whole story, I think, really begins somewhere around 6061 in Harvard, where Schwinger was having a change of heart. that back in 47, he had proved that massless photons and gauge in variants somehow go together, but he had never been able to prove it totally. And he was beginning to suspect it wasn't in general true. And of course, we now know that it isn't in general true. Now, when I look back, I mean, through Jerry Garanick's history,

that he was very intimately linked with guilt. In fact, was Gilbert his supervisor? I think so. Okay. Well, I mean, it was clear that there must have been talk going on, you know, in the coffee room at Harvard about massive, could photons have mass and so forth? Yeah. Because around that time, Gilbert wrote a paper looking at what might happen when photons interacted with other particles. And I think, if I recall Gerarlnik's memorandum, there was some sort of mention of that in his work, which got him started in that direction.

Oh, certainly. Yeah. Jeffrey Goldstone had told me when I was researching Infinity Puzzle, and I mentioned it in elusive, that he also, when he wrote his, what the work that he did, he's led to the Goldstone boson, he also included electromagnetism

and found that it gave a mass of the photon. And he mentioned this to Schwinger, and in Goldstone's memory, Schwinger's reaction was something like, well, that's sort of obvious. Now, it's certainly true, that around that time, Schwinger wrote a paper where he was clearly questioning whether his belief that gauge invariance of masses photons was absolute. But it wasn't at all clear that

he regarded it as obvious that you give masses. In any event, it seems that Schwinger's reaction was enough to make Jeffrey Goldstone think, well, I won't do that. I'll focus on the big problem, which was this goldstone boson. But that's a total irony, you know, if true, that Goldstone already had the solution to his own problem, but was talked out of it. So the mass mechanism has a long convoluted history. I mean, the Toft independently rediscovered it when he was doing his work in 71. The boson itself, and I challenge anybody to find a massive scalar boson in any paper other than the one of Higgs, the fact that Higgs may have done it by accident or luck, well, how can we ever know?

but he did and of course goldstone is still very much alive thank you yes and uh and could have been considered yeah i feel like he is this you know he is kind of elusive in the sense that is really this this problem now of course you know it's a massless issue and then and then actually getting the mass mechanism to work out is really the key insight so but you know they've given nobel prizes to wrong ideas like uh like uh bore atom model and stuff like that so So it could be a greatest hits award, so to speak. But let's pivot away from that because I know we only have a few more minutes left and I want to cover a couple of more issues.

One in the field of cosmology, which no spoilers involved, but we sort of dovetail to it at the end of the book. Of course, my colleagues and I are looking for potential signatures of primordial gravitational radiation, which would be potentially caused by the, a so-called scalar, scalar field called not a boson, but a scalar field called the inflaton, that would be present in the early universe coupling to gravity. In the book, you talk about that, and that would be the CMB imprint of so-called primordial

B modes, although they're all alternative models that predict no B modes and that there is no singularity and there is no Big Bang. The way we think about it, it's more of a cyclic model. That's for another time. But looking at the analogies between the Higgs boson and the inflotone, can you talk a little bit about what the future of the Higgs looks like? And not only experimentally, because as I understand it, you know, the LHC is still running.

They're gearing up for a new higher luminosity run, 13 TV. There's no real targets, right? I mean, you say there is a natural target. It's the plank scale. Good luck finding that. We've had James Beecham and we've had another experimentalists from LHC on Atlas and my colleagues here at CMS at UC San Diego. But in reality, you know, there is no natural target, just like there may not be a natural

target for inflation either. How should we handle this potential existential crisis where you don't have a good target to go to as you did with the Higgs? But now kind of just the refrain that I hear is bigger is always better. What do you make of such claims? Well, I think in the, I mean, certainly it's correct that I say that for 50 years, we have had a fairly clear idea of where we were trying to get to and how far we had to go to get there. And in fact, over the last 30 years, it was becoming very clear that although we thought we were going to have to have a one TV energy scale to get to whatever the solution to electric week symmetry breaking is, we honed in on 110. 10GV and indeed found the Higgs at 125.

But now we don't have any clear marker like that. There is, however, one immediate question, I think, which is important, which is a big strategic one. I mean, we found the Higgs boson, so what? I mean, this is not just collecting postage stamps. If you stop now, it's collecting postage stamps. This is a very valuable postage stamp, but, you know, that wasn't what it is really about. I mean, an analogy that I draw is that just like fish need water, so we need the Higgs field.

We don't know what it is. We know that it has no sense of direction or in quantum sense is a scalar. We know how much energy it takes to make it bubble up into, to reveal itself as bosons. But that's about it. Now, what we really want to understand is how. How is it that the Higgs bosons condensed to make this field? And the analogy is it's as if some very bright fish have discovered a molecule of H2O, which has proved that indeed they do live in water.

But what they really want to understand is how the oceans are formed. And that is like us. I mean, really, we really want to understand what this Higgs field is because that is what determines everything we now know. And until we understand what it is, it'd be hard to know how the determination takes place. I think the first step to that would be, and this is why I think the new high-intensity experiments that the LHC will hopefully be doing in the next few years, to be able to produce two Higgs bosons in a single collision.

And if you're lucky enough that those two bosons interact with each other before you detect everything, we'll start getting the first information about how Higgs bosons mutually interacts and get the first idea of how this Higgs field is formed. That's the theory side. That's the experimental side. You mentioned the inflatom and early inflation. I mean, I'm now getting outside my pay grade, but I have this sort of gut feeling,

if that's the right metaphor in this day. I'm not into grand unified theory, but the other sort of gut feeling. That isn't it remarkable that we found the Higgs boson, actually it seems to be so simple. I mean, the simplest model that was written in the early 1964 seems to be consistent with everything at the moment, which is something.

There's one of the place, at least that I'm aware of in quantum field theory, that scalers are wanted, and that is what you mentioned, inflaton. So the obvious question is, are the inflaton and Higgs boson one and the same thing? Well, insofar as we, the Higgs boson, as we know it at the moment, certainly not, because the inflaton drove the expansion of the whole universe. So it couples very strongly to gravity, and the boson as a standard model doesn't do that unless there is, very massive particles out waiting to be found. And given that the Higgs boson likes to couple to mass, the bigger, the better, so to speak, the possibility that it might couple through these ultra-massive things

bubbling in and out of the vacuum, and that these have big enough mass to couple to gravity, sort of like the way that Frank Wilczek pointed to discovering the Higgs, you know, that light particles like gluons or photons can turn it a massive top of quarks which can then couple to the Higgs and produce it. Likewise, if there are supermassive stuff that couples to the Higgs and also couples to the gravity, maybe they are one and the same thing. So I really do think the big question in the longer term and how it's going to be done

is a question for the future experimentalists and funding agencies and everything else is I think the idea that the Higgs boson is some sort of placid, structuralist, thing is as naive as, I mean, all of history has been, you look carefully and you start seeing things have made of stuff. So the analogy that I would end up with here is, I think we are in profundity, analogies to where Rutherford was back in 1912 or so, when he had discovered the nucleus at the heart of the atom, but all he was able to tell with his alpha particle probes was there's a lump of massive charge there. But what it consisted of, he didn't know. And that's where we are with the Higgs field.

Later, they became aware that it's made of protons and neutrons. And if you're a science fiction writer, and then you learned you could do things with that and manipulate the nucleus and such like, I suspect we will find that the Higgs field has some structure. And given that the Higgs field ultimately determines not just mass of fundamental particles, but why they have the particular masses they have, there's got to be something going on there, more than we yet know to get to questions like that, whether or not you would then be able to manipulate the Higgs field and change stuff, well,

there's a science fiction story waiting to be written. Well, speaking of science fiction, we're going to conclude with what I usually call the thrilling three or the fantastic four, but we only have time for one question, and it's from renowned science fiction, but also science nonfiction authors,

Sir Arthur C. Clark, who is the name, sake of the eponymous Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination here at UC San Diego, which I'm privileged to be the associate director thereof. And also the very quotable man who gave us the title of this podcast by saying the following. He said, the only way of determining the limits of the possible is to venture beyond them into the impossible. And I like to turn that around Frank, and I ask all my guests of the following question, sort of advice to your former self. Frank, if you could go back to 20-year-old, 30-year-old Frank and give him one word of advice

to give him the courage to go into the impossible, what would it be? The same advice I'll give to the students right here and now that are coming through their PhDs. There's going to be a time in the future when the textbooks will be filled with staff. that is yet to be discovered. Somebody has to discover it. Why not you? Why not you? And Frank, I want to be the first to extend congratulations on another phenomenal book.

You're such a good writer. And your books have been inspirational to incredible numbers of scientists and non-scientists alike. You're also a renowned scientist. And I want to thank you for sharing that gift. with the public. I have a controversial belief that we scientists have a moral obligation to do outreach to the public. Let's not get into that now. I don't want to saddle you with my own particular peccadillo problems. But I want to thank you for this wonderful book called Elusive,

which is how the mystery of missing mass or how matter gets mass is such a delightful story, both for the lay audience, but also for my fellow physicist, who loved to do. devour in some detail, maybe not in our particular field, but this is a gift to physicist and to the lay audience alike. Frank, congratulations, and thank you for going into the impossible with me. And folks, stay tuned because I have the inaugural Higgs Chair Professor, Professor Neil Turrock, friend of the show. He is coming on soon, and he has the eponymous name of Sir Peter Higgs from Edinburgh University. So look for that episode coming soon. We're talking about his models of the universe and the astonishing simplicity of all things. But for now, Frank,

thank you so much for joining us. Enjoy the rest of your evening. And I hope we can talk again soon. And thank you very much for talking to me in Oxford, to you in California by the great invention Tim Berners-Lee at CERN. That's right. That's right. Thank you so much. Bye, Frank. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Well, that's a wrap. It was an amazing. amazing opportunity for me to chat with Frank and explore some lagging, not lagging questions I've always had about that particular prize and more prizes. So I hope you enjoyed it. And I hope that you too in the future when I post calls for questions and feedback that you'll take

advantage of it. You'll join me on Twitter, Dr. Brian Keating, YouTube, Dr. Brian Keating, Instagram, same handle. And ask questions in the community tab on YouTube. And don't forget to subscribe. And don't forget to subscribe to my mailing list where I'm giving away meteorite dust samples, cosmic dust samples. You can subscribe at briankeating.com slash list. And I hope that you will, you will subscribe. And if you are listening on a podcast player, you can leave a review on iTunes, Apple Podcasts, it's called. When you subscribe, you can also leave a little constellation of five stars that will really boost the show. We're trying to get to 500 ratings this year. I hope with your help, we can do it. We're already over

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until we meet again. Brian Keating, you're a fearful cosmic host, posing and hopefully answering some of your cosmic conundrums on the Into the Impossible podcast. Bye-bye.