Is the Higgs Boson useful?

What is the Higgs Boson and why do we care?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
It's very natural in physics to describe the unknown in
terms of the known, and so we understand like grains
of sand and tiny rocks and this stuff. So when
we think of particles, we like to think of them
as tiny little balls of stuff. But they're not balls
of stuff because they have no space to them. So
then if they don't have space to them, how can
they have stuff to them? Because we think of mass
is being stuff. Right, Like, I'm made up of all

(00:28):
the particles in me, and I have mass because of
all those particles having mass, I'm like the sum of
all those particles. I am Jorge, and I'm Daniel. Welcome
to Daniel and Jorge. Explained the universe. Explain the universe.

(00:51):
The universe. Explain the universe, the whole universe. People. That's
the topic of this podcast today. We're gonna be asking
the question what is the Higgs boson? What is the
Higgs boson? After all? Yeah, it turns out it's a
really important particle, right, Daniel, that's right. It cost US
ten billion dollars to build the LHC and find the

(01:12):
Higgs boson. Good thing, we found it. A good thing.
We found it. And actually I was kind of disappointed
when we found it, but we can get into that later. Um,
But the Higgs boson is a big discovery. Yeah, and
it's very important because it's it's like what keeps everything together.
We wouldn't be here without the Higgs boson, that's right.
We wouldn't be here without photons or ws or z's
or Higgs boson. It all comes together in the beautiful

(01:34):
symphony of particles that make up our universe. Right. But
it's sort of the most recently discovered particle and in
lots of ways, the weirdest. So we thought it'd be
fun to talk about and actually break it down, like
what is the Higgs boson? After all? But before we
jump into it, Um, I thought i'd be cool to
talk about how this is. The Higgs boson is actually
sort of how we started working together. That's right. That
was our first date. Right, let's talk about the Higgs boson.

(01:55):
That's right. We met on physics. Tender, physics plus cartoonists tender. No,
but you're right, it's unusual for physicists and cartoonists to
spend this much time talking about science, So let's tell
them how that started. Yeah. So I'm a cartoonist. I
draw something called PhD comics, and I've been doing that
for a long time on the Internet, and then one

(02:16):
day I just get this email from this physicist at
the University of California at Irvine saying, hey, jor hey,
I would like to pay you too and commission you
to draw some comics about the Higgs boson. And is
that the first time a physicists had ever cold emailed you?
That was the first time a physicist has offered to
pay me, to be honest, So I was like, what

(02:38):
you want to pay me? What is that about? But
I thought was that was pretty cool. It seemed like
it's kind of something I was needing. And you know,
I had been seeing a lot of the buzz about
the Higgs boson and the search for the Higgs boson
a few years ago, and so I was really intrigued
about about what it was. I wanted to learn more
about it, and so I said, yeah, let's let's make
something that explains what the Higgs boson is. Yeah, and

(02:59):
I've been reading all the buzz about the Higgs boson
and I thought, man, this is all buzz and no reality.
You know, there's so much writing about the Higgs boson.
That's just like throws together a bunch of important sounding words,
which doesn't actually explain it. And right, I felt like
there was this gap where we weren't really digging into
it and communicating with the public what it was actually like.
And I was hoping, you know, something visual would work. Yeah,

(03:22):
it's like people are sort of afraid of getting too
far into it, right, Like nobody wanted to touch kind
of the serious mechanics and how it was, how it was,
how you guys were looking for it. Yeah, and a
lot of it was sort of poetic writing. You know,
there's things like in the New York Times when they
say that scientists have revealed the deepest layer of reality
humans have ever probed, and like, I mean, this is

(03:44):
my field. I don't even know what that means, Like
what like where what is that guy smoking? And where
can I get some You're like poetry? So you're actually
one of the scientists who worked on Like you're you're
like one of the one a couple of thousand physicists
that worked on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. That's right, Yeah,
there's several thousand of us all collaborating at this collider

(04:06):
and the detectors surrounding the collision points, and we all
work together to make this project happen, all right, So
you reach out to me, and so we we created
this video called the Higgs Boson explained. The Higgs theory
starts with this. Imagine a field that for me, it's
the entire universe, and every particle UH feels this field
is affected by this field in different amounts. So some

(04:29):
particles are really slowed down by interaction to this field,
like you know, swimming through molasses, and other particles hardly
feel it. So the ones that hardly feel it, they
have a small mass. The ones that are really affected
by the couple strongly to this field are slowed down
a lot. They have large mass. So you've turned the
question of why do particles have different masses into a
different question why do particles feel the Higgs field differently?

(04:51):
But there is one manifestation of the field is the
existence of this particle. Yeah, that's right. You were at
CERN and we sat down to the cafeteria and just
talked about physics for hours and hours, and you recorded it,
and it recorded like hours of conversation then edited down
to a few minutes to make me sound really sharp.
Thanks thanks for that, by the way, I was trying

(05:11):
to make you sound poltic. Um. So yeah. So then
we put it out there and it was super popular,
and then they discovered the Higgs boson actually, and then
the video went viral, like millions and millions of people
saw this video and um, and it was amazing. It
was great, and people were saying, like like the New
York Times and CBS News, all these places were saying,
this is the clearest and easiest to understand explanation of

(05:34):
what the Higgs boson was. And so you might ask,
since we put out that video, has everybody now just
everybody understand the Higgs boson? How well have we succeeded
in explaining the Higgs boson people in that short video. Well,
I think the video is up to like three million
views or something, so we've reached at least three million people,
that's right. Well, I went out on campus and asked

(05:56):
random people. I walked into what is the Higgs boson?
Do you know what it is? Do you care about it?
What do you understand about it? And here's what they
had to say. Have you heard of the Higgs boson. Yes,
it's a particle. I have no idea. No, it's a
sub potomic particle. Alright, So it sort of seems like

(06:16):
maybe everyone has sort of heard about it. Everyone has
heard about the Higgs boson. That's right. The buzz has
succeeded in at least convincing people that the Higgs is
a thing. Good brand management there, brand exactly if we
could only copyright that or something. Yes, so people know
the Higgs is a thing. Some people call it, say
it's a particle, but that's really about it. That's like

(06:38):
the level of knowledge that's penetrated sort of the cultural
zeitgeist into people's minds. The Higgs is a particle. People
have found it, That's what's the thing, Right, It's a
Nobody seemed to know what it was or what it
was for. Yeah, nobody said anything about how it's responsible
for giving particles mass, or the meaning of the discovery,
or why it's significant or anything like that. So from

(06:59):
that point of you, I think UM science has done
a good job and telling people what they found, But
I'm not sure that we've really succeeded in explaining what
is the Higgs boson? Why is it interesting? So that's
why we thought it would be a good episode for
this podcast. So it's like, you've done a good job
of telling people that you're doing your job and the
job is important, but don't don't really ask is what's

(07:20):
going on? That's about as far as we've gone. No,
I'm happy to talk to people about it. That's why
we're here. Yeah, that's right, that's what so tell us, Uh, well,
what is the Higgs boson? What is it for? What
is it for? Well, um, the Higgs boson is a particle, right,
and we have we're familiar with lots of particles, you know,
electrons and corks and other larger particles like protons and

(07:41):
neutrons and most of the particles in our everyday world.
They're the things that make up matter, you know, electrons
and these corks make up the stuff that we're made
out of the stuff. We're made of stuff. And one
mystery we always wondered about was like, how do these
particles have mass? How do these particles weigh anything? You know,
how do these particles have any stuff to them? What

(08:02):
do you mean, like, why do they have mass? What
does that even mean? To just wonder if something has mass? Well,
it's interesting because you think about these particles and mathematically
we think of these particles as just points in space
like dots, like zero volume, Like how big is the electron.
People have some fuzzy ways to calculate electron size, you know,

(08:22):
the electron radius, using like the photons that's surrounded, but
at its core, the electron itself is zero volume point
in space. And I always thought that's weird. So it's
not like a basketball. Like a basketball, you can put
it down and it had it goes from like here
to here, and it has a surface to it, right,
has an extent exactly, basketball has an extent. One side

(08:45):
of it is not the same place as the other
side of it. Right this you can measure its length
and its width and its height exactly has a volume.
But electrons and point particles are not like that. They're
not like that. Two different particles can have different masses,
but they're both the same side, is right. So if
you if you're thinking, oh, are these particles all made
it out of some sort of like basic universe stuff

(09:06):
and one of them is a bigger spoonful than the
other one, will know they're both zero size spoonfuls. So
that just can't explain why one has more mass than
the other. And but it can't explain why either one
has any mass, because there's no room for stuff in
there anyway, right, there's no like, um, there's no more
of something in one of them and more or less

(09:27):
of something in the other. There's just no there's nothing,
there's no stuff to it. And so that was a
big mystery. That was a big mystery, like how did
these particles get mass exactly? Yeah, let's talk about that,
but first let's take a quick break. I think it's

(09:54):
in the end more natural to think about the mass
these particles not as the amount of tiny unit her
stuff in them, but just like a label. Right, Like
you think about the electron. You know the electron is
negative charge, but you don't worry like where in the
electron is that negative charge? Is there room to put
that charge in the electron? You don't think about that
or worry about that, the same way you think about mass.

(10:16):
Mass is just a label for particles. We don't understand
really what these particles things are. What we think of
them as points in space with a set of labels, spin, mass, charge,
all sorts of other interactions and that's basically it. And
so mass isn't like amount of stuff. It's just another label, um,
and it's a label that affects how these particles move. Right,

(10:37):
Mass means inertia means it's harder for it to speed
up and harder for it to slow down, just like
maybe like the electron has negative one electrical charge, and
maybe like I want to say a prolem, but I
know persons are made out of quarks, but like one
of the quarks has plus one third allergical charge. That's
just like something that is inherent in it. That's right.

(10:59):
In a hundred years, we might have an explanation for that.
We might have sub corks which are made out of
something else and add up to have the minus one
third charge or the plus two thirds charge or whatever.
We might someday have an explanation for that, but currently
we don't, and so we just think of them as
these point particles. And the Higgs boson explains that that
was the mystery, Right, how can particles have mass? What

(11:20):
is this thing we call mass for a particle? How
does that even make sense? And the Higgs boson is
part of this larger idea called the Higgs mechanism, which
includes also the Higgs field, and the Higgs field is
something which permeates all of space. It's just like you know,
the way like electromagnetic fields can you know, fill space. Also,

(11:42):
they theorize this particle a long time ago, like in
the sixties they said, um, well we have this mystery
about why some particles have mass, why did they have mass?
So we think we have this theory and this was
down done in the sixties. Yeah, yeah, and so just
to make sure we finished the explanation of what they
actually Higgs boson is right, sis field the field space

(12:02):
and particles feel this field and if they feel it
really strongly, then it prevents them from speeding up and
slowing down. And that's the same thing as having mass.
That is what having mass means. That means you have inertia.
Inertia is the property of things to resist being slowed
down and the property to resist being sped up. So
interacting with the Higgs field is the same thing as

(12:22):
having mass. So what do you mean like a field,
Like it's just like this thing, this mathematic is it
like a mathematical concept that sucks surrounding us, or it's
like actually a thing. It's actually a thing. The field
is actually a thing, like the way an electric field is. Right.
Electric field is a mathematical concept, but it's also a
physical thing. You can measure it um you put an

(12:43):
electron and electric field, it'll move, so you can see it. Right.
You line up magnetic shavings on a table, you can
see magnetic fields, like your compass sees a magnetic field. Right.
So Higgs field is just like another field, like a
magnetic field or electric field. Right. But usually in a
like the mechanic field, there's a source, right, like there's
a magnet, or there's like a charge, or there's a

(13:05):
battery or something like that. But what is like this
Higgs field is just there. Yeah. And that's one of
the fascinating things about it is that without any particular
localized source, it has some energy to its, some value
to it, all the way through the universe. And that's
why these particles can get mass. It's called a vacuum
expectation value, which is a technical term I Pobily shouldn't

(13:27):
have mentioned. But it's a really weird thing about this
field is that it fills the universe and without any
particular source, it has some strength to it, and the
effect of that is to give all particles inertia, which
is basically the same as mass. So when you say
that like particle A has this much mass, it means
that when it tries to move around, it feels the

(13:47):
Higgs field that much. Yeah. When if you have particle
A and then you give it a push, right, well,
acceleration F equals m A right, so a little push
should give you acceleration, But the amount of acceleration asian
you get from the push depends on the M part
of F equals m A. Right. The larger your force,
the more your acceleration. But the larger your mass, the

(14:09):
less your acceleration. So you need a really big push
to accelerate the Earth, for example, and a really little
push to accelerate you know, a grain of sand. And
so you would say that that's because the Earth is
interacting more strongly with the Higgs field, whereas the little
grain of salt is like almost ignored by the Higgs field. Yeah,

(14:29):
in comparison exactly. And so really massive particles interact with
the Higgs field a lot, and and massless particles or
particles that have almost no mass hardly interact with the
Higgs field at all, there's really easy to accelerate or
to slow down. Have almost no inertia. So it's kind
of like it's like you're in the ocean. You're underwater,
and uh, if you are really massive, then maybe you

(14:53):
have kind of like an odd shape and so it's
really hard to move in the water. But maybe if
you have a sleep shape, and it's really easy for
you to move around in the water, and so that
sort of shapeness is maybe what mass would be. Yeah,
people try really hard to come up with like intuitive
analogies for the Higgs field, and almost all of them
are roughly right, and that they give you the sense

(15:14):
that the Higgs field is the thing that makes it
hard to move through space, but they're technically almost all
not correct because what the thing you describe, which is like,
you know what friction from water is different from inertia, right,
Friction from water is always going to slow you down.
Inertia makes it hard to slow down. So something that's
moving really really fast it's hard to slow down because

(15:37):
it has inertia. M So it's just some some sort
of field that affects how easily you can change in speed, right,
whether it's gleating up or slowing down. So we should
just stop at that and not try to make any
molasses or politicians in the crowd analogies that's right, exactly,
or deep poetic statements about the meaning of the universe exactly, right. Um.

(16:01):
But yeah, and you were saying earlier people came on
this idea decades ago, right, yeah, and so they took
him that long and billion dollars to find it, even
more than thirteen billion dollars. But it's it's a cool
story because it's an idea that came sort of out
of a search for beauty or poetry. Actually, I shouldn't
have I shouldn't have dogged poetry or a long this

(16:21):
podcast of a huge mistake. I didn't mean poetry in
a negative sense of an empty poetry, right, right, right,
poetry without mathematical references. That's right. We just lost the
huge poetry loving audience segment of this audience. Let's get
him back. Let's get him back, prepared turn on poetry now. Okay,

(16:41):
So people were thinking about the particles we've seen and
how they work, and they were wondering about patterns there
and the short version of The story is that they
noticed a pattern and the patterns would be missing something.
You know. It's like they looked at the list of
particles we had in the forces and they said, m hmm,
this would be so prettier, this would be so much

(17:01):
more elegant if there was one more piece here, one
thing that made that that tied it all together, you know,
like the rug that tied the Bowski's room together. Like
the equation seemed out of balance, right, Like it's we
had they had an equation and it just it was
just kind of imbalanced. Is that what you mean by beauty? Yeah,
And in particular, people were trying to unify forces. There's

(17:23):
a long history in physics of trying to bring everything
together into a single equation, like can we describe all
the physics in a single equation? And you know, for
a long time we've had different um we've talked about
a different phenomena like magnetism and electricity, and one of
some of the great advances in physics have been in
unifying those forces, like showing electricity and magnetism are actually

(17:44):
part of the same force. It's called electromagnetism. And the
things that we think of as as magnetic and I
think to think of electric, aren't you just two sides
of the same coin. So there's a great tradition there.
It's like simplifying things bringing them together. And so people
were trying to do that one more time, and they're saying,
can we bring the weak force, the thing that's responsible
for like radioactive decay. Can we bring that together with electromagnetism.

(18:08):
One problem is that the weak force is really really
is really really weak is compared to electromagnetism. And the
reason the weak force is so weak is because the
particles that carry it, the W and the z boson,
are really heavy, if huge amounts of mass, whereas the
photon for electromagnetism is really light. So one reason that
electromagnetism is so powerful, such a strong force, is that

(18:32):
the photon, the thing that carries it, can go really
far there is no mass, whereas the W n z
bosons have so much mass it makes it a very
short range force. So the question they were trying to
understand is how do we bring these two things together.
Why do the W z bosons have mass and the
photon doesn't. So obviously, the equation they were trying to
make more elegant. So it was weird that some particles

(18:54):
would have mass and some others would not. That was
like theoretically mathematically weird, and so they came up with
this idea of the Higgs field to patch it up.
That's right, that's right, the Higgs field and the Higgs
particle together in this thing called the Higgs mechanism. And
if you add the Higgs mechanism to the theory, then boom,
it explains it. It connects the weak force with electromagnetism,

(19:15):
and it explains why the W and Z have mass
and the photon doesn't. And so that was really beautiful.
People are like, wow, that really makes sense. That's pretty.
You know, there's like an elegance to that theory, and
people were hoping that it's also true. You know, Nature
doesn't have to come up with nure, doesn't have to
reveal that the universe is beautiful. And sometimes, as as

(19:38):
human physicists, we use like like aesthetic sense to like
sense what is nature's solution, Like how should things work?
And we want things to be pretty. It doesn't always
work out that way. This history is littered with like
beautiful theories that turned out to be wrong. Well, this
is a perfect point to take a break. So but

(20:08):
back to the story of the Higgs boson. Yeah, after
all that, they found it, right, How did they find
the Higgs boson? Yeah, well they were looking for it
for a long time. Um, and people thought there was
a collider in Geneva before the Large John Collider. There
was one called the Large Electron Positron Collider that leap
l EP and people built that one, and they really
were hoping to find the Higgs Boson there because like

(20:29):
how their name has the word large in it, you know,
like what if you build a bigger one, what is
that one going to be called very large? The very
largest v l h C is the plan for the
next one super large, uber large, hyper large, super duper large. Anyways, Um,
so there was one before the large, the LHC UM

(20:51):
but that they they didn't find it, so they build
the bigger one. They didn't find it, but they thought
they did. Actually, so it ran until the early two thousands,
and they had a very short window to run it
in because they had to turn it off because they
were building the Large Hadron Collider in the same tunnel.
One scheme for making the hadron collider. Cheaper was to

(21:13):
reuse the existing tunnel so that to turn off the
electron positron collider so they could build the hadron collider.
But in the last few weeks of running the electron
positron collider, people started seeing hints of the Higgs boson.
They're smashing these particles together, and they started to see
collisions that looked just like what you would expect from
a Higgs boson. The thing is, we didn't know how

(21:34):
heavy the Higgs boson was. That's one thing the theory
didn't predict. Is it really really light, is it kind
of heavy, is it medium heavy? Is it's super duper heavy.
So we didn't know exactly where to look for it,
and right on the edge of where the large electron
positron collider could have seen it. It started to pop
up just in the last few weeks. But then they said,

(21:54):
but no, we just got thirteen billion dollars to make
a very one. Don't find it yet exactly exactly. And
there was a huge argument in the community, like should
we put off building the L A C and keep
running this one because we might be like on the
verge of a discovery or um should we say, look,
we have a plan, let's shut this thing down, build

(22:15):
the next one, um and find it there for sure.
And the problem was that across the pond outside Chicago,
the Americans were working on their collider, which is the
Tevatron Fermulab, and it was going to run sort of
in the gap there between the large electron positron collider
and the Hadron collider at CERN, and the Europeans were

(22:37):
really worried that if they gave this opportunity up, if
they turned off their collider, that the Americans would discover
the Higgs boson while they were busy building the Hadron collider.
That was their fear. Suspiciously, the Americans were like, no, yeah,
shut it down down UM. So certain decided to shut
it down. They were like, we see this evidence. It's interesting.

(22:58):
It's not compelling enough for us to cheer age our
entire program. You know, like when my son has to
go to dinner, but he does want to turn off
the video game he's playing, that's right. They were like,
So the Europeans saved their game while they're building the
next colider, and the the Americans turned on their their
collider and they looked for it, and they didn't find it.
I mean they saw a few things hints here and there,

(23:20):
so they wouldn't haven't even found anything. Then the LP
would not have found anything. It turned out that the
Higgs was not where they thought it was. Yeah, what
they were seeing was just a fluctuation. So that was
and he was a little bit heavier than that. So okay,
So what does the act what does the large patron
collider actually do like and specifically how how does it
do that? What does it do to find how what

(23:40):
did it do to find the Higgs bloson? So what
we do is we smash protons together. And protons really
high energy, and protons inside them have little particles called
quarks and also particles called gluons. And when we smashed
protons together, through the corks and the gluons inside the
proteon that do the smashing. Think of protons is like
little bags of particles and the cork and the gluons

(24:00):
smashed together, and then sometimes like one in a tri
zillion times, those quirk and gluons will smash together to
make a Higgs boson. We run this thing every twenty
five nanoseconds because most of the time. When we smush
particles together, boring particles come out, particles we've seen over
and over again. So the rare the interesting stuff is
really rare, which is why we have to run it

(24:22):
really often to spot the rare ones. And so it's
like one in the trisilient times the Higgs boson appears,
it doesn't live for very long. The thing I think
people should understand is that you can don't make a
Higgs boson and then you have it. It's not like
you can fill a glass jar with Higgs bosons that
we've made at the LHC. They exist for like ten
to the negative twenty something seconds, and then they decay.

(24:44):
They turned into other stuff like evaporate kind. Yeah, they're
like heavy and unstable and so they break up. Yeah,
they yeah, exactly into other stuff that we can see.
Like one of the most common things they do is
turn into two bottom quarks for examp able. And so
how do we actually see the Higgs boson. Well, one
way we do what is we look for events with

(25:05):
two bottom corks in them. The problem is there's lots
of other ways to make events with two bottom corks
in them. Lots of times when we collide protons, we
get events with two bottom corks in them that wasn't
from the Higgs boson. So you have to figure out
which of the stuff that you see might have come
from Higgs boson that existed for like a really short
amount of time, that's right. And so it's like visiting

(25:26):
the scene of a car crash and trying to figure
out what happened. Um, all you can see is the
debris afterwards. You don't get to see the car crash itself,
and you have to be like, all right, I think
from the debris that it was two yellow volkswagens that
crashed onto each other, that's right. I think the Higgs
boson was driving and it veered off the bridge. So
then that's why it costs so much. It's you have

(25:47):
to like run this thing. It was huge. You needed
a lot of energy, that's right, and you had to
run for a long time. And so then you found
enough observations of the debris to know, Okay, I think
in there we can definitely say that there was a
Higgs boson that popped into existence for a brief amount
of time, that's right. What we do is we take
the energy of those two bottom qrks and we add
them up and we say how much energy was there?

(26:10):
And if it was a Higgs boson, then the energy
of the two bottom corks is going to mostly add
up to be the mass of that Higgs boson. So
you do that a bunch of bunch of times and
then you add them all up, and if the Higgs
boson was there, you'll see a little bump. You'll see
you make a plot for example, yeah, bump at the day.
If you make a plot for example of like how
much energy was in the two bottom quarks versus how

(26:32):
often you see it, you'll see a bunch of collisions
that all have the same energy in the two bottom qurks,
and that will be at the mass of the Higgs boson.
So we were bump hunting. We didn't know where we
might see it. Bump hunting. That should be the next
show in the Discovery Channel, bump Hunters. I think there's
probably some easy, salacious misunderstanding of bump hunting, you know.

(26:56):
So they so they found it right, and this was
I think to the is in what was it two thousand,
thirteen fourteen that they founded it was it was sort
of slow like we started to see hints of it.
We saw little bumps, and then they would go away,
and we saw and then we finally started to see
more significant bumps that just grew and grew and grew.
And so the actual discovery the Higgs wasn't like an
aha moment like one day like boom, here it is,

(27:18):
we found it. There it is, you can all see it.
It was a slow accumulation of data. It's sort of
like you know, the water draining out of a out
of the ocean, and you can revealing things on the seafloor,
like very gradually we saw this bump rising out of
the take he saw a little shadow of it here,
a little shadowed it were there, and then suddenly you
had the confidence to say, I think all of these things,

(27:39):
say that the Higgs boson is a thing. That's right.
And it gradually accumulated. So it was sort of a
slow burn, and at some point it passes some threshold
where statisticians say we were allowed to say we've discovered
the Higgs boson, and so huge fanfare, lots of excitement,
lots of like news cover rige in the media. Why

(28:01):
do you think it was such a like media frenzy
dis Higgs boson, Like you know, like scientists discover stuff
every day all the time. Why do you think people
got so excited about discovery of this particle? That's a
great question. I wish I understood how the whole science
journalism world worked, why they all get excited about something
sometimes and other times you just can't get them interested

(28:24):
at all. I don't know. I think that Certain has
a great PR team and that they really built their
argument about why Certain is exciting based on this um
this goal, this let's discover the Higgs boson, and that
has positives and negatives, like the positives that are if
you spend several years hyping this up, then when you
actually are ready to deliver your discovery, people are hyped up. Oh,

(28:46):
I see. Part of so part of it was just
like the the size of the project. People were really
hyped up about it. Yeah, and Certain is organized and
they know how to do PR and they have been
priming science journalists for a long time. But it's sort
of important because it's it's kind of it closed the gap, right,
It's sort of like put the little button on this
theory of the universe that physics sad, right. It was

(29:08):
kind of like this piece that people have been theorizing
for a long time and so now here it is. Here,
here was the evidence that this theory was right. Yeah,
and a lot of people look at that positively. I
actually think this it's kind of a negative story. I mean,
people's people sold the LHC is like, here's we're going
to discover the Higgs boson and that's going to be
the answer to this decades long question. And after that

(29:30):
the standard model is finished. And it's certainly true that
we've been looking for for a long time and that
we found it, and it validated this idea of this
beautiful mathematical idea which came you know, just from this
esthetic sense of mathematical beauty. That's awesome, that's an awesome story. Um.
And it was the missing piece of the standard model,
the piece we didn't have. So now we have a

(29:52):
theory which is complete in the sense that it works right,
there's no obvious missing piece. But it doesn't mean that
there aren't questions remaining. And I think one downside of
saying the late C was about discovering the Higgs is
that people think, oh, we're done, Like well, we've finished
this theory and now it's over, and like, why are
you still running the late c um And the other
thing is that some of us were hoping we wouldn't

(30:14):
find the Higgs. I mean, the Higgs is sort of
like a nice wrap up to that story, but there
were other ideas out there, ideas that might have been
more exciting. And so in some ways, finding something that
wasn't the Higgs, something weird and strange and unexpected, something
that wasn't predicted. But the theory is something where we
didn't have like a mental slot for it already. That
would have been much more exciting, something totally unexpected than

(30:37):
I cracked open particle physics and let us understand things
about why particles get different masses, or what is dark matter?
You know, what are the patterns of the particles. There's
a lot of questions we don't have the answers to
just because we found the Higgs. I can see a
politician being like, all right, guys, so you're telling me
that you were totally wrong and you misspent all this money,
But it turns out that unluckily it's actually good news.

(31:02):
That's right. Well, for me, the most exciting thing is
the exploration. Like I want to build that three trillion
dollar collider because it lets just explore the universe at
a scale we've never seen before. And I'm excited for
unexpected discoveries much more than I'm excited for expected discoveries.
You know. It's like if somebody told you exactly where
to find a special little rock, it'd be cool to

(31:23):
go there and see, like, oh, look they found this
little rock. Would be much cooler to find something you
didn't expecta