Was the Higgs boson discovery a triumph or disappointment?

Daniel and Jorge debate whether the Higgs boson discovery marks the end of collider physics.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hey, Daniel, you're officially one of the discoverers of the
Higgs boson, right, I mean, yeah, me and ten thousand
of my close collaborators, then thousands. Did you really need
ten thousand people to discover one particle? We each discovered
one ten thousands of it. Does that mean you also
get one ten thousands of a Nobel Prize? No, the
Nobel Prize went to the theorists, of course, not to

(00:30):
those of us who actually found the thing. I guess
it must have been exciting though, when they finally discovered
the particle. It was exciting, but you know, it happened slowly.
It's sort of like taking a flight across the ocean.
You're really excited when it starts out, but by the
time it's all official and done with your exhausted. You
should do what I do, which is taken up during
the flight. Then it's like you're teleported, you know, you

(00:51):
teleport your way to a Nobel Prize. Yeah, exactly. So
what's the next discovery that particle physicists are working on? Well,
I hope there is a next discovery. It's usually about
twenty years between major discoveries. Wait, do you schedule it
every twenty years. Why not every ten years? Hey, I'd
like to do one every year, but these things are
pretty tricky. You just need more naps. Maybe I just

(01:12):
need a neck pillow. What's the point of the neck
pill if you're not gonna nap. I'm not sure you're
getting the physics of that being here, right, Daniel. I'm
definitely out of my expertise. You should just sleep on it.

(01:37):
Hi am Orhamma, cartoonists and the creator of PhD comics. Hi.
I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I do have
one millions of a Nobel Prize one million or don't
you mean like one seven? Since you are part of
the human race. Yeah, but not every human has a
Nobel Prize. Actually, I'm no longer a Nobel Prize winner.

(01:59):
I used to be you because I had EU citizenship
and the entire EU won the Nobel Peace Prize once.
But I'm a UK citizen, which means I'm no longer
an EU citizen. So I guess we brexited from Nobel
Prize winners. Oh my goodness, it affected so many people
in so many ways. It lost you the Nobel Prize.
I mean, you should write a book about losing the
Nobel Prize the Brexit. I had to update my CV

(02:21):
and everything, or at least one five million of it.
So anyone who joins the EU is a Nobel Prize one.
Is that what you're saying. I'm not sure it's retroactive.
I think you have to be a member of the
EU when the Nobel Prize was handed out. How do
you know is that in the rules. There's probably a
bunch of lawsuits about it right now. But welcome to
a podcast. Daniel and Jorge explained The Universe, a production

(02:42):
of I Heart Radio, in which we seek to misstow
the benefits of human knowledge on everybody, not just members
of the EU or the UK or any other silly
islands out there. We think that everybody should understand what
we understand about the universe and what questions we are
puzzling over as we struggle to sort through the crazy

(03:02):
details of this universe, all the amazing things that it
does out there in deep space, and all the incredible
things we discover in our particle colliders. That's right, because
science is for everybody. We are all part of the
human race, and this race to understand the universe and
how it works and how it came to be, so
that we can understand more about our context in the cosmos,

(03:23):
and also hopefully when some prices along the way, or
at least some chocolate. And it's incredible that we can
force the universe to reveal its secret to us by
constructing interesting experiments. Right. In some sense, you can think
of an experiment as a specific way to make the
universe show you the answer. You set up your apparatus
so that it tells you whether universe works this way

(03:45):
or that way. And we have lots of different ways
to explore the universe and to force it to tell
us its secrets, from things out in space to incredible
machines we build underground. That sounds great for us, Daniel,
but I feel like it feels a little mean to
the universe, like you're forcing it to do something or
to reveal something about itself. What if the universe doesn't
want so, don't we get consent? Well, you know, I'd

(04:06):
love if we instead just had an oracle. We could
ask the universe questions and it would just answer to
us in our language. That would be awesome. I definitely
would prefer that set up to feeling like the universe
was our partner in this process rather than our slippery adversary.
Oh man, you're consider the university adversary adversarial position to take. Well,
some people in my field think of the universe as

(04:28):
prey and we are the hunters going out. Jeez, I
didn't know physicists were so violent. But I agree with you.
We should just be sitting down with the universe over
a cup of hot cocoa and having a nice chat.
And you're like, quantum mechanics, what's the deal with that?
Then they take a nice deep sip and it just
gets downloaded into my brain. Right, Or if it says no,

(04:49):
you should be respected, it says no, Right, I'm gonna
have to disagree with you on that one. No, if
the universe says no, I still want to have the answer.
I don't think the universe as a whole, as a
physical entity, deserves privacy you. Oh my goodness, I feel
like we're on shaky gra here. Ethnically, if someone says
the same thing about you, would you have to disclose

(05:09):
everything about that anyone asked you because you're part of
the universe technically, so it's anybody's right to know what's
the things that they want to know about you. I'm
part of the universe, but I'm not the universe. If, however,
I was in charge of the physical laws of the universe,
then yes, I wouldn't begrudge my denizens from attempting to
discover the laws under which they ruled. You know, it's

(05:30):
sort of like a Freedom of Information Act. Should you
be able to ask the government about what it's doing
and what the laws are. Wouldn't it seem unfair to
the government enforced laws on you and didn't even tell
you what they were. Well, that's why they have classified information,
which apparently sometimes doesn't matter, or that you can declassify
with just your thoughts. Yeah, I don't think the universe
should have classified information. I mean, it's not like we're

(05:51):
going to war with other universes and it needs to
keep secrets, right, But what if it's patented or what
if it's dangerous information? Well, that is a real concern.
And as we do discover the secrets of the universe,
we learn not just to understand what it's doing, but
also to influence it and manipulated and that, of course
we know leads sometimes too, very powerful, very dangerous technologies.

(06:12):
So there are of course real ethical implications in revealing
how the universe works to the wider human race. Well,
we are definitely hard at work and exploring the universe
and trying to learn more about it, whether or not
we have permission or not. I guess physicists are charging
forward plundering the universe just to line up their pockets.
Politely investigating the universe. That's how I like to think

(06:33):
about it. They see, you're just a member of the
press on behalf of the citizens of the universe. We
would just like to understand what are the rules we
are living by? Thank you very much. And there is
a lot to learn and a lot that we have
learned about the universe, including what things are made of.
We've made an incredible amount of progress understanding the particles
and all of the forces that govern those particles that

(06:55):
make up you. The reality that we experience turns out
to be very different on a microscopic scale. If you
pull things apart, you discover the table you are sitting
in front of, and the chair you're sitting on, and
even you are made out of these funny little objects
that weave themselves together with special rules to create the
reality that we experience. But as you zoom down to

(07:17):
that microscopic scale, you discovered the rules that they follow
are really quite different. They are quantum mechanical objects, and
they can do things that normal objects like baseballs and
ice cream can't do. It's really incredible how at the
tiny scale those different rules work together so that our
reality emerges. Yep. And we've seen a lot about what
reality is made out of, what the atoms and your

(07:39):
body are made out of, and how they work and
how they interact with each other. So the question now
is what else is there to know? I mean, I
know that I'm made out of electrons quarks. What else
is there to know? Daniel, Well, listener to this podcast.
Of course we'll know that there's never an end to
the questions. There's so much that we don't understand yet
about the universe. Sure, we take you apart and say

(08:01):
you're made of electrons and protons and neutrons which are
made up of quarks, but we don't know what's inside
those electrons and quirks, if anything. And there's still lots
of mysteries that we have not unraveled. Patterns in all
the particles that we've seen that remain unexplained, and then
even bigger mysteries like is dark matter made of particles?
And how does gravity work for particles? There's so much

(08:24):
still left to do. Yes, we have talked a lot
about the mysteries that are still in particle physics, but
I guess maybe in terms of the popular consciousness of
the quest for understanding particles, people clearly partly remember the
discovery of the Higgs boson. That was a big deal.
That was a big deal, and it was an important
moment in particle physics because it marked sort of the

(08:45):
end of an era. You know. We have lots of
questions about the particles we have discovered, but those questions
are sort of like can we use this to explain
other things like dark matter? Or why is it this
set of particles and not some other But before we
discovered the Higgs boson, we had other questions like how
does this stuff actually all work? Before the Higgs boson,
we didn't even have a really complete picture of how

(09:06):
all the electrons and the corks behaved. So finding the
Higgs boson was sort of like finding the last brick
in that wall. Now we still have questions about why
this wall not some other wall, and can we extend
this wall, build it in other directions. But the Higgs
Boson really did complete the picture of the standard model
as we know it, and that was a very important milestone. Yeah,
it was a big deal because it sort of completed

(09:28):
the standard model, which is the set of particles and
forces that we think make up all matter in the
universe and how it interacts with itself. Um, and so
it was a big deal to find the Higgs Boson.
But I guess you know that was ten years ago, right,
it was discovered in That's a long time ago if
you're ten years old, especially, and so us in the
field of particle physics are wondering what comes next. Was

(09:50):
the Higgs Boson sort of like the last thing we're
ever going to discover? Or does it lead us down
the path towards future discoveries? And so to be on
the podcast, we'll be asking the question was the Higgs
Boson discovery a triumph or a disappointment? Does it after

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

(10:31):
it's been more than ten years since we've been working together,
though sometimes it feels like shorter. Sometimes it feels like forever,
never ending, Daniel in Jorge time dilation, have you been
sucked into the black hole of particle physics? Wait, but
we don't know if there are particles inside the black holes.
Just dive on in and maybe we'll all find out.
But the discovery of the Higgs boson was a pretty
big deal in particle physics, and as you said, it's

(10:53):
sort of finished the picture of the standard model, which
is kind of our view of all the particles that
there are and all the forces that work between m.
And it's sort of hard to remember now because we've
had the Higgs for so long. But before we found
the Higgs, we weren't sure that it was there. There
were other ideas, competing theories in play. Some people predicting

(11:14):
we wouldn't see the Higgs boson, that it doesn't even exist,
some people predicting that we'd see other crazy stuff. So
the discovery of the Higgs boson validated one of those
research directions, but shut down a lot of other possible theories. Yeah,
and so it was more than ten years ago that
it was discovering, and I guess people are kind of
twiddling their thumbs now and wondering, like what else is

(11:35):
the next? Like are we done with particle physics or
is there still more to discover? And in fact, some
people are kind of starting to question the whole field
of particle physics, right. It's a bit of a recent controversy.
It is a tricky topic because these experiments are very expensive.
You know, the LHC costs like ten billion dollars to build,
and so you can always ask, like is that a

(11:55):
good use of our money? Particle physicists tend to justify
by building these things by predicting that we will discover things,
saying like, if we spend this money, we're very likely
to discover X, y Z. That can get them into
a little bit of trouble if they then don't discover
x y Z when you build it, and so some
people are wondering if particle physicists can really be trusted

(12:16):
to make those predictions or not. So that's the question
we'll dive into today. And so, as usual, we were
wondering how many people have thought about this idea, whether
the Higgs was a triumph or a disappointment. So thanks
to everybody who participates in these questions. We're very happy
to have your ideas before we dig into the topic.
So we're very grateful for your participation. If you'd like

(12:37):
to hear your voice for future episodes of the podcast,
please don't be shy. Right to me. Two questions at
Daniel and Jorge dot com. Think about it for a second.
Do you think the discovery of the Higgs boson was
a triumph or a disappointment? Here's what people have to say. Yes,
it certainly was a triumph, but I guess there were
probably some people who were disappointed in some aspect or

(13:02):
other of it. I would say that's uh, three, no
questions about it. I think that it was probably like
a disappointing triumph because they found something, but it probably
wasn't exactly what they expected. To find because it only
happened very briefly, and even though it met the requirements

(13:23):
of what they were looking for, it might have been
a little bit of a disappointment because it was really
hard to find again later. I think the discovery of
the Higgs boson was a triumph because it had been
predicted in theory um, and so when it was found
it um gives on just some confidence in the theory.
All right. Most people think it was a triumph. That's
a that's a good thing for your job security. I

(13:45):
hope all these folks are voting on my promotions. But
how many of those folks are named Higgs? Like I imagine,
if your name is Higgs, then it was definitely a triumph.
Maybe if you have no connection to the bson at
all and now your name is famous, I wonder how
that feels. Actually. Like my wife, for example, her name
is Katrina, and after Hurricane Katrina blew through New Orleans,
everyone's like, oh Katrina, like the hurricane. Are you saying

(14:07):
the Higgs Boson discovery was a disaster. I'm sure that
everybody named Higgs was flooded with emails afterwards. Yeah, I'm
sure it was a heck of a job. But I
guess most people seem to think it was a trial.
That's a good thing, right or I guess mostly you
ask people who like physics, not people who need desperate
funding for other things. That's true. But you can be
a particle physicist and be pro physics and pro discovery

(14:31):
and still think that the Higgs boson discovery was a
little bit of a mixed bag. I personally felt a
little bit of disappointment when we discovered the Higgs boson.
Mm hmm. Interesting. I guess we'll dig into that, but first,
I guess we'll start with the basic discovery. So this
happened in right, What is it that they actually discovered. Yeah,
so it was announced July four, two thousand and twelve,

(14:53):
and what they announced on that day was that they
had enough statistical evidence to say that the Higgs field
exists in the universe. So the Higgs boson and the
Higgs field are slightly separate, but they're related. We've talked
often on the podcast about how particles are like wiggles
in a field. So photon is a wiggle in the
electromagnetic field. An electron is like a wiggle in the

(15:15):
electron field. So there's a field that fills space called
the Higgs field. Then if it gets enough energy in
one spot and it wiggles, then you can say it
makes a particle. So the particle for the Higgs field
is the Higgs boson. And this field is particularly interesting
because it interacts with all the other fields and changes
the way particles move so that they have mass. Right,

(15:37):
But I guess what does it mean that they discovered it? Like,
they probably had an idea that maybe it existed, that
it was in the theory that it could be there,
and then so this discovery that happened ten years ago
was confirmation of the theory, right? Or did they just
find something out of the blue. No, it's not like
they just found it in their coffee one morning and
you know, rain screaming to the papers. It was definitely
a dedicated effort. We thought that it might exist. We

(15:59):
had very clear and crisp theoretical ideas about what it
might be. But it's not enough to just say this
makes sense that the universe would be more mathematically consistent
if it were this case. You need to also make predictions. Remember,
physics is not just descriptive, where we say, here's a
description of everything we've seen in the universe. It needs
to be predictive. It needs to say if this description

(16:20):
of the universe is right, if these concepts are actually
real and not just part of our heads, we should
be able to predict the outcome of some new experiment.
So the Higgs theory predicts that if you collide particles
at very high energy, you can dump some energy into
the Higgs field, make it wiggle, create this Higgs boson,
and see evidence of it coming out of your collisions.

(16:41):
And so that's what we saw in the particle collider.
We created the conditions necessary to make the Higgs field
wiggle in just the right way so we can show
us that it actually exists. Right. You used the Large
Hadron collider in Geneva to speed up particles up to
almost the speed of lights, smash them together, and then,
just like theory predicted, sometimes all of that energy goes

(17:03):
into wiggling the Higgs field. And that was a big
deal because it confirm what the theory said. Right. Yeah,
and the theory predicted exactly how often those protons would
collide to give you a Higgs boson. How long that
Higgs boson would last and what it would turn into
because when you collide protons together, protons are not fundamental particles.
They're not like their own little tiny dots, their little

(17:24):
bags of particles. Each one has quarks inside of it
and blue ones inside of it. So when you smash
them together, what's really going on is that the cork
inside one proton is interacting with a cork inside another proton,
or a gluon from one proton is interacting with a
glue on from the other proton. And that's actually how
you make the Higgs boson. You don't collide the quarks
inside the protons, You collide the gluons to make a

(17:47):
Higgs boson. And so I guess that's why it caused
billions of dollars, because you have to build this huge
facility to create this huge particle accelerator. Because this kind
of thing doesn't happen just like anytime, right, you need
some very special condition. It actually does happen all the
time in the upper atmosphere. Cosmic rays hit the atmosphere
very high energies and create collisions even more powerful than

(18:08):
the ones we create in Geneva. But that's not easy
to control. You don't know where it's going to happen.
You can't set up really elaborate sensitive detectors around those
collisions because it's quantum, mechanical and random. Though a lot
of people do that kind of study of cosmic ray
physics using really interesting detectors on the surface of the ground.
But for our purposes, we need the collisions to happen

(18:29):
in a specific place where we can surround them with
our very sensitive instruments that detect what comes out of
the collision. And so you're right, it's expensive because we
had to build a big tunnel inside which we can
put our colliding beams and magnets to bend those beams,
and little devices to kick those beams to make them
go faster, and more magnets to focus those beams, and
so the whole system costs about ten billion dollars. It's

(18:51):
very specialized. It's not like that kind of thing you
can buy on Amazon for cheap. But I guess, um,
you know, you need this super a special equipment to
kind of create the collisions that then give you the
Higgs boson enough for you to see them. But I
guess also, at the same time, the Higgs boson is
working all the time, right, Like if it's the particle
that gives all the other particles a certain amount of mass,

(19:13):
then it's working. Like right now as I move my arm,
there's are there must be Higgs boson is flying all
over the place. The Higgs field is there all of
the time, and every particle in your body is interacting
with the Higgs field, and the field is there the
same way that like the electromagnetic field is there in
all of space. It may not have a lot of
energy and it may not be excited, but the field exists.
Like you have to empty space far far away from

(19:36):
everything else, there's no particles in it, there are still
the fields in there, like the capacity to have particles,
like a parking lot with empty spaces in it, right,
And so in that same sense, the field exists throughout
the whole universe. Whenever a particle moves through the universe,
it is interacting with that field, and it's that interaction
that gives the particle mass, that makes it move as

(19:58):
if it had mass. And so in that sense, the
Higgs field is interacting with you. And you can also
technically say that there are Higgs bosons doing it but
they're virtual Higgs bosons in the way we can replace
the concept of a field as like an infinite sum
over virtual particles. If you prefer that way of thinking
about it. I do prefer that way of think about it,
even for my every day life. No, I'm just kidding,

(20:22):
but I think you're saying that it's a field, and
so you need some kind of particle to interact with it, right,
And that's where the virtual Higgs bosons come in. Remember,
there's sort of two pictures of what happens microscopically with interactions.
Either you can imagine that a particles interacting with the
field produced by another particle, Like when you have two electrons,
maybe one of them creates an electric field that interacts

(20:44):
with the other electron. That's the field picture, or there's
the particle picture. We say the field is really just
a bunch of virtual photons, And so the way two
electrons interact is by passing virtual photons back and forth
between each other. Mathematically the equivalent philosophically, they're completely opposed
to each other. But in the second picture, you can
say that you're passing virtual photons back and forth. So
back to the Higgs field you can say that an

(21:05):
electron moving through the universe is interacting with the Higgs field,
or you can say it's got a lot of virtual
Higgs bosons bouncing off of it all the time. Fundamentally,
it's really equivalent. All right, Well, that's the discovery of
the Higgs boson. It happened ten years ago, and you
were able to produce Higgs boson's, right, You sort of
saw them in the data, and then you say, hey,
that bump, that has to be the Higgs boson. Yeah,

(21:25):
we saw things happen in our collisions that we couldn't
explain without the Higgs boson. It's important to realize also
that this is a statistical discovery. It's not like back
in the old days, like the discovery the positron. Whether
it's just one example and yet a picture of the
path of a particle doing something nothing else could do,
and so you knew it had to be a positron.
In our case. There are other ways to explain any

(21:47):
individual collision. You can't look at one collision and say
this one has to be a Higgs boson, therefore it exists.
There's always other things that can give the same sort
of signature in your instruments. So what we need to
do is a statistic analysis to show we see more
of this particular kind of collision than we would if
we didn't have higgs boson. So it's a little bit
less satisfying because we don't have one we can point to.

(22:10):
We can look at a whole data set and say, oh,
we ran this thing for three years and the trends
in that data are consistent with their being a higgs
boson and not consistent with their not being a higgs boson.
All right, So that's the discovery the Higgs boson. And
so now the question is was it a big triumph,
What's it a good thing for physics, for humanity, for
particle physicists or was it a bit of a disappointment

(22:32):
or maybe a little bit of both. So let's get
into that, But first let's take a quick break. All right,
Today we are debating whether Daniel should keep his job

(22:52):
or not. Vote yes, yes, we still need particle physicists.
You vote yes, you're not desperate to get into another
line of work. I'm having a good time, absolutely yeah.
I love being a particle physicist. M But I guess
there's been a bit of a debate recently online, which
of course makes it real that many particle physicists is

(23:12):
not maybe so justified in its search for particles, and
it maybe doesn't even know it exists. Well, like every
field of science, it depends on funding, and who's paying
for it are the public, me and you and everybody
who pay taxes. Their money which comes from their hard
earned paycheck is going towards this thing, and so it's
very reasonable to ask, like, is it worth the money?
Should we be spending that money on something else, like

(23:34):
going to Mars or fighting climate change or whatever. So
it's totally reasonable to be asking questions like do you
guys know what you're doing, and do you deserve another
big chunk of money to build another collider? Because these
things take decades to build, and so the planning for
them has to start well before you want to turn
the thing on. And we're sort of in the like
middle age of the large hadron collider is not ready

(23:55):
to retire quite yet, but we can sort of see
that on the horizon in tent or of teen years.
And so there's been a lot of conversations recently about
the future of particle physics should we build another collider?
Is it justified? How would you justify it? What do
you need to know before you build it? Do you
need to guarantee that you're going to discover something or
is it enough just to explore the universe. It sounds
like you have a lot to say about this topic. Daniel,

(24:20):
might be a little too close to home. We're sort
of studying this question, I guess in the light of
the Higgs Boson discovery because it was sort of the
last big discovery that particle physicists made a big deal
about and that got the Nobel Prize and made the news.
It was, you know, the completion of the standard model
and our confirmation of it. So maybe it's worth taking
a look back and thinking about whether it's a triumph

(24:42):
or a disappointment. And so Daniel, let's start with the
I guess the pro case in which way it was
the Higgs Boson discovery a trial. It was a triumph,
first of all in the sense that it finally accomplished
something we've been trying to do for a very long time.
We had the idea of the Higgs boson since the sixties,
and everybody agreed it was a very beautiful way to
solve a sort of thorny theoretical problem understanding the connection

(25:06):
between the weak force and electromagnetism, and maybe we can
get into that in a little bit. But people have
been looking for for a long time. You know. The
Americans wanted to build a super conducting super collider in
Texas in the nineties, and we spent billions of dollars
on that before he was canceled, so we didn't get
to discover the Higgs boson. And then the Europeans built
a collider, the Large Electron Positron Collider, that almost discovered

(25:29):
they thought the Higgs boson in the year two thousand
and then the Americans took over again, building the tevertron
in Chicago that would have seen the Higgs boson if
it had been a little bit different, but they didn't
find it. And so for the Large Hydron Collider to
finally discover in two thousand twelve was sort of like
the end of an epic journey, right, because I guess
what kept eluding all of these previous colliders was the

(25:50):
amount of energy, right, because they built one back then,
but it wasn't powerful enough, or it turned out I
guess because they thought maybe it was powerful, but it
wasn't powerful enough to find the Higgs. Because you need
a certain amount of energy in these collisions for the
Higgs to come out. It was harder to find the
people anticipated, and so it took a very powerful machine
in order to create it, and not just powerful in

(26:12):
terms of the energy, but also powerful in terms of
the number of collisions per second, because the Higgs boson
is very very rare. When you smash protons together, most
of the time you don't get a Higgs boson, You
just get more protons coming out. So to see the
Higgs boson, you need lots and lots and lots of collisions.
But because the collisions, which happened every twenty five nano seconds,

(26:33):
were enough for us to build up the statistical picture
of the Higgs boson to claim the discovery. But it's
also true that you just needed more energy to write
that's why the LHC is so big. We also needed
the energy, and the two things go hand in hand.
So it was a triumph in the sense that like
people have been trying for a long times, you know, saying, hey,
if we build this, we'll find it. They didn't find
it to say it, but if you give us more money,

(26:54):
we can build even bear one and then we'll find it.
But they didn't find it, and so finally they said
it's go all in, and they built the L A C.
And they found it, and they found It's sort of
like climbing Mount Everest. You know, you failed a few times,
you didn't quite make it to the peak, so you
definitely want to make it to the peak the next time,
and so when you finally get there, it feels triumphant, right,
And it wouldn't have felt as triumphant if you hadn't

(27:15):
failed a few times along the way. And so I
guess it confirmed Peter Higgs theory that there is a
field called like the Higgs field coincidentally, I guess, and
it's a field that kind of explains how particles have
mass or feel a certain kind of mass or in
a sense inertia. Right, Yeah, that's right, and sort of
most natural version of our theory, particles shouldn't have any

(27:37):
mass at all. They should all be massless. The electron,
the quarks, none of these particles should have any mass
if you want to respect all of the symmetries that
we think exist in the universe, So it was sort
of a puzzle to us, like, well, we measure these
particles to have mass, how is that possible if in
our theory they should all be massless, And particularly saw
that some particles were massless, like the photon is massless,

(28:00):
whereas other particles like the W and the Z particles,
which mathematically are very very similar to the photon, have
a lot of mass. So there was this puzzle like
how do particles get mass? And why do only some
of them get mass? Right, I guess it was kind
of a big question. It's a big question in general,
like why do things have mass? Like why is it
hard to push on things? And why does it take

(28:20):
a while for them to get going if you push
on them. That's a really deep question in philosophy, like
what does inertia exist at all? And it's important to
remember that a lot of the mass in the universe
doesn't come from the Higgs field and the Higgs boson
like the corks, they get their mass from the Higgs field,
but the mass of a proton doesn't come mostly from
the mass of the corks. The mass of the proton

(28:40):
is a lot more than the mass of the pieces
that go into it. Most of the mass of the
proton comes from the energy stored within it, which also
gives it inertia. That's sort of a larger question that
we're going to dig into in a future episode, like
what is inertia? Where does it come from? Anyway? But
the Higgs boson is sort of like just one slice
of that answer. It said as well, for fundamental particles

(29:02):
like the electron and the corks, we think we have
an idea for why they have mass. It doesn't answer
the question why inertia exists at all, but is in
the interaction with the Higgs field sort of it looks
like inertia for fundamental particles. For fundamental particles, it answers
the question. And the mental picture I have is that

(29:22):
you have sort of like the true electron, This like
theoretical quantity that has no mass, and it flies through
the universe, and if the Higgs field wasn't there, it
would move like a photon. But as it flies through
the universe, the Higgs field is there, and Higgs field
interacts with the photon same way that like the electron
interacts with the electromagnetic field. Right, it interacts with these fields,
and that interaction changes how the electron move. It's like

(29:44):
absorbing Higgs bosons. It's radiating Higgs bosons, and the way
that it changes its motion is exactly the same mathematically
as if you just give it mass. If you said, well,
how would an electron with mass move, it moves exactly
the same way as a massless electron that interacts with
the Higgs field. So that interaction with Higgs field changes

(30:04):
how it moves in exactly the same way as if
it just sort of inherently had this inertia. All right, Well,
then I guess the discovery of the Higgs boson in
the experiment confirmed this theory, the Higgs field and these
ideas about how fundamental particles get their mass. I guess
was it a big surprise that you found it or
were people pretty sure that the theory was right. The

(30:25):
field was really divided on the question of whether we
were going to see the Higgs boson or not. But
there was something really important that we knew, which is
that there had to be something else out there. The
theory we had just didn't work. It was missing a
piece without the Higgs boson, it just didn't hang together.
So we either had to see the Higgs boson or
we had to see something else to explain why the

(30:47):
theory didn't break down. So there was a bit of
a no lose situation. We were going to see the
Higgs or we were going to see something else, because
the theory we had just wasn't gonna work. It was
going to bail if the Higgs boson or some thing
else similar didn't exist. And by fail, you mean like
it couldn't explain certain things like why do certain fundamental
particles have mass? That's right, that would be a failure theoretically,

(31:10):
but also the theory we have was going to fail experimentally,
like there were certain kinds of collisions ones where w
Boson's we're going to bounce off of each other where
if the Higgs boson didn't exist, our current theory predicted
that that would happen at an infinite rate, right, It
predicted infinities in our experiments, and we knew that that
couldn't happen. You're not going to collide particles and get

(31:30):
like an infinite outcome, right, And so our theory itself
was failing at predicting what was going to happen. In
the experiments, so we knew that we were going to
see something new, something interesting, something that wasn't predicted by
the theory without the Higgs boson. Either the Higgs boson
was there is going to rescue those predictions, or something
else had to intervene. And I guess it was also

(31:51):
kind of a triumph in the sense of that it
was a huge project. Right as you mentioned, there were
ten thousand people working in it from you know, maybe
hundreds of countries, and so it was kind of a
triumph just for humanity to work on something so big
together and the search for knowledge about the universe, and
then to have it be successful. Yeah, and remember that
certain came out of sort of the ashes of World

(32:12):
War two, trying to bring nations together, getting them to
work together on scientific projects, to build those connections and
to make sure that those communities are tightly woven together.
And so it's a real success that way. It's a
very international place. You go have lunch at certain or coffee,
You're going to hear conversations like fifteen different languages. There's
all sorts of weird cuisines, being drunk in strange hot beverages,

(32:33):
really sort of a fascinating place. And politically it's a
very sort of successful sociological experiment. Can you bring a
bunch of physicists together from around the world and get
them to work together. Well, we have our arguments, but
we made it work. Yeah. And also it was kind
of crazy about it is that you didn't know you
were going to find it, right, Like, it could have
been that you looked and looked and looked and we

(32:53):
didn't find it. It certainly could have been. We had
no guaranteed that the Higgs itself was there. It's just
an idea in somebody's mind. It's incredible that a clever
dude thinking mathematically can say the universe would make more
sense if it was arranged this way rather than the
current idea. And so let's go out and see if
that's correct. And to have that actually be the way

(33:14):
the universe is right, that we can deduce the mathematical
structure of the universe just by using our minds and
finding patterns, that's really pretty powerful. That's philosophically very deep, right,
And I guess it says you mentioned the end of
a long string of similar discoveries, right, like you that's
how you build out. The standard model is people would
look at the theory and say, hey, maybe we should

(33:34):
we should probably find a particle here, And then you
go out and build a collider and you would find
a particle. I guess I gave you some encouragement that
you might find it. Yeah, there have been times in
the past when we expected to see something and then
found it, like the top cork or the bottom pork,
these other quirks and leptons. There are also times when
there were surprises, like the discovery of the Muan was
a big shocker to everybody. I have a whole bunch

(33:56):
of podcast episodes about the discovery of each of the particles.
Go back and check these out, because each one is
a really interesting history of false starts and dead ends
and final triumphs. Right, And I guess maybe a question
is why did it take so many generations of colliders
to find it? Didn't you have from the theory at
the beginning. Didn't you know how much energy you would need?

(34:16):
Or the theory kind of evolve as you kept coming
up with empty hands. Now, great question. The theory does
not predict how heavy the Higgs particle itself is. It
tells us that the field or something like it has
to be there, But the actual mass of the particle,
it is just a number. It's a parameter of the
theory isn't predicted, and so that meant we didn't know
exactly how big the collider had to be. It could

(34:38):
have been that the Higgs boson was much much heavier
and we wouldn't see it at these colliders, And so
people were excited and at least at the time, it
seemed like a huge triumph for science and for humanity. Right,
it was a big deal. People were happy. Did you
shake hands with all ten thousand of your collaborators or
at least fiz bomp. You know, there was definitely a
lot of celebrating going on, even though it had been

(34:58):
sort of slowly of involving, and we saw it sort
of rising out of the fog of the data bit
by bit over the year. The day that it was
announced was a big moment at CERN. People lined up
to being the auditorium that I camped out the night
before to make sure they got a spot to be
in the room when they was announced. Peter Higgs himself
had flown in for the occasion, though I think he
fell asleep during the announcement. Well, I think the man

(35:20):
deserved the nap. I mean he did. He did most
of the work, right, He's been waiting for fifty years
for us to follow up on his efforts. Absolutely, I'm
sure he didn't need to hear one more talk about
the Higgs boson. So there definitely was a sense of
celebration and you know, something accomplished on that moment. It's
it's good to mark these events in your life, right,
not to let them slide by. That's why we have birthdays.

(35:41):
Your birthday is not actually any different from any other day,
but it's good to mark the passage of time and say, hey,
I did it one more year. And in that same sense,
it was good to say here we draw the line.
Now we declared discovered. Let's congratulate ourselves. Yeah, And so
one way to look at it is that the discovery
of the Higgs boson was a triumph for scientists for humanity.
But you might also say that it was a disappointment

(36:02):
or maybe the start of the end of particle physics.
So let's get into that point of view. But first
let's take another quick break. All Right, we are celebrating

(36:24):
Daniel's birthday. Happy birthday, Daniel, It's not my birthday. Oh
wait what wait? I thought you said it was good
to celebrate your birthday every day. It's good to mark
those occasions in your life when you've achieved something. You know,
you get a new job, you get a promotion, you
get married, you have a kid, these kind of things.
I think it's good to celebrate moments in life. I
guess if I celebrated my birthday every day, I would

(36:46):
be what years old? And if you eat cake every
day you probably wouldn't live as long anyway. Be a
lot of candles to blow out. All right, we're talking
about selling the celebration of the Higgs Boson discovery, which
was a big deal at the time and was considered
and still is considered a triumph. But now we're going
to take the opposite view and think about whether maybe
it's a disappointment for particle physics, whether or not we

(37:09):
can expect more things from particle physics, and whether or
not we should keep hiring people like Daniel, and by extension,
me who interviews and talks to people like Daniel. Well,
I think it's valuable to take a time machine back
to before we discover the Higgs boson. And remember that
there were lots of other ideas. Peter Higgs had his
theory about how particles get mass and how to solve
these other technical problems in the Standard model, But there

(37:31):
were competitors out there. There were people with other ways
to solve the same problem, to give particles mass, and
to patch up the other problems in the Standard model,
and we just didn't know what we were going to discover. Wow, wait,
so how did they pick the Higgs boson as the
preferred solution to pour billions of dollars into. Well, when
we build a large hige On collider, we try to

(37:51):
set it up so we could discover any of those things.
It wasn't just a Higgs Boson search machine. It was like, hey,
let's explore the universe and see what's out there and
set ourselves up to be able to discover the Higgs boson.
But we were also capable of discovering other things. There
was another theory, for example, called technique color, which was
like a super fancy version of the strong force, which

(38:12):
you remember uses colors to describe its charges. Technicolor was
like a super powerful version of color and it could
also give particles mass. Isn't that a registered trademark you
use it or is that why it was projected? Well,
it wasn't discovered. The universe doesn't seem to respect it,
so we didn't have to worry about those legal issues.
I mean, the universe is not in technicolor not as

(38:35):
far as we know. Yeah, there were theories, for example,
that like top corks could bind themselves together into weird
particles that could sort of function like a Higgs boson
and do its job instead of having Higgs boson. So
there were definitely other ideas out there. Why was the
Higgs boson theory itself the most popular, the most widely
talked about. That's just a question of like what particle

(38:56):
physicists thought might be reality. It's sort of like a
popular any contest. But they definitely were other ideas out there,
and so what we ended up discovering was sort of
like the most widely expected one, which, in some sense,
if you're looking to learn things about the universe, can
be seen as a disappointment because there was the opportunity
there for something crazy to happen, for us to all

(39:17):
get surprised, right, I know, you like to take this
point of view, and I wonder if part of it
is that, you know, if you consider the Higgs Boson
discovery to be basically the end all, be all triumph
of particle physics, that sort of leads the question of, like,
why do we need particle physics anymore? And so I know,
you like to sort of take the point of view
that there are still a lot of interesting things to
discover out there. And part of it is sort of

(39:39):
thinking about the Higgs Boson discovery as a little bit
of a disappointment because it's sort of confirmed all of
our theories, which is, I guess if you're a young scientist,
is bad news. But maybe you're an old scientists it's
good news because I think you can retire officially that
makes me young, I suppose, yeah. I mean I like
discoveries that lead to more questions. Right, you find something new,

(39:59):
like well, why is it this way and not some
other way? Or it gives you a clue about how
the universe works that spurs more investigation. The Higgs Boson
was sort of like the simplest, most vanilla, most boring
end to the story that wrapped up all the threads
in a way that didn't give us a clue necessarily
about what came next, and it could have been very different.
We could have found like a really weird Higgs boson

(40:21):
there was sort of Higgs like but did things we
didn't understand. Or we could have found something totally weird
and totally different that solved the same problem that Higgs did,
but had been completely unexpected, and that would have been
a huge clue that we were on the wrong track
and a way to learn about what the right track was. Instead,
we sort of like wrapped up all the threads nicely,

(40:41):
like at the end of every Disney movie, without a
clear path to follow up on, you're like, how are
they going to make a sequel? But it's something this
confirms that you're on the right track. Isn't that good?
And doesn't that also leaves you a lot of possibilities
for the future, Like why do you have to show
that you're on the wrong track to make more discoveries. Well,
in this case, remember sort of like the end of
a story, it's the last brick in the standard model,

(41:03):
and the standard mall itself, the openings, the holes and
it were great clues to know where to look to
find more stuff. We're trying to flesh that out, and
then look at it and say, well, what does this
tell us? And so it's sort of the end of
one story, which is like, how do we fill all
the holes in the standard model? So now there aren't
any holes in the standard model from that perspective, so
we have to pivot and ask different kinds of questions

(41:25):
and say, all right, if this is the standard model,
we have to ask like why is it this way?
Why is there some other standard model? Or ask bigger
questions like well, what about the rest of the universe
that the standard model doesn't describe, like dark matter and
dark energy. So it's the sort of the end of
the line of one kind of question. Of course, it
doesn't shut down lots of other kinds of questions that

(41:45):
we can ask. But you know, it's a disappointment if
you imagine another alternative world where we had found not
the Higgs boson, but something else totally weird and different.
They gave us like very immediate, tangible things to follow
up on. Right, Well, although I feel like you're telling
you're saying that it was a disappointment and that it
didn't give you more work as a particle physicist, right, Like,

(42:07):
if you're a particle physicist and you discover something and
confirm its validity, then that doesn't leave much work for you.
In that sense is a disappointment for you. But for
all the people who worked up to towards confirming maybe
the Higgs theory, then it's not a disappointment, right. Yeah.
Whether it's a disappointment depends on your goal. If your
goal is to complete the standard model and put it
away in a package on a shelf and go like, oh,

(42:27):
how pretty, then yeah, that's not disappointing. But if your
goal is to understand the nature of the universe, then
you want dangling threads to pull on, you know, just
to paint the picture more concretely, something else we might
have found was something like a supersymmetry, this idea that
every particle that we have is actually just one of
a pair, that for the electron, there's another version of it,

(42:48):
and for every cork there's another version of it. This
is also a prediction for something we might find the
large hit dron collider, and if we had found the
beginnings of that, it would have led to lots of
really interesting research directions. To study all of these new
particles and what they do and what it means about
the universe. But so far we haven't seen them, and
so some of the people who predicted that we would

(43:08):
see them at the large age on collider are eating
crow a little bit. But I feel like you're sort
of saying, like, you know, the goal is to understand
the universe. So if we confirm the standard model, doesn't
that also mean that we're understanding the universe? And in
a way, it's sort of like confirming that we understand
the universe. Why is that a bad thing? In terms
of understanding the universe? It's not a bad thing. It's
a very pretty picture. But we have other deeper questions,

(43:30):
right It doesn't answer the deepest questions about the nature
of reality. Is just sort of like wraps up a
little corner of it as a way to make progress
on the bigger questions about how the whole universe works.
And so it means that maybe this area isn't the
most fertile ground anymore for answering those bigger, deeper questions.
You know, we have to go to other places where
we have hints about how things are not quite working.

(43:52):
Threads we can pull on to try to answer the
questions about like what is the whole universe made out of?
What is the underlying theory of physics for everything? Because
we know the theory we have now the Standard model
is definitely not the final answer. But wrapping these threads
up so nicely doesn't give us immediate directions to explore
to finding that final answer. Well, I guess the question
is how does the Standard model, or knowing that the

(44:14):
Standard Model is right, how does that not help us
understand some of these deeper questions, like if it's right,
then doesn't that tell us that that is the nature
of the universe. Well, in an example is dark matter.
We know that there's more stuff out there in the
universe than that is described by the Standard model. Right,
the Standard Model describes quirks and electrons which build up atoms,
but we know that dark matter is not made of

(44:36):
those particles. One possibility is that we discovered at the
Large Hadron Collider a Higgs boson which interacts with dark matter,
which gives us like a portal into exploring dark matter.
Or we could have discovered supersymmetric particles, some of which
are the dark matter. So in those alternate scenarios where
we hadn't just discovered like the vanilla Higgs boson and
nothing else. We could have been cracking open this big

(44:58):
puzzle about dark matter, right, which is a really big
question in physics. But discovering the vanilla Higgs in exactly
this way doesn't give us any access to what dark
matter is. Well, I should you say that. I'm a
big fan of vanilla. It's my favorite ice cream flavor,
so I take offense that just you using it in
such a derogatory way. I mean, it's delicious, but you

(45:19):
always feel like you didn't really have dessert. Well, it's
just a matter of taste here, But I mean, I
feel like if you're not finding something related to dark
matter at the large out and collider, isn't that also
good news? That just means you have to look elsewhere
for clues about dark matter. Maybe she just not in
a particle collider. Yeah, it tells you something about what
dark matter isn't. But it's more exciting to discover what

(45:40):
dark matter is than what it Isn't You mean you
wish as a particle physicist, you wish the dark matter
I had more to do with particle physics. Yeah, it's
a little bit disappointing, which is the question I think
we're trying to answer, that we didn't also discover dark matter,
or for example, we might have created many black holes
which evaporated and gave us clues about the nature of
quantum graph Right, what is gravity for particles? Unifying relativity

(46:04):
and quantum mechanics for the first time ever, that could
have been a possibility, but it didn't happen. So yes,
it was a triumph, but sort of in the spectrum
of other discoveries, we might have made a sort of
minor in comparison to other bigger winds, right, But I
guess I just want to I'm trying to understand the
distinction here. It's sort of a disappointment, but maybe from

(46:24):
only from the point of view of a particle physicist, right, Like,
it doesn't open up particle physicists search for these bigger questions,
but that doesn't mean that people can search for these
big questions elsewhere or in other ways. Yes, absolutely, from
the narrow point of view of a collider particle physicist,
it's a disappointment. There are definitely areas in physics and
even in particle physics where other people can follow up

(46:45):
on these questions searching for dark mattering underground laboratories or
with space telescopes. We heard recently about interesting discoveries with
muans and their magnetic moments, which gives a hint about
how my supersymmetry might actually exist. But it could just
be too heavy for the large Hadron collider to discover.
But you know, we're in the era where we're asking
the question should the public give us another ten or

(47:07):
twenty billion dollars to build another of these colliders and
has an impact on the rest of the community. That's
why we sort of put a microscope on the collider
physics and say, was this the success? Should we do
this again? How much do we have to have a
guarantee of a future discovery before we spend another ten
billion dollars. So it is a disappointment for you and
ten thousand of my friends and ten thousands of your

(47:30):
friends out of the eight billion people on this planet.
But it's maybe an exciting news for people who are
not in particle physics, who are maybe now have more
funding available or potentially available to study their ideas for
what these big topics might be. Well I think there
is that myth often that if you cancel a big
science project that that money will then get distributed to
other science projects and sort of pits scientists against each other.

(47:53):
But you know it doesn't work that way. When they
cancel the super Conducting super Collider, they weren't like, well,
who wants this ten billion? And everybody just come in
and take a handful. You know that money went away.
The amount of money we spend as a society is
not fixed, right. We can decide to spend more or
we can decide to spend less. So in my view,
I think it's always good to spend more money on science.
It's an investment in the future. So we don't need

(48:16):
to pit the field of science against each other. But
we do need to make sure that the science we're
doing is well justified and well motivated and interesting and
hopefully a lot of it going to particles you want
to be opposed to that, I'll make sure that there's
vanilla ice cream in the cafeteriat cern Okay, then I'm
on board throwing some root beer and we can make
root beer floats, and I'm all in. This is how

(48:37):
politics happens, man, It's all about special interests. It's all
about ice cream, all right. Well, an interesting and personal
debate here for at least one of us about the
future of particle physics and how do you justify future
work in it and exploration in it. Danny, you're a
big fan of exploration, right I am. And as we
make these arguments for new colliders, to me, it's not
important whether we know we will find something. We were

(49:00):
very confident we would find something with the late C
But to me, it's worth it just to explore the universe.
You know, we land probes on alien moons and planets
to see what's there without knowing in advance what we
might find, because we are curious. And in the same way,
building these colliders and exploring reality and its smallest scale
is always worth the money, at least to me. All right, Well,

(49:22):
we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us, See
you next time. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel
and Jorge explained. The Universe is a production of I
Heart Radio. For more podcast for my Heart Radio, visit
the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you

(49:45):
listen to your favorite shows. Yeah,