Was the Higgs boson discovery a triumph or disappointment?

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Speaker 1: 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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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 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 details of this universe, all the amazing things that it does out there in deep space, and all the incredible things we discover in our particle colliders. That's right, because science is for everybody. We are all part of the human race, and this race to understand the universe and how it works and how it came to be, so that we can understand more about our context in the cosmos, and also hopefully 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 end of an era. You know. We have lots of questions about the particles we have discovered, but those questions are sort of like can we use this to explain other things like dark matter? Or why is it this set of particles and not some other But before we discovered the Higgs boson, we had other questions like how does this stuff actually all work? Before the Higgs boson, we didn't even have a really complete picture of how all the electrons and the corks behaved. So finding the Higgs boson was sort of like finding the last brick in that wall. Now we still have questions about why this wall not some other wall, and can we extend this wall, build it in other directions. But the Higgs Boson really did complete the picture of the standard model as we know it, and that was a very important milestone. Yeah, it was a big deal because it sort of completed the standard model, which is the set of particles and forces that we think make up all matter in the universe and how it interacts with itself. 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 the Higgs Boson discovery was a disaster. I'm sure that everybody named Higgs was flooded with emails afterwards. Yeah, I'm sure it was a heck of a job. But I guess most people seem to think it was a trial. That's a good thing, right or I guess mostly you ask people who like physics, not people who need desperate funding for other things. That's true. But you can be a particle physicist and be pro physics and pro discovery and still think that the Higgs boson discovery was a little bit of a mixed bag. I personally felt a little bit of disappointment when we discovered the Higgs boson. 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, 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 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, 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 had very clear and crisp theoretical ideas about what it might be. But it's not enough to just say this makes sense that the universe would be more mathematically consistent if it were this case. You need to also make predictions. Remember, physics is not just descriptive, where we say, here's a description of everything we've seen in the universe. It needs to be predictive. It needs to say if this description of the universe is right, if these concepts are actually real and not just part of our heads, we should be able to predict the outcome of some new experiment. So the Higgs theory predicts that if you collide particles at very high energy, you can dump some energy into the Higgs field, make it wiggle, create this Higgs boson, and see evidence of it coming out of your collisions. And so that's what we saw in the particle collider. We created the conditions necessary to make the Higgs field wiggle in just the right way so we can show us that it actually exists. Right. You used the Large Hadron collider in Geneva to speed up particles up to almost the speed of lights, smash them together, and then, just like theory predicted, sometimes all of that energy goes 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 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 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 the ones we create in Geneva. But that's not easy to control. You don't know where it's going to happen. You can't set up really elaborate sensitive detectors around those collisions because it's quantum, mechanical and random. Though a lot of people do that kind of study of cosmic ray physics using really interesting detectors on the surface of the ground. But for our purposes, we need the collisions to happen in a specific place where we can surround them with our very sensitive instruments that detect what comes out of the collision. And so you're right, it's expensive because we had to build a big tunnel inside which we can put our colliding beams and magnets to bend those beams, and little devices to kick those beams to make them go faster, and more magnets to focus those beams, and so the whole system costs about ten billion dollars. It's 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, 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 everything else, there's no particles in it, there are still the fields in there, like the capacity to have particles, like a parking lot with empty spaces in it, right, And so in that same sense, the field exists throughout the whole universe. Whenever a particle moves through the universe, it is interacting with that field, and it's that interaction that gives the particle mass, that makes it move as if it had mass. And so in that sense, the Higgs field is interacting with you. And you can also technically say that there are Higgs bosons doing it but they're virtual Higgs bosons in the way we can replace the concept of a field as like an infinite sum over virtual particles. If you prefer that way of thinking about it. I do prefer that way of think about it, even for my every day life. No, I'm just kidding, but I think you're saying that it's a field, and so you need some kind of particle to interact with it, right, And that's where the virtual Higgs bosons come in. 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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, whereas other particles like the W and the Z particles, which mathematically are very very similar to the photon, have a lot of mass. So there was this puzzle like how do particles get mass? And why do only some of them get mass? Right, I guess it was kind of a big question. It's a big question in general, like why do things have mass? Like why is it hard to push on things? And why does it take a while for them to get going if you push on them. That's a really deep question in philosophy, like what does inertia exist at all? And it's important to remember that a lot of the mass in the universe doesn't come from the Higgs field and the Higgs boson like the 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 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 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 you have sort of like the true electron, This like theoretical quantity that has no mass, and it flies through the universe, and if the Higgs field wasn't there, it would move like a photon. But as it flies through the universe, the Higgs field is there, and Higgs field interacts with the photon same way that like the electron interacts with the electromagnetic field. Right, it interacts with these fields, and that interaction changes how the electron move. It's like absorbing Higgs bosons. It's radiating Higgs bosons, and the way that it changes its motion is exactly the same mathematically as if you just 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 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 field was really divided on the question of whether we were going to see the Higgs boson or not. But there was something really important that we knew, which is that there had to be something else out there. The theory we had just didn't work. It was missing a piece without the Higgs boson, it just didn't hang together. So we either had to see the Higgs boson or we had to see something else to explain why the theory didn't break down. So there was a bit of a no lose situation. We were going to see the Higgs or we were going to see something else, because the theory we had just wasn't 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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? 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 far as we know. Yeah, there were theories, for example, that like top corks could bind themselves together into weird particles that could sort of function like a Higgs boson and do its job instead of having Higgs boson. So there were definitely other ideas out there. Why was the Higgs boson theory itself the most popular, the most widely talked about. That's just a question of like what particle physicists thought might be reality. 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 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 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, 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 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, 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, 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 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 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, 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, 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, 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 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, 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. Threads we can pull on to try to answer the questions about like what is the whole universe made out of? What is the underlying theory of physics for everything? Because we know the theory we have now the Standard model is definitely not the final answer. But wrapping these threads up so nicely doesn't give us immediate directions to explore to finding that final answer. Well, I guess the question is how does the Standard model, or knowing that the Standard Model is right, how does that not help us understand some of these deeper questions, like if it's right, then doesn't that tell us that that is the nature of the universe. Well, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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. 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