God, it was it was one of the most exciting days of my life by far. He's out there in terms of all of the best experiences That's doctor Archinti Arana recounting her time at CERN at the time of the announcement of the discovery of the Higgs boson. Welcome along to the Physics World Stories podcast. I'm Andrew Lester. And today, we'll be talking to 2 of the people who've been working in communications at CERN as it celebrates its 70th birth.
Later, we'll hear from James Gillies on how his role of head of comms at CERN gave him the opportunity to meet filmmakers, actors, and be at the heart of things with some of the most amazing particle physics stories of recent history. But first, let's get back to doctor Achinthia Rao. I was working in the CMS communications group at the time, and we knew the CMS result. We didn't know the ATLAS result. The ATLAS
researchers didn't know the CMS result. I think the only person who knew both sets of results, maybe their respective spokespersons and Rolf Heuer, who is the the director general of CERN at the time. So we were preparing our public communications because we had to have something on our website that described the research and the results in terms that could be understood by people who aren't experts.
And we had also translated that statement into about 20 languages within the collaboration itself. So I was there working on the site, putting up the latest figures that we're getting as more data was still, you know, being crunched at the last minute, and figures were being updated for aesthetic reasons, for accuracy reasons, all of this stuff, running up and down 2 floors between my office to the spokesperson's office to get have him send me the latest figures and
whatnot. It was really exciting. I was at CERN until very late that night. I think I left it left, quarter past midnight or something to go home. I think I caught the last tram available to go back home. Barely slept, got in the next morning, bright and early for the for the seminar. The seminar was starting outrageously early because it was jointly organized by the, ICHEP conference, the International Conference of High Energy
Physics that was taking place in Melbourne. They wanted to present the results at the conference, but they also didn't want the results to be presented away from CERN because all of CERN's big discoveries had been announced at CERN. So there was this hybrid nature of the conference where in Melbourne, there was this auditorium full of people that were watching the live stream coming out of and we had an auditorium full of people who were there as well.
And journalists in the next room, press conference, whatnot. So Yeah. I was in the I was in the room next to where the announcement was happening, preparing our website for going live. That was the room where the press conference was held. I mean, all of this is known to the world. It was just it was so fascinating, and there was this huge sense of relief.
Often the talks happen, often the applause, after having the people who ended up winning the Nobel Prize, Peter Higgs and and, Francois Englert speak. You had the press conference with the spokespersons of the experiments, the directors, the leading the heads of the accelerator divisions and so forth. We went out for lunch and it was just the most release that you could feel rippling across the entire laboratory.
I don't remember what I ate. I think it was pizzas or something, but we just all went and sat down and had this massive sense of release, not relief, just this this bent up excitement that had come to a head on day and then that just that relaxation that wow. This is done. This is monumental. Soak it in. This is a special day for humanity, for our for for us as a species having discovered this. I don't think I got much work done the rest of the day, I'll be honest.
I can imagine. But, yeah, it was it was such a lovely day. There's just smiles all around. Like, everywhere you look, you know, you usually see people smiling, and you don't always see people smiling all the time at a laboratory environment where people are always thinking about their work and there's lots going on and stuff. There were just smiles everywhere and just this general sense of joy, it was beautiful.
For a few years between 2010 and 2021, I worked, as a science communicator in various capacities at CERN, which was which was also very enjoyable. So how did that come about? How did you end up at CERN? Entirely serendipitously. There was no, intention, and sometimes things just end up working out for you, and I was really, really
fortunate that it did. I was doing a master's in science journalism at City University London at the time, and 2010, if you remember, was the year that the, Large Hadron Collider had been switched on.
Well, it had its proper sort of physics collisions taking place because they had tried to switch it on in 2,008, and there was a slight incident with a very small amount of resistance building up in one of the connections around the the ring of the accelerator, which caused buildup of heat and then caused like an explosive leak of gases. So they spent about a year or so repairing it. In 2010, March was the was the moment when they switched it back on,
and they had collisions and stuff. And so we were a group of science journalism students, and we were really excited by this. And we were in London at the time, so we got in touch with CERN and said, can we just come as journalism assigned to journalism students and and sort of learn about the work that you
do? So we just went as tourists effectively on a on a guided tour of CERN, where in fact, a large part of the tour was organized by James Gillies, who was head of communications at CERN at the time. And over the course of the day, we met loads of people, and one of them, Dave Barney, who was in charge of communications and outreach for CMS at the time. He for CMS is one of the 4 big, particle physics experiments that are based at the
Large Hadron Collider. And he just happened to mention that they were looking for a science writer and that any of us interested should apply, so I did, and I was very fortunate to have been chosen. And then I stayed with CMS for seven and a half years, and then I moved to the central communications team for the last 3 years that I was at. Okay. And during that time, there was a discovery? There was a very interesting discovery. I think it happened to capture,
attention from all around the globe. This was, of course, the discovery of the Higgs boson, which your listeners might be familiar with. And, yeah, I was really fortunate to be there and sort of, you know, not being a physicist myself, have the great privilege of sticking my face up to the glass and observing everything that was happening. I was embedded within the lab as the discovery was unfolding, and it was it's a very exciting
time. Yeah. But what did you see then when you got your face pressed up against the glass? Well, one of the things that was very new for me to learn when I first moved to CERN was was the duration that it takes for you to attain a discovery. This isn't something where you put 2 sort of different droplets of chemicals into a test tube and it goes a certain color and you
know you found something new. This is statistical accumulation of a large amount of data and through the examination of that data that is gathered over years, you might end up seeing a signal that corresponds to a prediction that has been made in theory. So one of the things I learned was that it takes these things take time. So I joined in 2010 about 6 months after they had started recording collisions at the at the Large Hadron Collider. I was working on CMS.
CMS and ATLAS were the 2 big detectors that eventually found the Higgs boson, and I could see the interest building. At the time, there were loads of different Higgs analysis groups that were all devoted to Higgs searches. Since then, obviously, some of those Higgs analysis groups have evolved to Higgs measurements now that
we know that the particle exists. But back then, it was just this excitement of searching for the Higgs boson and looking for signals and sort of recognizing that things would take time, but how can we get there faster? How can we get there more efficiently?
And this was a combination of the teams performing the experimental teams performing better than they'd expected with their detectors because initially when they had been conceptualized, there were certain limitations around how quickly they could they could record data, how much data they could record, how long would it take
to analyze the data and so forth. And these were the boundaries that the researchers were really really really keen on pushing and at the same time the accelerator which, you know, most powerful accelerator in the world, but it's still a prototype. Like, there isn't one that you've built before, tested it, perfected it, and then built the actual one. Your main piece of equipment is your is the prototype
as well. So the accelerator engineers were learning just how to crank up the performance of the machine in order to deliver even more collisions per second. And then the experiments had to respond to that by saying, oh, if you're giving us more collisions per second, we have to have the capacity to process more collisions per second because it's sort of like, you know, looking at multiple,
things happening in a photograph. If you want to capture each of the multiple things, you really need to slow down the the photograph, the the rate at which you're taking photographs and take lots of them. If you just take one long exposure photograph, you'll see all of the things happening at once and you won't be able to tell pull up the pull the images apart to identify each of the individual signals that you're trying to study. So, yeah, you can give the accelerator can
give all the collisions they want to. Can the can the can the experiments and detectors respond to it? So it was all this work that was happening, and there were some sort of early signs in, in 2011 where both CMS and ATLAS began to see an excess in their data that happened to be in the same range. That's when you start getting excited. I mean, these excesses can go away even if they're in the same range. Nature is nothing,
if not, you know, playful at time. Like, you could just statistically end up seeing excesses in the same place in your data that correspond to a signal, and then they can evaporate. But they happen to see something exciting, and that was when people at CERN, you know, the experimental team really began to get you could you could sense the excitement ramping up. You could sense the feelings of we might have something after about, what, 60 years of waiting, we might have
something. But were there, like, conversations happening in the cafeteria Or was it literally you could see people getting used to it? So part of being part of being that sort of non physicist with my face pressed up against the glass being embedded in the organization was the fact that I could attend the meetings where they were presenting these things internally.
Now, listeners might not entirely know how the the the entire structure of the experiments at CERN is, but CMS and ATLAS, the 2 so called general purpose detectors, are designed entirely differently. They're looking to study the same physics signatures, but the last thing you want to do is build build an identical detector and put it in 2 places. So if you see a signal, well, you don't know if it's nature showing you something new or it's just an anomaly in the same hardware that's now
in 2 locations. So CMS and Atlas, completely different designs operated by entirely independent teams. They don't share their data with them on with each other until they've seen something, and there's always competition because CMS wants to get to a new measurement first. Atlas wants to get to a even more accurate measurement after that or something like that. You know? There's this constant tussle.
So in that sense, you had when I was in these meetings, they were internal meetings, it was CMS meetings, and they're very procedural, like, it takes a really long time to get to the point where you can say we found something. Each analysis group has to discuss, are we able to separate the signal of 2 photons that might have emerged from the same interaction from sort of random photons that are produced or photons coming from different interactions that might not be corresponding to the Higgs.
How good is your detector at isolating electrons and muons and sort of joining them up to the point at which the collision took place? All of these things require study because once again, the detectors are prototyped as well. So the 1st few months were a lot of understanding how your machine works, rediscovering signals of the standard model
that had been found over 60 years. You're trying to rediscover everything in the space of 6 months and said, right, we can see all the predicted signatures, the particles that had been discovered over the course of half a decade we found back in half a year. And then in those internal meetings, there was just a sense of, you know, occasionally excitement, occasionally frustration, occasionally very heated discussions. Why can't we do this better? People won't accept it if we publish
something with the these these values. We need to really tweak the statistics here and this, that, and the other. And when you're in a massive collaboration with 2 and a half 1000 people signing every research paper, there are lots of people with diverse expertises. And all of those expertises have to combine together in order for you to achieve something.
And so those meetings are very exciting. But, you know, the last sort of 6 months, that was where you could sense, right, something is happening. Okay. The reason it was discovered is because they tweaked it. They tweaked the Large Hadron Collider. They tweaked the detectors to a point where they were going to detect it. It was always there.
The particles were always being created or is it particular Well, they they improved the performance in order to find it sooner than one would have expected at the start. They they didn't have to fine tune it in order to produce it itself, but they had to increase the rate at which you would produce them so that you will see the signal
sooner. So what happens at at a particle accelerator, and you'll have to forgive me for both simplifying this for you and for myself largely because my understanding of it is as that of a of a layperson from the outside, but what happens is when you collide 2 protons together it's the components of the protons, the quarks, and the gluons within that interact that are the ones that are actually colliding And because you could have any combination of these things
colliding, you cannot predict the exact energy at which the collision takes place. So you have a center of mass energy, but then you could have 2 bottom quarks interacting, you could have an up and a down and there's also different combinations that can happen. You can have gluons fusing together to form a Higgs boson as well, all of this
can happen. So when we talk about tweaking the performance what you want to do as an accelerator engineer is to squeeze the bunches of protons as tightly as you can so that you can increase the amount of them smashing into each other when the 2 bunches cross. So you have a couple of 1,000 bunches of protons. Each bunch has a 100,000,000,000 protons in it. They're all sort of flying around the accelerator.
And when they pass through the detectors, they're squeezed together into tight bunches so that when the bunches cross, a handful will hit each other. And it's really a small amount because when you have a 100,000,000,000, 150,000,000,000 particles in each bunch, at least you had at the time, That's one with 11 zeros after it. And then about 30 will hit each other. So it's a very tiny amounts. You wanna squeeze that to the point where those are colliding.
And if that number increases, then the detectors have to start taking those multiple rapid photographs so that they can capture each of the 30, 40, 50 simultaneous collisions that are taking place. So that's what you mean in terms of improving the the performance so that by having more collisions per second, you can gather more data, which is a challenge in itself because where do you store the data? So data storage becomes a challenge. Data
transfer becomes a challenge. There's lots of challenges associated with it. So you had to have technology, computing abilities, the way in which you write the software to record each collision? How can you minimize the amount of storage data you need to capture all the necessary information? You need to tweak your computing capabilities as well. So all of this was happening. All of these tweaks were being done.
These improvements were being done in order for both CMS and Atlas to see the Higgs before the other. Okay. And so then we get to this moment, sort of 6 months out Yeah. And are you allowed to talk about it with people at that moment? So that that's a good good question. So what happened in December 2011 was okay. So the thing is every year, CERN organizes an end of year seminar. This is where all the big research research
collaborations are brought together. Usually, I mean, the last few years, it has been it just focused on the Large Hadron Collider, which is a flagship machine, at at CERN. So they bring together all the research collaborations to come and present their results to the CERN council, to the member states, to all of the researchers around the lab.
And that was when December 2011, 6 months before this the actual discovery, was when CMS and ATLAS both showed bumps in the data, signs that there's something there. And this was meant to be an internal seminar sort of delivered to the community. Right?
And because CERN I know today we're all used to Zoom and webinars and online seminars and stuff, but CERN has been doing video conferencing since the nineties, which it has had to do because of the distributed nature of researchers who are participating in the endeavor from all across the globe. So they had set up a a live stream.
They used to live stream it onto the website so that other members of the research community, you know, those who are located in Asia and the rest of Europe and in in the Americas could all participate in it and and just sort of see the results, see the the research. And CERN has had this tradition of openness, so that was never behind, like, an authentication wall. You do not have to be a member of CERN to see it. You do not have to log in to see it.
Anyone could go and see these web webinars as they were happening. And it so happened that word had gotten out that CMS and Atlas had started to see something. And so all of this was targeting the community of, you know, a few 1,000, tens of 1,000, couple of, you know, 20,000 or so people of whom a handful would actually watch the thing live, several would be at certain, etcetera. Suddenly, the infrastructure was overwhelmed by the number of people who were tuning in,
and the web stream actually went down. I was in India at the time. I was visiting family, and I was trying to watch it from my ancestral hometown on a very poor 3 g network at the time, and I was getting really excited by it. So from then on could you talk about it, you could talk about the fact that there were bumps in the data for both collaborations, What what more could you say? You can't really say we have started doing this analysis
with these things. You can't you can't openly share what specifics you're working on. And so the analysis proceeded, Atlas were doing their analysis, ACM was doing their analysis, and come sort of April, May, that's when you start realizing, the data are building up to the point where we might have statistically significant bumps in the data. But another fascinating complete this this completely fascinated
me when I was there. Another fascinating thing that researchers do in in particle physics is they do something that is known as a blind analysis. They should call it blinds analysis, but essentially you draw blinds over the data or the region of the data that you're interested in. So you have a spread of data. You have you're essentially stacking up a histogram. So on your x axis, the horizontal axis, you have mass range, and on the y axis, you have number of data points that
you have collected at each mass range. So the mass range that you're interested in, that's the one that is covered in blinds, you can't see it, so you apply all of your analysis to the regions lying on either side of that mass range and you do all of your tweaks of your performance, your analysis methods, all of those tweaks happen not in the range that you're interested in. And when you're satisfied with the analysis in the outlying ranges, you then apply that analysis to the blinded
region. It's called the unblinding. And then whatever you get, you get. You cannot unblind it, see that the statistical significance has dropped, and then say, oh, back to the drawing board. You you you just need fresh data at that point. So once you have confidence as a researcher and you as, you know, there's approval processes that you have to go through at at each of the collaborations that can take days weeks to get there.
You apply you do your analysis on either side of your interested data, and then you apply it to the data of interest. That's called an unblinding process. So I went and filmed that for CMS. I went and filmed that, and this research is done by people from all around the world, and we had a a young, student from China. She was a I think she was a doctoral student at the
time. I can't remember now. But she was the one who was presenting the unblinding, and she got really excited because this was a point in which, you know, this is a 2 photon signature of the Higgs boson. So the Higgs boson produced and then transforms into 2 particles of light, 2 photons, collect lots of data to see whether the photons are resonating at a certain energy, at a certain mass
that then tells you there's Higgs. So then she did the unblinding and showed this sort of 2010 data, 2011 data, 2012 data, 6 months worth, and you could see the room get getting to the point where saying we've we've found something. And I filmed this, and I put out a short film on this on the CMS website. I had no filming abilities at the time, I was just there to capture the moment as it was happening.
So it's not the best film, but you can get an insight into what it was like on that day and the excitement around the laboratory. And we went from there to within within handful of weeks from getting to that point to saying we found it we found we found something new. We will, of course, post a link to that video on the physics world website, physics world dot com. We had been discussing for a long time how to tell the world the story of how particle physics research is done.
That it isn't a question of you build the accelerator, you plug it in to the French grid, essentially, press a switch, flip a switch, and then boom, collisions take place, you found a Higgs boson. No. It isn't an instantaneous
thing. It is a process that takes lots of time, that is very procedural, that involves a lot of heated discussions, that involves lots of people having to all agree on something that there are so many of these nuances that could be missed from people making having a different understanding of the of the scientific process when it comes to particle physics research. So our objective, this was a discussion that we had in the communications team. It wasn't just me deciding to go and film.
We had a discussion in the comms team. We had to get permission from the collaboration board chairs and the and, the spokes person of the collaboration to go and film it because they were worried about what are these leaks and all of this. So we couldn't get the CERN communications team to film it because they are not a in coach neutral party at that, I mean, at that point. They're or they're they you know, we didn't we
didn't have control over what would happen. So the collaborations operate separately. So I had to go to the communications team and say, I need advice on how to film. Can you please give me the cameras and the setup and stuff? And then I had to go and film it myself, because we couldn't involve anyone outside. So the idea was not
necessarily from my fascination. I was just fascinated to be there, but we wanted to share the process of scientific research at the energy frontier in particle physics to people who might not be familiar with it. We just wanted to tell a story. And tell a story they did. We'll hear
more from Acentia later in the podcast. But on the Physics World website, you'll find a feature by James Gillies, the former head of communications at CERN, entitled angels and demons, Tom Hanks and Peter Higgs, how CIRM sold its story to the world. And here is James Gillies. I worked there for a very long time. First month in 1986 when I was a graduate student. Worked in research for 8 years before leaving the field completely and going to Paris actually for a couple of
years. And then I worked went back to CERN in 95 and worked in comms, ever since then. And what were you doing in Paris? I worked for British Council for 2 years. Essentially, I I ate for my country. It was, it was a strange it was a great job, actually, but I was I was expected to take people out for lunch, working lunches, of course, and and I was expected to be taken out for lunch as well. And, sort of a measure of your success was how many invitations you got to go for lunch with people.
So, yeah, I got paid to eat in Paris for 2 years. And is that the sort of transition from physics to sort of communications? When I was a physicist, I was the kind of physicist who who the press office would use. So, yeah, media would come and they want to talk to a physicist, and they would talk to me. So they knew me. So when they were hiring, they they they contacted me and say, you know, there's this job coming up. We might be interested. But yeah. So I just
thought that that looks good. It's an opportunity to use my background, my education, doing something that I like and that I think I'm reasonably good at. So, so, yeah, so I applied to them and went back there. Brilliant. I mean, I mean, I assume that your skill at eating food with people came in handy when you had dinner with, Ron Howard, Tom Hanks, and Islet. He came a couple of times. I remember once we we we had lunch with with him, in a very nice restaurant, and it was
very expensive. It's in 20 minutes and taxpayers' money on this. But, and then the second time, it was, yeah, it was it was it was very interesting, actually. I mean, it was the when they when they came to launch the film, it was around the time that Bernie Madoff made off with a lot of people's money. And so, you know, basically a kind of pyramid scheme. This guy was was persuading wealthy people to to invest his money with him and it all just disappeared. That was, that was a big subject of
the conversation. So, you know, the people around the table had not gone for it, but, of course, they knew many people who'd, who'd invested a lot of money in in in that and lost it all. At this point in the conversation, James and I had a little detour into nominative determinism. How could you not when made off made off with people's money?
But I'll save you from that conversation that the reason Tom Hanks, Ron Howard, and Eilat Zurer were gathering at CERN was to make the film Angels and Demons, the 2009 movie directed by Ron Howard based on Dan Brown's book of the same name. As something of a film nerd myself, I wondered what it was like to meet Ron Howard. I really liked him. You know, I thought that I think he
makes good films. I don't I I have no idea whether this is true or not, but but the feeling I got is that he seems to alternate, you know, the the kind of more highbrow films like Frost Nixon with with box office, you know, big box office films like Angels and Demons. So I I think that he kinda likes to make the more intellectual films, but, but he makes the big box office to
to allow him to do that. As I said, that that's a theory, that's just my theory but it's it's, it was kind of the impression I got. And he was very much aware that the the science of the book didn't hold up, but he was also very keen that we didn't go around saying that because he didn't want to be any perception of the of the movie being trashed by CERN. I mean, that was never that was never our our idea at all. I mean, when when they came and said, can we will
you help us? We thought, here's an opportunity at least to to finesse the bad science and and and allow him to make the film. And there's there's no way that that he was not gonna make the film. You know, there was that wasn't an option. And, and we felt that, ignoring it was was not a very good idea either or or then if we were asked about it saying, well, the science is a load of rubbish, isn't it? Wasn't a
good idea either. We we thought as we did with the book that here's an opportunity actually to talk about the reality of antimatter research. And I was very impressed that that they, you know, they the structure of the film is very different from the structure of the book. So in the film, all the certain sequence happens before the opening credits. That's it. And and you're immediately off in Rome with the the ticking bomb
story. There's there's this thing, but they know it's there, and they're trying to catch it before before it goes off. Right? Whereas the book is about half at certain. So I remember when when my boss gave it to me and said read this, you know, my boss was, he majored in English, and he came to CERN to teach technical English to, to scientists. And he had a knack for for comms and and media work, so he evolved into that area.
But in my opinion, you know, angels and demons looks like it's written by somebody who who used to teach creative writing because he all the tricks of the trade are in there and they're absolutely transparent. You see all of the you see what he's doing, so it's not brilliantly written to my mind. And Neil just said I can't read this, but, you know, I'm your boss so you've
got to. So so I I read it and the first part was painful because every page you're looking at and you think no no no no that's wrong that's wrong that's wrong that's wrong all the stuff that's done. When I got past halfway and I didn't know all the about, you know, art in Rome and all the churches and things that have been described in Rome, I couldn't put it down. I mean, he's a he he may not be the most skillful writer, but Dan Brown, but he tells a very good story actually.
And, and I think that's what Ron Howard recognized, and and he told that story very well on screen. Another prestigious and frequent visitor to CERN was Charles Jenks, a cultural theorist, architectural historian, and a theorist of postmodernism. He was somebody, who I I got to know reason reasonably well because he came a lot
to CERN. And the first time he came, there was, it's a long time ago now, but there was this this young physicist who was was trying to make a bit of a name for himself as a communicator of science, and he got an award from the, I guess it was coming whether it was PPARC, the research council for physics at the time, to come to CERN with well known people and make podcasts. So he brought he brought all kinds of people including Charles Jenks and this was this was his name
was Brian Cox. You might have heard of him since, but, but that was one of the things that he did early on in his in his career. And he brought Charles Jones. And Charles came on many occasions, and, and he he thought deeply about anything he did. And he he said to me, I'd really like Peter Higgs to see my garden. Now Charles Jenks' garden is spectacular. It they have a a large gar well, had a large garden at a house in, in Southern Scotland, and it's called the garden of cosmic speculation.
So in it, you find, you find mounds that have double helices on them, you find soliton waves running through the ground, you find, a sculpture of particle tracks above a river so that when the sun is shining you see the the shadow of the particle tracks, which is kind of analogous to to how you would take do physics with with, bubble chambers in the past and things like this. So it's just full of science. There's a there's a,
there's a big bang waterfall. You know, it's it's an amazing, amazing place, and he wanted Peter Higgs to go there. So, you know, I was able to organize that. So that was a a wonderful thing too. So I I took Peter, with with somebody else from from the press office at Edinburgh University and my boss, Rolf Hoyer, to to Jenks' house, in Dumfries and Galloway. And he also he he came up with this design we have we we we inherited,
the the the globe of science innovation. It's this round wooden structure at CERN from we we inherited it from the Swiss government. It was a pavilion for the Swiss National Exhibition in 2002. And, and he thought, that you could he he was famous for for making land forms, so he thought you could make land forms in the form of question marks around it. And his idea was that this this idea of the cosmic ouroboros, so that's the serpent that's biting its own tail.
And, and the idea of this was that as you as you went in the points of the question marks, you would find artworks or exhibits representing the human scale. And as you walked around the question mark in one one direction, you get to larger and
larger scales. In the other direction, you get to smaller and smaller scales, and when they meet is the top of the question marks, and it's what we don't know, and it's where the the science of the extremely large and the science of the extremely small meet. So you go in through the human scale, and as you go out through the other, say, side having seen whatever there is on offer in the globe, you would go to visit the ATLAS experiment, which is one of the places where we're
trying to answer those questions. So it was just a wonderfully clever thing. And, as I as I said, we we were unable to fund it. So so it didn't, didn't see the light of day, which was a which was a pity. And that now, of course, we have we have a a Renzo Piano building there because, Fabiola Gianotti, currently, was able to fund that. So we have a a really good visitor center in that now. But it wasn't always film stars and celebrated icons.
At times, the story surrounding CERN were a little more, shall we say, odd. There was, as you may well remember, in the run up to the switch on of the Large Hadron Collider, some noise on social media and in some areas of the press that perhaps doing so might destroy the world. We'd seen what happened before. I mean, one of the main protagonists of this was this guy from Hawaii, and he'd, he'd also attacked, US machines and and, including the relativistic heavy ion collider.
So we'd seen what happened there. They they they actually did delayed the startup, if I'm correctly, and and did a did a safety assessment. So we'd seen that it happened. So we we we we did that ourselves, before anything happened and our approach was always to be absolutely transparent about this. So so there were there were theorists, several theorists, who were were writing material. I was working with them to make sure that it was accessible to
the audiences we were trying to reach. We made all of the safety reports absolutely, open to anybody to look at who wanted to. And, of course, yeah, they all boil down to, we are not doing anything in this machine that doesn't happen in nature already. So if all of these horrible things could happen, you know, they would have they would be happening in nature already, and that that's not the case.
And, yeah, I was I was very impressed with my management at the time that allowed me, to write this this lateral thought piece for Physics World, back then. And that was that was inspired by, I just had saw on a on a a blog somewhere somebody who was very pro science had said, you know, if they if if they if they if they manage to shut down the LHC, then we better ban wardrobes because I don't want my kids ending up in Narnia. And so I thought, okay. You could you could
you could figure out. You could do a comparative risk there. So you you we know yeah. The the idea behind this is that, you know, the idea of of 0 probability doesn't exist in physics, you know, but I could, any second now, I could just fall through the earth and emerge to the other side. It's extremely unlikely that quantum mechanics would allow for that to happen. It's extremely unlikely to happen, so I'm not worrying about it at all.
And, yeah so so we we're we're sure that the LHC is safe because we observe cosmic rays striking the atmosphere, and we've observed cosmic rays everywhere everywhere we've been or sent things in space we see them. So they're they're not they don't seem to be targeting us. They're just ubiquitous cosmic rays are just just zooming through space all over the place. And we know how many have we know how many we observe hitting the earth at l hc energies and above, so you can actually figure out
a limit. That's what physics is about because, you know, it doesn't matter how many bazillions and bazillions of times these things happen, the next one might be different. That's that's the nature of it. So you can figure that out and, and then I thought okay when when is the first mention in history of something called a wardrobe, like a wardrobe? So you figure out when they were invented, and then you can, figure out how many that there might have been. And so you you you do some
some some simple mathematics. And every now and then, I threw in a factor of a1000000 or so just to make sure that my limit was going to be a very, very conservative one. And, and when by the time you get to the end of that, you you figure out that that opening a wardrobe door once, you're more likely to end up in Narnia than running the LHC for 40 years creating anything we've never seen before. That is brilliant. Over that time that you were there, it, you know, social media became
more part of the landscape. Well, yeah. I mean, it was social media became, full stop. I mean, it didn't exist at the beginning of this period, and, and it it sort of emerged. And we didn't know how to do to deal with it. Yeah. Comms people talk to each other. So in Geneva's Geneva's full of people who do communications. There are lots of international organizations and
companies and NGOs. So every now and then, they get together and they talk about it, and we really didn't know how to deal with this at all, and
everybody was sort of floundering. And then I remember at one point, a guy who who was, in communications for the World Economic Forum just looked at the perception of the World Economic Forum online, and if you googled World Economic Forum at the time, you found pictures of rioters in Davos and things like this and, and and people outside a closed fence trying to get into some exclusive thing that they weren't allowed access to. And he thought, well, you know, that's not
what's going on there. That's not what the World Economic Forum is really about. And how do we counter this? Well, he I remember him saying we we they just took the decision. They were going to maximize their digital footprint. They were just gonna open up and dive into social media and see what happened, and what happened was was extremely positive for them. So we got into social media, on the day we switched on the LHC
in 2008. That was CERN's first account. We we we got a Twitter account then. And we were nervous about how we would deal with it, what what we would do with all of the criticism and stuff that bubbles up there. And, at first, at least, we didn't really have to worry about that because what the people who chose to follow us, were largely very supportive. So if something like that did crop up, it was corrected by the community that followed us. So so yeah. I mean but, so that
was how we started. And, and then another thing that the the same person did was, he sort of published a study. I think it was called the triplomacy study, which was, yeah, who is the most influential leader of an leader on on Twitter and and who who is the most influential organization on Twitter or the most successful organization on Twitter.
And in the early days, we you know, our chief exec, our DG was not on Twitter, but we were heading that poll for the most successful organization on on Twitter for a while. And again, and that was that came down to the fact that we were we were we weren't flooding people, but we were being timely. We were being honest, and we were being very open about what we risk what we were doing and saying. So, now, of course, it's it's gone it's gone
way beyond my competence. I mean, I'm I'm well well pre social media generation, but we we do it now have people whose job is looking after social our social media channels these days. We didn't in the early days. Yeah. Do you still feel like it's changed though? Because it feels to me like in those early days of Twitter, it was quite a positive place and then maybe isn't anymore.
My my personal feeling is that, you know, I I was on Twitter for a while, but as soon as I stepped down from being head of comms, I got rid of my Twitter account because I I am not a fan of that. I I can see I can see the potential for good in social media, and I can see a a lot of good does happen on it. But, but there's an awful lot that isn't good going on there too, in my in my opinion. But CERN CERN stays there. CERN looks at this and CERN has taken the
the decision to stay there. We've got a huge audience there. And, again, our audience is largely enthusiastic and, and so we stay there. As Achinta mentioned earlier, after the switch on and before finding the Higgs boson, there was a discovery that something had gone wrong with the Large Hadron Collider. There were a lot of people who looked at what we did on the switch on day and said, CERN was crazy to invite all the press and, they're absolutely right but what they don't know is we
didn't invite all the press. The press invited themselves And so we we didn't have really much of a choice because at some point, it was very clear that there was if we didn't do something, if we didn't formally prepare and invite people to come, there will be, a lot of cameras and journalists outside the fence of CERN on the switch on day anyway. So so we prepared to invite everybody in, and, and it was brilliant. The day was just
fantastic, actually. I mean, we I can't remember the exact time, but the, the first attempt to get a beam around the machine was scheduled very early in the morning. So we had everybody in the media center right ready for that, and then something happened, and they had to put it back by a couple of hours. We had sched we had flexible schedules planned so that we didn't just leave everybody sitting
in the media center waiting. We we took them around to visit the experiments control rooms in various different places and meet people, talk to people. And then we had them all back in the media center, and and they got a beam around the machine. And by the end of the day, they've got a beam around in one direction and a beam around in the other direction. So that was that. You know, it was, you know, you don't just switch on in one of these things and start taking data
straight away. It's a long, long process. And usually, something does go wrong. So we we were aware that there was a risk. It was what went wrong was, was worse than I would have liked. I would say worse than anybody would have liked. It was it felt awful when it happened. I remember, you know, around the laboratory, there are these screens that are called LHC page 1, which tell you what's going on in the machine.
And, you know, when when machines are running, it's just second nature if you're at CERN, and you see you you look at the screen to see what's going on. And, on Friday afternoon, there was something that didn't look right. And, they have meetings at the control center every day. Normally, somebody from my team would go Monday to Friday to to just to be keep them in touch with what was going on. And on this occasion, I thought I'd better go to the Saturday 1.
And it was very clear then that that, we were not gonna be running for a while. The director general, know, set up task forces to go and investigate what was going on, and then he saw that I was there and he said, oh, you better take care of communications. So that just he he let me do what what what I wanted to do. And so I said, we, you know, we we know we're not gonna be running, so we we better just put out a statement. The world is watching us.
So we were able to put out a statement saying that's that something's something's gone wrong. There's been some kind of malfunction. We don't know the details yet, but we'll keep you posted. And, again, we we've followed this this process of of being, open and transparent with what had gone on. And, yeah, it was it was very painful, but it was it was also amazing to see how, you know, people just got up, brushed themselves down, and thought, okay. We've got a job
on our hands. There wasn't any attempt to say, whose fault was this? Who are we gonna blame for this? You know? And, the the the the task at hand was to figure out why it had happened, what you could do to make sure it didn't happen again, and then get get on with fixing it. And, and people again were were very yeah. The experts were were were very happy to answer questions.
There was one, the head of the magnets group, Lucio Rossi, who who, you know, he was passionate in Italian, and he he told people in great detail what had gone wrong, why it had gone wrong, what we're gonna do to fix it, and and how that gives us confidence that that's not gonna happen again. And, and he did it with with with with with with great emotion as well as as with great clarity about what was going on. And so people followed us, and there was I think there was even a
documentary. There was a series called the world's greatest fixes, I think on I think it was discovery. I'm not sure. And, so they they followed us. And, and when we did get going, there was this great celebration everywhere actually. So I think, you know, I still got it somewhere. I still got all of the the feedback we got after that switch on day with all of these journalists saying that's amazing it's amazing that you did that.
And thank you for doing that because so much is is done behind closed doors and then presented when it's done and done. So people really liked to see something that was was as difficult, as challenging as that, and we were doing it in public. So so painful though it was, and it cost us a year. You know, that year is now a long time ago, and and a lot of great things have happened with that machine, including Higgs discovery and the Nobel Prize
in the meantime. So so I think it was it was it was in the long term, it allowed us to show the reality of doing research at the cutting edge. Because I think one of the one of the dangers of of the kind of research we do is that the discoveries are few and far between, and so there's a there's a risk that you get this this impression of particle physics that we just sit around twiddling our thumbs for 10 years and then, yeah, even make a discovery and then we'll
twiddle our thumbs for another 10 years. And of course, it's not like that at all. So I think actually getting the process of science across was was, was one plus from that episode. You know, without without that black hole myth going around, without angels and demons, we wouldn't have had this the kind of visibility that that we had. And our our approach to that was okay, this is this is happening out there. There's nothing we can do about that happening out
there. So how can we turn it to our, you know, to our own advantage? And I think that our approach of being, you know, honest and and, about this was great. And it was the right one. And one thing that we we did, you know, we we did hesitate about was, you know, are we gonna engage directly with this? And, you know, there I've I've
talked about the guy from Hawaii. There was also a German professor of nanotechnology who was saying you're gonna do dangerous things, and, and he said, can I come to CERN? And we said, yes. So he came to CERN, and he met our scientists, and, and he went away. And he said, well, you know, I would like to hear from somebody who's an expert in general relativity. So we got, a comment for him from the head of the Albert Einstein Institute, in Potsdam,
saying there's nothing to worry about there. So, you know, this was a professor in a different field who was concerned about what we were doing, and we we engaged with him. The guy from Hawaii, we took a it took a lot longer, and we didn't engage directly with him. But, the daily show came to CERN and, interviewed one of our physicists, John Ellis, And, John was just brilliant, actually, and and, you know, the guy said, what what's the chance that the LHC is gonna destroy the universe?
And John said, 0. And they'd asked, the guy from Hawaii the same question. And, you know, when when I saw what he'd said, I thought, why didn't we do this ages ago? Because I I think anybody could see the floor of his argument. He said, you know, when they switch this machine on, one of 2 things will happen. Either the universe will survive or the universe will be destroyed. So the chance is 1 in 2. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. I was already set. And, this
yeah. So that was the kind of thinking behind a lot of that hype there actually. So I think I think, you know, the the bottom line there, I think it was it was going on. It certainly was going to put the spotlight on us, but I think the way that we dealt with it managed to make sure that that spotlight was was was showing us in a favorable light. So we we we saw it happening, and we thought we we need to engage with this in a way that, works for us. So the on the day
of the discovery, what were you doing? My job was to go and get the the key people for the press conference from the auditorium across to the council chamber. So I was shepherding Peter Higgs, and Francois Englert through there. And, yeah, it was it was, it was an amazing day. You know, I found out since that that Peter Higgs had seen at least one of the results before, so he he knew.
Somebody'd shown it to him. I got an email from, Jerry Guralnick, I think, so one of the American theorists who'd who'd published on this subject very shortly after, and independently of of Higgs, Brout and Englewood. No doubt about that. And they said, can we come? And of course, we we're not gonna turn down any physicists wanting to come to that. So 2 of the Americans came. Their co author was British, Tom Kibble.
We invited him, but he said no. He was gonna go to the event in in Whitehall because the research council was was organizing something in Whitehall. And, and we got in touch with with Unglair and Higgs, so they came too. So we had all of, you know, 4 of the the theorists, the original, proponents of the theory in the room for the announcements. That was that was great. I I think it was the day that Angler and Higgs met each other for the first time, sat next to each other in the in
the room. We had a a hiccup the day before because, you know, we we genuinely didn't know what was going to be said until very soon before, and we knew it was going to get very busy for the people involved, on the on the day. So we recorded, yes, we've got it, and watched these space videos with both of them. And we we had them both ready to go in k you know, depending on what was gonna be announced.
And, this is how we discovered a bug in in our database that one of my colleagues noticed that there was a typo in one of the captions. And so she she fixed the typo. And what she didn't realize is that when you edit a video back then, when you edited a video, it defaulted everything to to to default values and that included making the video open. So one of the discovery videos was visible for 5 minutes and that was long enough for a lot of journalists to phone me and say, is this what
you're gonna say tomorrow? And and I had to say, well, you're just gonna have to watch this space and and explain to them what we'd done. You know, and so this is why this is why why you saw this and this is there are there are there are yes and no videos and we just have to see because they were really doing the analysis up to the wire. So that was that and and, you know, Rolf Feuer had seen both of the analyses.
So he he, you know, he was he said to me the day before that even if they don't feel confident enough, I can say I think we've got it because he's seen both. But as it was they were able to to make the discovery announcement themselves. That's brilliant. Do you feel like there is are there going to be opportunities at CERN or other places for particle physics to make a splash that big again?
Well, that was a particularly big one but you know, there are there's there's and and what's what's one of the things that's changed is that a lot of the the the kind of science that would have made little ripples in the past is making much bigger splash these days. So, you know, the the discoveries of of, pentaquarks, tetraquarks, and things has has actually been covered very extensively, much more than it would
have been before. So I think that that that helped build up a a taste for the kind of things that we're doing even if they're smaller stories. And, you know, gravitational waves was huge as well. It's not particle physics, but it's it's basic science, and that was huge too. Who knows? I mean, there are there's a lot to be discovered.
Back in the startup time, people there were people who genuinely thought that we would discover supersymmetry very quickly, and this is a a theory that could account for dark matter. So that would have been huge. I mean, it would have been as huge from a physics perspective, if not more so than the discovery of the Higgs, really. And we still yeah. There's still
something going on that we don't understand. You know, if if if, you know, if if you interpret the the the data, then the most likely reading is that about 5% of the universe is is is matter, is visible matter, and the rest of it is stuff that we can't see. There are other interpretations that something going on with gravity. But either way, when when that when we make steps into that 95% that we don't know, it's gonna be a huge result from a
physics perspective. So I I think there is I think there is the chance for equally big stories coming up in the future, but but it's could be a while. You never know. Yeah. Nature nature nature's in control here, not us. So When speaking to Achintiya Rao, I'd asked a similar question. Could there be anything that CERN could do that would inspire the public in the way that the discovery of the Higgs boson has? I'll be honest. I don't think it's necessarily their role to inspire the
public. I think their role is to do the research that they have argued the case for. So you need to, you know, a multinational endeavor like CERN, which has got member states from all around the world, all around the globe at this point. You don't do it unless you have a very solid case for the research that you're performing. So SON's primary role is to do the research. But in terms of how to excite people once again, well, I mean, I I I don't know.
There might be discoveries that are on the horizon, but what we have learned from the past is that these things don't happen every single day. They can take years, they can take decades for us to achieve something as monumental. And the important thing to remind people is that the Large Hadron Collider was not built to discover the Higgs boson. It was discovered to find the Higgs boson as a first step if the Higgs boson existed, and that was it. It was almost the Higgs boson was the the lowest
hanging fruit on this hypothetical tree. And if you found the Higgs is right right, we are on the right track, but there's much more to do. Something else that's quite cool is the fact that historically, every single particle that researchers have found has become a tool in itself for further understanding for the studies. So there is muons were discovered through cosmic rays and then we started using muons in in discovering other particles and then
this has proceeded. The Higgs boson was found through its interactions with w bosons and other bosons that were found more recently. So the hope is that the Higgs boson becomes a tool in our continued exploration of the universe and its origins and its very fundamental structure. There are lots of unanswered questions for particle physicists to potentially inspire the inspire future generations with. We don't know what dark matter is, and we know that there has to be some
dark matter out there. And it has to have a material component. It has to interact with some of the forces in some ways with gravity for sure, but we are trying to find the researchers as a species are trying to find that particle that might be associated with it. Would we find it? Fingers crossed, but there are no guarantees with nature. What about gravity, which sits very far apart from particle physics? There are 4 known forces in the universe and theoretically, we can unify 3 of them, but
gravity sits far apart. Gravity is the weakest force. Gravity is the in some ways, very less understood because we haven't found a particle associated with it. Maybe there isn't one, but if you want to unify it with the rest of the particle physics, we're looking for gravitons. There are lots of unanswered research questions still out there. And even when you look at something as astonishing like supersymmetry and people are starting to
say, oh, it hasn't found anything yet. Well, supersymmetry has got lots of different models and we've only ruled out the simplest ones. The more interesting ones that can still answer the questions haven't even been explored yet. We haven't even accumulated enough data to do it yet. So there are loads of questions, but in terms of how can they inspire the next the the future after the Higgs boson, the honest answer is I don't know. I think the ongoing work itself is inspiring in different ways.
This is a place where at the height of the cold war, researchers from across the iron curtain would come and work with researchers from the western world. This is a place that today brings together countries that do not look at each other diplomatically eye to eye, but have researchers sharing offices. There is inspiration there to be found in a world that is in increasing turmoil of how can we do things together for the benefit of all of humanity.
Research at CERN is fundamentally grounded on peaceful research. There are no military applications. It's it's forbidden in the convention of CERN. It's an open space where anyone can go to. They get hundreds of thousands of people wanting to visit the lab. The machines that they're building, pushing technology to its frontiers, pushing researchers frontiers, I think all of these are inspiring things
in in their own way. And while discoveries capture attention, big discoveries capture big attention, I think the work of an organization like CERN is inspiring in and of itself. I'd like to thank Achintya and James for talking to me for this episode of the Physics World Stories podcast. And don't forget, you can find James Gillies' article, angels and demons, Tom Hanks, and Peter Higgs, how CERN sold its story to the world on the physics world website, physics world dot
com. We'll be back next month with something else from this wonderful world of physics, And thank you very much for listening.