You know, I. Welcome to the 2015 Simoni Lecture. My name is Marcus DeSoto and I'm the professor at the Simoni Professor for the Public Understanding of Science here at the University of Oxford. I'd like to thank the Playhouse once again for hosting this lecture and the Amador Foundation, who helped to fund it. I think this is my kind of favourite time of the year, actually, because I get to invite somebody to come along and tell us one of the big scientific stories of our time.
And I guess if one was going to think of a story that has really hits the the news over the last decade, it is the discovery of the Higgs boson. So I was very excited that Professor Melissa Franklin from the University of Harvard, who's an experimental particle physicist, agreed to come over and tell us something about her work. She was one of the first to find the evidence for the top quark in 1993.
She also has been working at CERN, along with the discovery of the Higgs and maybe some more things that we might discover this evening. So anyway, I'd like to give you to all give a great Oxford welcome to Melissa Franklin, who's going to put the Higgs boson in its place. Thank you. Thank you. Hi. I just wanted to see who you are, so I know who I'm talking to. Hi. I'm really happy to be here. Um, it's really fun.
I haven't really ever been to Oxford except once. Anyhow, I wanted to talk to you, and I have too much to say. So sorry. I have to find the place. It doesn't feedback. So to begin with, I just wanted to talk to you about myself. Because as I get older, I like to talk about myself. And. But it's. It's pertinent. This is me. Yeah. I grew up in. In the west of Canada and where we all wore cowboy things.
But I wore cowboy boots and a badge. And this is who I am still part of being a particle physicist is being a cowboy on the frontier. And we don't really trust authority. That's the physicist part. And we wear our boots and we build things and we ride over the edge of the cliff half of the time. So I just wanted to tell you, that's who I am and that's where we're going. Another, you know, as as you, you know, live your life and have your career, you're many things.
At some point when I was filling in the standard model, this is the standard model of physics. These are quarks and leptons. Some of the things that we actually discovered, the top quark there and I'll tell you what these are in a minute. So here is just me. Before I had children, you can see the top quark is on my shoe. This is easier, an easier way to find it. But then there's also the dark periods with with this is my idea of myself and Dirac. And so it's a complex cowboy punk model.
MELOSH So Cowboys on the frontier, what are we doing? We're going to understand the constituents of the universe. That's not so hard. Then we're going to understand the forces between them. Okay, got that. But then what we're going to talk about tonight together is to understand the universe without anything in them. So we take everything out of the universe and what you have is the vacuum. So this is something that's kind of interesting.
And I don't know if you remember Samuel Beckett. He was a writer and basically he did the same thing. Samuel Beckett took everything out. Sometimes he just had two things and try to see what the interaction was between them sometimes. Then he just had one thing that would be a person and try to understand what one thing in the universe was like. And sometimes, for instance, in his in his book, The Unnameable, it's not even a thing, it's unnameable.
So there is a kind of intellectual space for trying to imagine what is this world with nothing in it? And that's what the Higgs search is about. So what we believe is that if you take everything out, you still have energy and you still have the Higgs field and you still have things called quantum fluctuations. That is, quantum mechanics allows things to pop up and disappear.
You can't do anything about it. And so what we want to do is if we believe there's a field with energy in it, when you have nothing else in in space time, how are we going to find that? So let's talk about a field. What is she saying? What does she mean, a field? Well, one field that I like a lot is the wind field. This is a wind map of the United States. So at every point in this map, there's a direction and there's a strength of wind.
And you can see it. I have to show you this. This is so beautiful. I'm going to show you something that's so beautiful that you can't even imagine. I am going to show you something that's so beautiful you can't even imagine. That's odd. I'm. I'm going to show you something that's so beautiful that, uh. Sorry. It was. It was there. I just want you to know that. Sorry. This is really bad. This is 101. Do not do this. Okay. Okay. I'm not going to show you. I do not understand this.
It worked. Everybody agrees it worked earlier, right? I'm just hoping that I can ever get anything back now. Okay. This. Imagine. Okay. I have a better idea. Hold on. Don't go anywhere, okay? Don't go anywhere. Stay here with me. Oh, my God. This is absolutely terrible. I'm really apologetic. Here we go. Imagine for a second I had a backup here. Imagine for a second. So I wanted to show you the world. I wanted to show you, actually. Oxford. The wind patterns in Oxford.
But unfortunately, this is still America. And unfortunately, this is from 2012. So you can see where I was going. This is a field at every point in space, every point in America, there is wind. The wind has a direction and a strength. And that's what I'm plotting. Now, what you want to imagine is. Now what you want to imagine. You can see why I was going here. Is this? You have a field and there can be an excitation of the field. So this is called an expectation of the field. This is a tornado.
So you can imagine a wind field and sometimes the wind goes so crazy that it makes a tornado. So that's an expectation. Okay. So if I want to find the Higgs field and the Higgs field is a bit different, it doesn't have a direction. So you can't make this map, but it's still a field at every point in space. It has some value. If I want to find it excitation of that field, what do I do? Really? Really. Okay. This is fine. Everything's fine. Everything's just fine.
Okay. So we want to understand the Higgs field in the vacuum. We want to make a momentary disturbance. And that disturbance is called the Higgs boson. It's a short lived particle that lasts for a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second. And that's our little tornado. So we want to make the Higgs boson analogous to the tornado. Now the Higgs is defined. So there's a Higgs boson. I just want to make this clear that the Higgs boson and the Higgs field, they're not the same thing.
The Higgs boson is this excitation of the field, and its Higgs field is defined at every point in space. It's there even when there's no matter. You can't turn it on and off like a light switch. It has no direction, it has energy, and it interacts with elementary particles according to their mass. Heavier particles it interacts more. So the disturbance is an expectation. This is actually my feeling when I'm walking. After we discovered the Higgs.
I would walk down the street and I would feel really weird because I knew it was there and that's how I felt. And this guy, I think he's a British guy. Gormley. Gormley. Gormley is a gormley. Okay, so what does it take? How am I going to make this disturbance in the field? What I need to do is take a whole lot of energy in a very small space. Okay? And then I need to shake it. So I need there to be kind of like a tornado.
And the only way I know how to make a lot of energy in a very, very, very small space. And when I say small, I mean really, really, really, really small is to build an enormous particle detect particle accelerator here. This is that Large Hadron Collider and the red is just the 27 kilometre radius. It's the red thing, it's just a line, but it's actually underground.
So I'm going to accelerate particles so they have a lot of energy and then I'm going to collide them together and that's going to give me enough energy to make this disturbance in the field. Okay. Are you guys are you buying this? Yeah. So it's really going to do in this accelerating and accelerate protons. I just have to I'll tell you I can tell you later, I'm going to accelerate protons.
And when I accelerate and there will be a point right in the middle where that that yellow thing is, where there'll be a huge amount of energy all of a sudden and there could be a very intense interaction. And what could be made there is a Higgs boson. And then since it decays so or since it decays or morphs so rapidly, I have to look at what it decays into in order to find it. And so I need the Large Hadron Collider. And so basically this simple there's an on off switch.
Yeah, actually, yeah. No, it's really not that simple. There's I'm not someone who knows how to make an accelerator, but there are amazing people who do it. A lot of them are British. For some reason, British are just sort of accelerator kind of people. Okay, so what am I talking about? Protons. Well, let's just start with the atom. We know an atom. It has a nucleus and electrons going around it.
And most people stay here because this is probably the most interesting part of the world, the atoms, because, you know, when you touch, you know, it's all atoms. But then I'm kind of I'm a kind of already thinking that the nucleus, the thing at the at the centre is already too big. Look at it. It's so lumpy and disgusting. Notice they're all round. They're all round. Just because nobody can think of anything else but one of the nucleons in the nucleus would be called the proton.
The charge one positively charged one. And look, look how small it is. We call it ten to the -13 centimetres, which is a thousands of a billionth of a centimetre. And then, of course, the proton really isn't a ball. It has these quarks running around in it. And the quarks are the real things. And I love the quarks and we don't know how small the quarks are. And they're not a ball.
We've we've measured that they're smaller than ten to the minus six centimetres, but we don't really know whether they're point like or not. And then there's the electron, which is just, you know, the electron. That's the thing in the power in your heater. Okay, here's the thing. When you think about the proton, it's not just a couple of quarks. It's got a lot of stuff in it, gluons, anti quarks, all kinds of things.
And there is no shell. So these pictures are wrong. Imagine you're going shopping. Imagine you're going on a plane and you have a bag and there's a bunch of stuff in it. But then all of a sudden there's no bag. That's how you so imagine you're going really fast on a train and you're got a bag. And then there's another big in the bags meat. But there's no bag anymore. Just the stuff inside. That's what a proton is. Just get rid of the outside. Okay. So, okay, now I'm going to tell you something.
Don't be worried. I've wasted my entire life. I've wasted my life because I've just been studying. Matter and matter is only 4% of the universe. So I've been like this. Yeah. I started when the charm quark was discovered up there. Here. These are all quarks. These are the things that are the basic building blocks. And here are the leptons. Here are the force carriers. These were all discovered in Europe. These are all discovered in America. Yeah. Oh. Electron was Britain.
Is that Europe? Yeah. Sorry. And here's the Higgs boson. So this is my world, but it's the world of matter. And that's only 4% of the universe. So I've wasted 96% of my time. This 25% is dark matter, which doesn't interact with light. That's why it's dark. And then this other part, dark energy. I have no idea what that is. People just say that. So I'm saying it. There's something else out there. We have no idea what it is. But don't be scared because. Okay. Is this okay so far? Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
Too slow. Am I talking too slow? Okay, so I just want to go through the forces just in case. I don't want you to go out of this room without knowing what the forces are. Gravity. Not interesting. Not interesting to me. Gravity is is is so weak compared to electromagnetism that you can just ignore it. So let's ignore gravity, but not when we're walking or anything, just like in this lecture. And then you can you can think about it again. Electromagnetism is a force mediated by the photon.
And that's the thing. We're all you know, when you touch things, that's why you feel them. So without touch, life would be terrible. The weak interaction is when there's radioactive decays. If you have a nuclear power plant and then you put the stuff underneath and the waste, you put it in the ground, then it leaks that. That's that. But don't be scared by that. And then strong force is what holds the nucleus together. And this is how we think of it to ourselves.
We draw these diagrams and we say, Oh, the electron spits out a photon and the photon is absorbed by another electron. That's the electromagnetic force. So we think in these weird diagrams, which we'll talk about later. Okay, so there was a guy called Higgs and he came up with some other guys to some other. There's a bunch of guys. There's six guys. There's possibly seven people who predicted this, that there was a field, that there was a Higgs field.
And so we didn't really believe it. I'm an experimentalist. He's a theorist. That puts us at odds right away. We'll talk about that. We were all like Higgs. Schmidt You know, that's a Higgs. Schmitz That's how we are when when experimentalists get together. But we looked for in our spare time. So he got the Nobel Prize in 2013 and he's so nice. Look at that. I like the two tone glasses.
Okay, so I'm not going to talk about theory because I don't know any, but I'm going to have this one theory slide. So here's the theory. We have this L here script l is the standard model of physics. Everything we know, I'm going to put in a L and then I'm going to add a Higgs field. See that little thing? That's a field. I'm going to put it in a big machine and out is going to come the Higgs boson. And also all of my elementary particles now are going to have mass and they didn't before.
So this is the whole story. Okay. So all we have to do is actually this is the theoretical machine. I have to make the real machine. Okay. So what about theorists and experimentalists? This is kind of important because a lot of people don't really know that theorists think like this. They want to understand sort of the stick figure version of the world, the deep stick figure version. And this is experimentalists want to really understand the world like this, like how it actually is.
Theorists would like to understand the world as understanding the symmetries of the world, and we would just like to see what's there. So we like to measure things wrapped in fog, sort of like this guy, this guy, Caspar David Friedrich. He was some I think he was some guy maybe Austrian or German. This I love this picture because apparently there's a German word for the horrible feeling you get by looking at the back of your own head. Okay, forget that. Okay.
Are we are we on? Okay, are we? I feel like maybe we've gone astray. Here's a particle. Okay? We want to make a particle. It's called the Higgs boson. But what is a particle and how do we see? Well, the particle normally is round and it has a spin. It doesn't it has an angular momentum. So if we found a new particle, how would we know? Well, the Bose on this Higgs boson has a spin zero. So we don't have to worry about spin, but we want to. It should have a mass and it should have a lifetime.
It should morph into something else after a short amount of time so we can see it by its decay. We say decay, but it's really it's a metamorphosis. The Higgs will come along and all of a sudden there will be two W particles. And all of a sudden those. W's will decay to something else. Muons and neutrinos and electrons. Okay, so what we're going to try and do is discover the particle by looking at this. So how do we understand that? Like you and me, like normal people?
So there's a classical resonance. You know, if you have a wine glass and you sing to the wine glass, the wine glass will resonate. And if you stop singing, it'll stop. But it'll take a certain amount of time to stop. So a wine glass it at this. If this is frequency, hear like you change the frequency slowly at some frequency, the wine glass will absorb a lot of power from your voice. And it'll go one moment. And then over here, it won't. So this is a normal power absorb spectrum.
Just change the frequency you're singing with. I wanted to just show you. What this resonance I'm talking about looks like. So we are singing to this is a piece of. Paper on it. Now we're going to put a strobe light on it so you can see you see that? It's really cool, right? That's a resonance. So the wineglass is resonating and it has that power spectrum. Okay, good. Now. When I make a particle, a particle will have exactly the same distribution.
Although instead of this being the power absorbed by the glass and this being the frequency that I'm singing at, this will be the mass of the particle, and this will be the number of times I see it. So when I create a particle like a Higgs boson, I will see a shape like this. And the the width of this shape will be the lifetime of the particle one over the lifetime of the particle.
So this is kind of cool. It's exactly the same. So a particle that decays or morphs into something else is just like a resonance of a wine glass. Okay. Well. When I was young. I read this book, a guy called Werner Heisenberg. He was one of the authors of Quantum Mechanics, and he said something that made me go into physics, which was that science rests on experiments, but science is rooted in conversation. And I like talking. He's here. He's pretty cute, nice hair.
He said two really interesting things, what they're called the uncertainty principle. Usually we say that the uncertainty in in how fast something is going times the uncertainty and where it is has to be larger than a certain amount. I can't know exactly where something is and how fast it's going at the same time. Well, everybody knows that. But there's another way of saying this in the saying that the uncertainty in energy and the uncertainty in time have to be greater than a certain amount.
And that's a different way of saying you can't know the energy and the time at the same time, so you can't know the lifetime of the particle and the energy of the particle exactly the same time. So this curve is is real quantum mechanics. This is where I get to sit and look at quantum mechanics all the time. It must be weird. I have a particle. I have 100 particles that decay. Sometimes they have this energy and sometimes they have this energy, and sometimes they have this energy.
That's weird. A little bit, right? It's not that I'm making a mistake. It's a that's very fundamentally I can't tell. That's kind of cool. So I am totally cool. That's what I'm trying to tell you. So I do things like this. I mean, I didn't see at first this is a particle called the Z particle discovered in 1982 at CERN. You see, it has this shape. This is the mass. So this is a particle decays to two electrons.
And when I look make the mass, this invariant mass of the two electrons, I see a peak z nice. We this this was a discovery of the top and this is the top we see now. So the top cork also decays. C So you see this shape, right? And then you see the shape in a million different ways. In our experiments you always have these shapes and that what that means is a particle was there and it decayed and it has a particular mass.
So all I'm going to do is look for a bump, then I'll know I have the Higgs boson. Then I know there's a Higgs field, and then Higgs can get a Nobel Prize and I get nothing. And all I need to do is spend 30 years doing it with 3000 other people and work really, really hard. That's all. Okay. We're just going to look for a bump. You know what? I don't even like this.
So all I wanted to tell you was, the way we think about experimentalists, think about physics is through these things called Feynman diagrams and scattering. So we just say, we would just make a diagram. We write a diagram, we say, look, an electron in a positron that's an anti-matter, come together, annihilate, make a photon, and then all of a sudden they decide to make two muons. Okay, so what are we talking about? We scatter things every day.
Like this is happens every day. The sun shines light on a small object that might or might not have a dog inside or might or might not be a dog. And then that light scatters off the maybe dog into my eye, which is connected to my brain, which is connected to my lips, which might then say dog. So this is a sort of normal thing we do every day. We scatter light off dogs. Okay.
But what we do at an accelerator is we take an accelerator. And so, look, if we if we go back, this light has a certain wavelength. It has a certain energy. Okay. And if I make this wavelength really small, I can see a really small dog. Big, big dog. I can't see a small dog with a big wavelength. So what I do is I make an accelerator of any wavelength particle. And then I look, for instance, inside a proton. And then instead of my brain, I put a detector that costs, you know, $350 million.
And then I put a computer and. Yeah, and a cassette tape. Okay. Rutherford did this. And I just want to show this because Rutherford was a guy who worked in England and also in Canada, and I'm Canadian and your English. And this is his very first graduate student, Harriet Brooks, who is amazing. Here is his group in Manchester in 1913. I just thought this was pretty amazing because there's one woman and her name is Miss White. Yeah. Come on, guys. Are you kidding?
Her name is. She's wearing white. I guess American humour doesn't really work here. I mean, really. Okay, I give up. Okay. Okay. I'm going home now. Okay. Are there too many diagrams like this? It's okay. All I'm saying is stuff happens and electrons can amid a photon. That's what this is. A top quark can decay to a bottom quark. A quark can imitate gluon. Lots of things can happen. And we all make all these diagrams, okay? And then we say, this is the thing.
Everything that's not forbidden is compulsory. So everything that can happen, there's no reason that can't happen. With all those diagrams, putting them together will happen. And we just have the terrible job of figuring out how often they happen. So one thing that can happen if there's a Higgs particle is that when I collide, two protons, the gluon, which is in the bag, member of the proton to gluons, could collide, but really not directly.
They could only collide by making top anti top pairs in this strange loop, which can happen. You make a Higgs and then it immediately decays A to z bosons which immediately decay to four muons. Okay, this can happen. My question is, how do I find it? Is it there? Does it happen? Does anybody understand what this is other than you? Okay. Does anybody have any idea what I'm talking about here? This gluon comes from one proton. This one comes from another proton that I'm going to collide.
And then I have to be able to see this, the final stage. So I need an accelerator and I need a detector. These are these horrible protons without the bags. I'm just going to take a glue on one of these squiggly things from one. And these are moving it. .99999 times the speed of light. They're going to collide. And I'm going to make one of these things. So at the Large Hadron Collider, we have huge numbers of protons moving this way and protons moving this way.
There's like ten to the 11th protons in each bunch. You remember what a proton is. Take away the bag and you have some quarks and gluons. And then I get an interaction. And if I do this ten zillion times, 10 trillion times, I'll get one interesting event. So you have to be kind of smart. And luckily there's lots of people from England on the experiment and this is the kind of thing you see coming out.
A many, many particles come out of this interaction because the protons blow up and we have to look at this and we have to follow every single one of these particles and figure out where it's going and what it is. So, yeah, so we build an accelerator, it's underground. Yeah, we build the two detectors at the same time because when we find something, we want to make sure that we find it that we don't have to wait 30 years to build another detector before we know it's there for sure.
So we have this thing. You each of each one, everybody here is paying 2.3 CHF per year to fund this. Thank you. Thank you very much. So here is the accelerator. Here's the Mont Blanc. It's a beautiful place to work, but a little sad. When you go inside here, you see it's a curving accelerator. And inside there's a vacuum, a different kind of vacuum, just one where you have a pump and you pump out all the air,
not the vacuum that we're talking about at the beginning. And this guy is not doing anything. You can't be in here when it's on because you'll be dead. That's not good being dead. So there's protons going in this. This is superconducting magnet protons going one way, protons going the other way. At some point, they collide. It's magic. And we have very cute French people. This is the kind of thing that happens when two protons collide. This is the number of particles that come out good.
So here we have to build the detector. These are some Swiss people. Very short. Very, very short. Now, this is a huge this is a huge detector. This is where the protons collide in here. And this is sort of what's happening. The detector is too complicated to actually explain, but we use electromagnetism for everything. So that is we use ionisation, you know, when a, you know, you have atoms with electrons on them, when you knock the electrons off, they're ionised.
And then you have some charge particle that you can you can look at. So what we do is we here's a charged particle and a magnetic field that makes this beautiful, swirly thing. So we use magnets and charged particles and we can measure the momentum of the particles that come out with the magnet and with amazing detectors, silicon detectors. And then if they're electrons, they go through and make showers or protons, they'll make a shower like this.
And if they're muons, they'll go all the way through here. So this is the this is a piece of that huge, huge, huge detector. And that's a detector that if you've ever seen it, has anyone ever seen it? Yes. You will make up your pants. That's how big it is. Yeah. So the different pieces are made in different places. We made some at Harvard and then they shipped them all there and we put it all together. This is beautiful. This is beautiful. Look, that's why it's so scary.
This is the muon detectors. I obviously like them. You on detectors that we made. This is. This is when you drop it down, it's all underground and everything has to be dropped down a hole. And then you can't close the hole, which is a problem. Okay. And then once you've got your detector made and everything is working, this is the kind of computing power you need. And this goes on to infinity. And that's a very tall Dutch person. Okay. I feel like I feel I feel like you're really following this.
I feel like you know it already. I feel like I'm just talking to you and you know this. I feel sad. So, you know, physicists spend all their time drawing things. So when the LHC broke a little while back, I had a really hard time and I went to the psychiatrist. But I'll tell you something about the psychiatrist office, and then I'll just see if anybody agrees with me. There's no whiteboard or blackboard, so it's impossible to talk about.
Yeah, I don't know. So I asked the psychiatrist, can I put can I put a whiteboard in the office? And he said, no, that's not really the point. Like, you're not supposed to abstract things and then talk about them. Anyhow, that wasn't very useful story for any psychiatrist in the office. Okay, so here is me. We're going to actually bring we're going to breathe life into the Higgs. We're going to do it this way. We're going to make two gluons. But you know what?
We don't know. They're gluons. The problem with protons is you never know what's going to collide and you never know before and you never know after. And that's a very sad. So we just and we don't know anything about this. All we see in our whole lives are these two things coming out. So first way we're going to do it is this we're going to make two Z's and look for four muons coming out.
Let's just. That's just. Oops. Oops. Hi there. Oh. So here's a picture of an event in which possibly these red lines are for a really momentous nuance coming out. So they would be what I expect in my final state here. And this is you want to see in real time. This is the mass of those four letters. So remember, I'm going to look for a bump. Okay. Are you ready? Are you ready to look for a bump? You don't seem that ready. You know what? American audiences are much more rowdy.
They'd be yelling, Shut up. Yeah. What do you mean? They're good for sure. Okay. Wait, wait, wait. Do you see anything weird? What? Oh, yeah. What was that? Did you want me to do it again? Yeah. Do it again. Yeah. Yeah, man. Do it. That's. Yeah, of course. Oh, see, there's something missing there. All of a sudden, there's a bump. You see that bump? Oh, oh, oh, that's it. That's the Higgs. That's is that bump I told you about. Bumps, right?
You said the wineglass, the bump, everything. That's the Higgs. Oh. Now, what's all this other junk? Well, if you have. If you're singing to a wineglass and there's a lot of noise, like maybe you're in a, you know, what's the noisiest place you can be? You're, you know, underneath a helicopter, there's a helicopter above, and you're singing into a wine glass. You're trying to hear the resonance. That's our lives. But the helicopter is right, right on top of us.
So we're trying to do all this stuff is just background noise. This is actually the signal. It's so beautiful. I don't know, you guys. That is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. So there it is. That's not moving. This little thing and this is ten events here. 15 events, 20 events. Not very many. Two years we spent taking data. We're colliding beams every 50 nanoseconds, every whatever that is, one that's really small and nanosecond that's smaller than micro is ten to the minus 9 seconds.
Okay. So you see, we've seen a bump right now. You guys are so blasé. Like just because you have incredibly good people talking here about the Higgs bosons all the time who are much clearer than me. Doesn't mean you can't give me some, like, give me some emotion. Look at these, like, but they don't try the things like this. Anyway, let me just say that once you've made the Higgs, it can decay in many ways. And one of the ways it can decay is to two photons. And then you can also see that.
So instead of having four muons come out, two photons, these yellow things come out. And then you can look at a bump there. And what do you think? What do you think the bump is going to look like? Not as nice. Look that thing. Guess what, Mom? I discovered the Higgs. You see, there's a lot of background. There's a lot of helicopter noise there. That little tiny thing is the discovery of the Higgs boson, which is why you need two detectors and 6000 people. Finally. Okay, this slide is just crazy.
This slide just says if I ask the question, can I get that data, that exact data, without having a Higgs at the mass of where the Higgs is? 125 GB. So what's the likelihood that I see what I see without any Higgs? And the answer is ten to the minus nine. And what's the answer? Small. Really, really small. We've totally found something. We totally think it's the Higgs. Are you happy? I think he was happy because I'm going to tell you something sad in a minute. So we found this thing.
Look, this is the Higgs. We turn out. I didn't show you, but it has been zero. So it's a scalar. It's the first scalar ever for a scalar particle ever. And it's mass is like 125 five. And this is what makes it possible for electrons and things and quarks to have mass. And if there is a boson, there's got to be a field. So we've just closed it up. We have nothing more to do. It's sad. And then there's this. Theorists are terrible. This is the kind of way they think. They say, Hey, wait a second.
What's that? Higgs Mass. If the Higgs mass is 125 and the top mass, which you already know is 175, it looks like a little smaller there. Then we're in a state of matter. Stability. The universe is in a state of matter. Stability. Now, that doesn't sound good. We like stability, not metal stability. What does it all mean? This makes it even less clear. Imagine. Imagine that you don't know what the axes of this plot are. But you know that our whole universe is sitting here like a ball in a well.
Happily sitting there. It's always going to stay the same. But imagine this better stability means maybe there's another well over here. And maybe because of quantum mechanics, there's a thing called tunnelling, which means that particles are allowed to go through mountains particles. This ball is total it. Total it. It can go here, even though it doesn't have enough energy to jump over here. Oh, it's so sad. This is terrible quantum mechanics. Now, what would this mean?
The metal stability would mean all of a sudden, our beautiful world would be completely gone. And then it would be here. Luckily, theorists are never right except for Higgs. Luckily, this wasn't an English theorist. Okay, this is getting way too scary. So I just wanted to talk about what I think I'm doing with my life, because I know you're not that interested, but I'm going to talk about it anyway.
So a little while ago I was asked to give a preamble, talk to who framed Roger Rabbit, which was a movie which was half animated, half people with Bob Hoskins. Do you remember that? And so I looked up the cartoon laws of physics, because apparently there are there's laws of cartoon laws of physics. There's 21 of them. And it turns out that every cartoon is, in fact, funny because of these laws. And it was amazing to me how could there be laws of cartoons?
But look at them. Let's just look at them and then we'll see why. So this one is a speed increases. Objects can be in more than one place at the same time. I'm sure you've seen that. And that's, of course, very, very funny. An anvil always falls more slowly than a person. That means it. Yeah, you know what that means? A body passing through solid matter always leaves its own shape. Okay, so then I thought, wow, this is amazing. Like, it is true. There are 21 of them.
You can look them up on on Google. So this guy is Walt Disney and he had an explanation. So he was basically just like me. Except that richer, impossible cartoon actions will seem plausible if the viewer feels the action he's watching has some factual basis. For example, the idea that following the cows tail could ring a bell hanging on her neck may seem far fetched, but it has some basis, in fact. There is an anatomical connection between the bell here and the tail here.
That is the spinal column. And so it seems entirely plausible that pulling her tail would ring the bell and. Okay. So you I mean, it's brilliant. He's brilliant. So what he does, what he calls it, is the plausible, impossible. He. Says all cartoons are plausible but impossible, and that's what makes them funny. So some guy at The Guardian or some woman probably, I think, because it's very smart, said, what a part.
I couldn't find the actual person, unfortunately. Particle physics is the unbelievable. In pursuit of the unimaginable. To pinpoint the smallest fragments of the universe, you have to build the biggest machine in the world. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What's interesting is that what we look for is the implausible possible. So people are always coming up with ideas that seem crazy. Extra dimensions, dark matter, Higgs bosons.
They're implausible, but they're possible. I'm only interested in looking at possible. Looking at impossible is only for cartoons. So one of the things that we're thinking about is, is there something a shadow world, a world where there's supersymmetry, where for all the particles I've just shown you, there are particles.
Honestly, roughly thousands of people are are as we speak, are looking for this, because if there were these this shadow particles, it would solve some elegant problems for theorists. We've been looking at this for years. I've even looked for this. I looked for this one. Well, we haven't found them, but we have we know that they're getting bigger and bigger. That is, if we do find them, they're going to be really massive.
So this is kind of like, you know, when you if you want, you know, so if you're young and you want to grow up and say, how cool are you? And you can just show people this picture on your card and say, I'm looking for this one. It's three. It's like, what could be a better job than that? And then this is the diagram that goes with it. Isn't this beautiful? Proton. Proton build. Well, look, this. These are all made up particles. Oh, no. This is real easy. These are real top.
So this is the kind of thing we're doing right now. Every day we're drawing a million different diagrams, and then we're looking for them. It's really I mean, it's so exciting and I'm so boring. I'm really sorry. It's over. Everybody's asleep. I feel like I'm asleep. Okay, so CERN is a wonderful thing. There's physicists everywhere. You're paying the 2.3 CHF. It really is the Wild West. We've started a new run at a much higher energy, almost a factor of two energy.
So we are about to find those supersymmetric particles. So you will win next cocktail party you go to. If it's in after April, you may find yourself saying, Well, I already know about supersymmetry. I saw that ball there. I know that there's a symmetry between fermions and bosons. And it's it's a very exciting thing. But we're also thinking about building new accelerators. There's very exciting idea is to build a huge accelerator in China.
Which would. Be really far away also and build a huge one that went all over Switzerland, then took up most of Switzerland. It's always good to build weather in mountains and then another one in Japan. So there is a future. It's just not in the United States. That's why I'm over here. I'm trying to see if I can get a job, but obviously, obviously it's not working very well. I'm really excited about another thing, which is that this is CERN is an enormous thing.
You know, it's got 800,000 member states meaning except for the US it's it's many, many countries pay a lot of money for CERN and these experiments to fund the Large Hadron Collider and there's a council of all kinds of people in grey suits who come together and run the whole thing from different countries. And then this person, she's the new director general. Starting January 1st, February is united. And I did this cowboy hat.
I learned Photoshop just for you. I just want you to know that I'm really excited she's going to head of the whole thing. CERN is really big. There's like 50,000 men there, and she's the boss and she's actually brilliant also. And and. Well, maybe. And funny and brilliant and funny. So it's an exciting time. First of all, maybe we'll find something completely new. Maybe it will be supersymmetry. Maybe it will be the fact there's not really three spacial dimensions.
There's four. Maybe it will be, you know, that nothing is new, which is also exciting. I have really low standards for excitement. Not only that, we have a woman as the head of this whole enterprise and that's extremely exciting. Yeah. And she's so young. Don't. Doesn't she look nice but hat. She's a cowboy, man. This person is a cowboy. I just want to tell you, this person comes in at 6:00 every morning for the past 30 years with her cowboy hat and her boots.
Not on exactly. Because she's Italian. It's more like a spaghetti western. Okay. Sorry, I'm just trying to get something out of you guys anyway. I'm really excited. I hope you are too. And I hope. I hope that one. You'll take at least one thing away from this talk, which is the wind. And the wind just go. Wind, tornado. Higgs field. The Higgs boson. And you will seem like such a powerful. You will be on your horse for who it is. Okay. Goodbye. Thank you, Melissa. That was.