Particle Fever Page #3

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I mean,

to be on the ground floor

when the data first comes...

it's awesome.

That means I have 5,000 emails.

There's a huge difference

between theorists

and experimentalists.

I mean, when I started college,

I absolutely did not

want to do physics.

Physics meant to me

everything that was boring:

Textbooks, theories, proofs.

But then I discovered

the experimental side,

and the experimental side

is the hands-on aspect.

It's about taking a theory,

which is abstract,

and making it real.

How do you build an experiment

to discover something

that the theory predicts?

And that aspect is what I love.

Of course, when constructing

the whole thing,

we several times thought,

"What if the whole thing

just does not work?"

I really believe now

this will work,

but the next thing is,

will we ever find something?

So maybe we will

just find nothing new.

It would be a catastrophe

for physics.

We would, somehow...

none of the open questions

which we have at the moment

would've been answered.

So the LHC is basically the

most fundamental of experiments.

It's like what any child

would design as an experiment.

You take two things,

and you smash them together.

And you get a lot of stuff that

comes out of that collision,

and you try

to understand that stuff.

Now, in this case,

what we're smashing together

is tiny protons,

which are inside the center

of every atom.

And in order to get them

going as fast as possible,

we have to build

this huge 17-mile ring,

and we run those protons

around the ring multiple times

to build up speed,

almost to the speed of light,

and then we collide two beams

going in opposite directions

at four points,

and at those four points

are four different experiments:

ATLAS, LHCb, CMS, and ALICE.

Now, I work

on the ATLAS experiment.

And ATLAS is like

a huge seven-story camera

that takes a snapshot

of every single collision,

and that's billions

of collisions.

And the hope is that we'll see

the very famous Higgs particle.

But every time we've turned on

the new accelerator

at a higher energy,

we've always been surprised.

So the real hope

is that we'll see the Higgs,

but that there's also something

amazingly new.

You can liken it to

when we put a man on the moon.

It's that level

of collaborative effort.

I would say,

even bigger than that.

This is closer to something like

human beings

building the Pyramids.

Why did they do it?

Why are we doing it?

We actually have two answers.

One answer

is what we tell people,

and the other answer

is the truth.

I'll tell you both.

And there's nothing incorrect

about the first answer.

It's just... it doesn't... it's

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