Fifteen Seconds Podcast #21 with Particle Physicist James Beacham from CERN 🇬🇧
Mar 19, 2021
James Beacham, a particle physicist at CERN's Large Hadron Collider, dives into the universe’s mysteries. He mesmerizingly discusses black holes as potential gateways in time and space, the relationship between mass and energy, and the philosophical implications of multiverses. Beacham also outlines CERN's ambitious plans for a new Circular Collider, emphasizing the power of curiosity in scientific discovery. He challenges listeners to address societal issues to propel innovation and reflect on how gravity intertwines with our understanding of existence.
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Cutting Deeper Reveals New Laws
- Particle physics asks how small we can cut things and what holds matter together at each scale.
- Probing smaller scales reveals new constituents and deeper laws, limited only by our current experimental 'knife'.
Huge Machines, Huge Data, Tiny Discoveries
- The Large Hadron Collider accelerates protons in a 27 km ring and smashes them millions of times per second to reveal new particles.
- Experiments like ATLAS sift vast data to find anomalies that signal discoveries such as the Higgs boson.
Higgs Validates And Deepens The Mystery
- Finding the Higgs validated the Standard Model but also deepened puzzles because its mass sits at an unsettlingly special value.
- The Standard Model works exceptionally well yet is incomplete: it omits gravity and dark matter, so new physics must exist beyond it.