I was recently contact by a gentleman from that was involved in an interview with Brain Cox. The Interview is really long so I have put some highlights from the interview below! Thanks Tim at Oreilly.com
For a video of Brian Cox at the TED conference check out an earlier post I made
Brian Cox on CERN’s supercollider
TO: Is there any real disagreement? Are there camps that have developed?
BC: Oh absolutely; there’s a huge disagreement
because this is–it’s truly a leap into the unknown. I mean you hear
that a lot about scientific experiments but this one really is a big
jump. The most powerful accelerator at the moment is in Chicago
actually; the Tevatronat Fermilab where I’ve worked. I worked there before I moved onto the LHC. And the
LHC is an order of magnitude pretty much–increase in energy and it’s a
huge increase in the number of proton/proton collisions we can have
every second, so it–in a sense I was going to say all bets are off.
It’s not quite true; I mean we know some things that we’re going to
discover so we will discover the origin of mass in the universe, the
mechanism that generates the mass for the fundamental particles.
TO: And that would be the Higgs Boson?
BC: Well yeah it would be. I mean the correct thing
to say is whatever does that job we should see. I mean I would say
actually we will see; as long as the machine functions properly we’ll
see it. It could be the Higgs; yes–in a sense the most likely and that
it’s a theory that works and–but it could be something else and you
will find people who don’t–certainly don’t believe in the so-called
standard model Higgs. There–there are many different Higgs theories;
there’s the–or Higgs manifestations of the Higgs mechanism. One of
the–the standard model of the Higgs at the [simplest] you find one
Higgs particle covers standard model Higgs, but there are so-called
sleeper symmetric theories that many people think are actually possibly
more likely. And in some of those theories, the [simplest] you get five
Higgs particles. You know so–so even the Higgs–you can have different
camps as to how many Higgs particles you’ll find. It’s fascinating
times to be a particle physicist.
TO: So the existence of the Higgs was suggested in the early ’90s in Chicago; is that true?
BC: No; it was the–we’ve got no direct
experimental evidence for the Higgs particle. We’ve got–we’ve got
indirect evidence in that the standard model of which it starts, which
our best theory of particle physics at the moment–works and as far
as–and you can–we tested it to immense precision in Chicago at
Tevatron and experiments at CERN and at SLAC for that matter in San Francisco and elsewhere. And it always–it works beautifully well and the Higgs is a part of that. So you can claim it
as indirect evidence but you can evade that indirect evidence actually
very easily in the theories. So the correct thing to say is it might
not exist; it might be something else that we haven’t thought of yet.
TO: It’s called the Large Hadron Collider but I’ve heard you say protons.
BC: Yeah.
TO: Was the reasoning behind calling it the Large Hadron Collider is it going to be colliding other things besides protons?
BC: Well you can actually yes; it can collide nuclei so there is a program at the LHC to collide gold nuclei which is what RHIC does–the Relative Heavy Iron Collider–at
Brookhaven in New York. And so it can–it can collide different things.
The proton program is kind of the you know–the lead program in a sense
because that’s how you get the most amount of energy to the smallest
amount of space, so you can try to look at things like Higgs particles.
But there’s a whole program–clan within a detector called Alice which
is dedicated to heavy iron collisions, the nucleus collisions and they
look at these things called quark gluon plasmas, which that’s the way
the universe was believed to be let’s say a millionth of a second after
it began–it’s a big soup of quarks and gluons. So it can bang together
other things, but–yeah; maybe it’s just–I don’t know why you’d call
it–you could have called it the Large Collider I suppose. I don’t know
why it’s called the LHC; I’d have to ask–Lyn Evans is one of the LHC
Project Leaders. It’s a good question; I’m going to ask him that.
TO: So it’s not a large particle per se; it’s just a "large Collider"? It could be called the "Hadron Collider"?
BC: Yeah, yeah; no large just means big
27-kilometer in circumference ring, so [Laughs] yeah. I mean–although
it’s got to be said actually that protons are pretty big things
compared to the things we’re looking for, the elementary particles of
matter.
Some questions excluded
TO: In the circle and the protons travel in some sort of perfect vacuum? I mean how do they–
BC: Yes; there are actually two pipes for most of
the LHC, so two beam pipes and they’re about you know
what–10-centimeters maybe across you know–they’re not very big pipes,
so one going one way and one going the other way and those pipes are in
a–in what we call a cryostat so which is where the magnets are as well
and that’s I’m told one yard across–. Now that’s not me being quaint
in English. It’s the only imperial measurement in the LHC and it’s
there because that’s the diameter of a standard oil pipe. This is what
I’m told, so it’s cheaper to make things one-yard across. So basically
you’ve got a big pipe–one yard across with all the magnets and the
beam pipes embedded in it and that’s the thing that’s down at the–at
minus 271-degrees. And then as you say the beams are in beam pipes and
those bean pipes emerge into one pipe at the interaction point so at
the places where you cross the beams through each of the–so you get
the collision and that happens inside the four detectors of the LHC.
TO: There are four main test points on the circle?
BC: Yeah; basically–that’s right.
TO: And these are–what have these machines
like–if you look at something called the Atlas or the CMS, these are
at each of the points and that’s what you work on?
BC: Yes; so Atlas is a–you think of a digital
camera. It really is except that it’s 40-meters long and 20-meters
high; it’s a big cylinder. It’s in a cavern 100-meters below the
ground. It’s bigger than the nave of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.
So it’s an immense structure but its job is to sit around the point
where you pass the beams through each of them so you collide the
protons together and it’s in those collisions that you–one way of
thinking about it is recreating the conditions that were present less
than a billionth of a second after the universe began–for a fraction
of a second and it’s in those conditions that you hope to reveal the
earth–I suppose the underlying simplicity of the universe.
TO: Two protons, two positively charged particles
each made up of three quarks a piece–what do you get when you bang
those together?
BC: Well what you do is you get a big mess is the
answer. [Laughs] And what happens I mean protons are actually full of
stuff. The three quarks is a simple view; there’s other things called
gluons in there. There are more quarks that are not in there in a sense
so it’s a big bag of particles and what you actually do is you collide
two of the constituents together so let’s say two gluons bump into each
other. The rest of the protons fly out in the direction in which they
came as a big cloud of debris really. So typically you’ll bang two
gluons together and it’s that–that you’re interested in. Those two
gluons could produce a Higgs particle let’s say and then the Higgs
particle will decay into other particles and you’ll collect that debris
as well. So you’re interested–the protons are really energy
deliverers. All you’re doing is trying to get energy into this small
space and out of that energy you would hope to make new particles that
you’ve never seen before.
For more of the interview please check the whole thing over at Oreilly
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