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.