John Ellis and the Large Hadron Collider

One of the advantages of working in a place like Ångström is the access to the numerous interesting seminars given by distinguished scientists. Some are traditional annual events of which the most notable are the invited talks by the Nobel prize winners in physics. But throughout the year there will be invited speakers who are at the leading edge of scientific knowledge in their fields.

Todays' seminar was given by John Ellis, a key scientist at the forefront of supersymmetry theory at CERN. The subject of the talk was, of course, the Large Hadron Collider and the talk was entitled "What the Future May Hold". Of course, it's not always possible to know beforehand how many equations are likely to appear during the talk. I was somewhat apprehensive about having to sit through an hour of calculations designed to demonstrate why the proposed Higgs boson that's so sought afer should have precisely the mass that theory predicts. But this talk was clearly intended for a lesser informed audience and was very enjoyable for me.

Dr. Ellis' enthusiasm for the subject was infectious. Here we are at the brink of a deepening understanding of our world and universe. Not only are we not the center of our Copernican solar system, we may be, as Dr. Ellis phrased it, mere pond scum on the surface of a universe made up of matter that we can experience despite an overwhelming existence of something called antimatter. The large hadron collider will take us on a journey into realms where Newtonian physics is ludicrous and quantum mechanics merely fails, where 3 spatial dimensions are quaint and Einsteinian warping of spacetime old hat.

The collider will likely lead to insight into compelling questions about the origins of mass and where all the antimatter has gone. But I suspect the most likely result will be the generation of new questions that no one knew to ask.