Every year the ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb collaborations award outstanding PhD students, who worked on the experiments, with the thesis prizes. Over the past months 15 early-career researchers have been recognised for their contributions during the collaborations’ meeting weeks.
On 7 June, the LHCb collaboration honoured PhD students who made exceptional contributions to the collaboration with their theses. Saverio Mariani (Universita di Firenze; CERN) was awarded for his work on fixed-target physics with the LHCb experiment, using proton-helium collision data to understand antiproton production in cosmic rays. Peter Svihra (University of Manchester; CERN) was recognised for detector R&D towards a silicon-pixel detector for the upgraded LHCb detector.
Collision – Stories from the Science of CERN is a highly readable anthology built on the idea of teaming up great writers with great scientists. There are 13 stories in all, each accompanied by an afterword from a member of the particle physics community. The authors are a very diverse bunch, so there’s something for everyone – from exploring the nature of symmetry through the mirror of human interaction, to imagined historical encounters and, inevitably, the apocalyptic: we humans have always ventured into the unknown with trepidation.
Being of the same vintage as the BBC’s Dr Who, I was pleased to discover that the first story was penned by one of the programme’s most successful showrunners, Steven Moffat. Although I found myself doubting the direction of travel after the opening paragraphs, I enjoyed the destination. It was a good start, and it established a standard that the book maintains to the very last word.
In Adam Marek’s story, I found myself listening along to protagonist Brody Maitland’s selection of music for his appearance on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Disks, something of a national institution in the UK. This story also contains the wonderful line: “we live in a world where it is more impressive to have millions of followers than to lift the stone of the universe and reveal the deep mysteries scurrying beneath it.” How true that is in a world of diminishing attentions spans.
Broadcaster and journalist Bidisha Mamata provides a welcome commentary on contemporary global politics. An unscrupulous leader manipulates an ambitious individual in a bid to undermine the global order. Sound familiar? In this case, the individual concerned is a CERN scientist, the reputation at stake, CERN’s, and the tool to achieving that goal the creation of a locally apocalyptic event. Politically spot on. Scientifically wide of the mark.
Post-apocalyptic scenarios make other appearances, though in these cases it’s what happens next that’s important. Stephen Baxter’s AI protagonist guides us through millennia of human stupidity, while Lillian Weezer imagines what might happen if people unearthed the LHC in some post-apocalyptic world.
Prometheus and Frankenstein make their appearances in Margaret Drabble’s wonderfully erudite tale set at CERN in the 2050s. Desiree Reynolds imagines a delicious encounter that never happened between CERN’s first Director General, Felix Bloch, and the American writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin. Would they have gelled? I’d like to think so. There’s a cautionary tale from Courttia Newland about AI, which draws the conclusion that whatever form intelligence may take, life, of a kind, will go on and the laws of the universe will remain the same. Ian Watson’s joyous facility with words puts a smile on your face from the first line of his galaxy-skipping parable. You’ll have to read it for yourself to find out whether he leaves you smiling at the end.
A recurring theme is the parallel between life and physics: Poet Lisa luxx, for example, entwines forces at work in nature with those between people, while Lucy Caldwell examines notions of uncertainty in life and physics in a story set in her native city Belfast. Peter Kalu applies a similar principle to computer security, with a cautionary yet warming tale about a side-channel attack of sorts.
Enough of the stories, what about the afterwords? Peter Dong’s comment leaves you wanting to sit in on his physics classes, while Jens Vigen gives a thoughtful account of the origins of CERN. Kirstin Lohwasser does a fine job of bringing Bidisha’s science back to the realms of reality. Tessa Charles is bullish about the FCC, currently at the feasibility stage. Michael Davis gives a glimpse of the vast industry that is modern day computer security.
Anyone that has juggled particle physics and parenting will identify with Luan Goldie’s story, which is accompanied by a heartfelt paean to CERN by one who has done just that. “Life is work and work is life,” says Carole Weydert, concluding with the words: “CERN. Grey. But sparkling.”
Andrea Bersani introduces us to the speculations that distorted spacetime allow, while Andrea Giammanco does a similar job for the dark sector. Daniel Cervenkov discusses CP violation, while Joe Haley ponders the development of ideas over time: Newton subsumed by Einstein, the Standard Model by something yet to be found. Gino Isidori, for his part, takes us on a brief guided tour of a metastable universe. John Ellis’s pairing with Stephen Baxter is particularly successful. The writer’s central story, which spans millennia and civilisations resonates well with the theoretical physicist’s daily work of examining Gauguin’s questions: “D’où venons nous, Que sommes nous, Où allons nous.”
All in all, the book makes for a varied, thought provoking and engaging read. As with the Arts at CERN programme, it demonstrates that creativity is not the preserve of the arts or of science, and that great things can happen when the two collide.
The 2023 Enrico Fermi Prize of the Italian Physical Society (SIF) has been awarded to Massimo Ferrario, Lucio Rossi and Frank Zimmermann for their outstanding contributions to accelerator technologies, ranging from plasma acceleration to the realisation of ultra-high energy particle colliders. Established by SIF in 2001, the centenary of Fermi’s birth, with an award of €30,000, the prize is awarded annually to one or more members for their significant contributions to physics.
Massimo Ferrario (INFN, Frascati) is cited for his formidable contributions to high-brightness photoinjectors, free-electron-laser photon sources and plasma-acceleration techniques. Following this path, he currently leads the EuPRAXIA project, which aims to develop the first dedicated research infrastructure based on novel plasma-acceleration concepts.
Lucio Rossi (University of Milan) is recognised for his key role in R&D for large superconducting ultra-high-field magnets, in particular those for the LHC. Rossi also proposed, founded and initially directed the High-Luminosity LHC upgrade based on advanced niobium-tin magnet technology, which is due to enter operations in 2029.
Described as one of the most prolific and creative authors in accelerator physics, and author of seminal discoveries that have made it possible to realise the most modern high-luminosity, high-energy colliders, Frank Zimmermann (CERN) is cited for his fundamental and pioneering contributions to the understanding and modelling of various effects related to accelerated electron beams. His current research contributes to the HL-LHC upgrade and future colliders, such as the proposed Future Circular Collider at CERN.
All three will receive the prize during a presentation at the opening session of the 109th National Congress of the SIF in Salerno, Italy on 11 September.
Stavros Katsanevas, who shaped the field of astroparticle physics in Europe, died on 27 November 2022. He had just become professor emeritus of Université Paris Cité and was preparing his return to the Astroparticle and Cosmology (APC) laboratory.
Born in Athens in 1953, Stavros pursued physics at the University of Athens. In 1979 he obtained his speciality doctorate from École polytechnique in Paris. He obtained his PhD at Athens in 1985, and later became an associate professor there (1989–1996). From 1979 to 1982 he spent three years as a postdoc at Fermilab. He also worked at CERN, as a research fellow (1983–1986), research associate (1991–1992) and corresponding fellow (1996). He was then appointed professor at the University Claude Bernard Lyon 1, and in 2004 became a professor at the University Paris VII Denis Diderot (now Université Paris Cité).
From 2002 to 2012 Stavros was deputy scientific director of IN2P3, during which he steered the institute to a leading position in astroparticle physics. He was particularly active in the emerging field of multi-messenger astronomy and in instrumentation. In this context, he played a key role in the creation of the APC laboratory in Paris, of which he was director from 2014 to 2017. Until his death, he led the French–Italian European Gravitational Observatory consortium, coordinating projects related to the detection of gravitational waves with the Virgo observatory.
Stavros’s scientific career was extremely rich, as evidenced by hundreds of publications on topics related to research collaborations, experimental techniques, or the conception and design of new research infrastructures. At CERN, he distinguished himself by developing software for simulating particle interactions, which later became a standard used at LEP. He also played an essential role in federating teams in several large international collaborative projects. One example is his involvement in the OPERA experiment at Gran Sasso laboratory; another is his leading role in the development of underwater neutrino telescopes, starting with the NESTOR project, which led to ANTARES and KM3NeT.
Over the past 15 years, Stavros played a central role in defining a global strategy in astroparticle physics. With the support of the European Commission, he created ASPERA, followed by the AstroParticle Physics European Consortium, which today gathers about 20 European countries. He was also involved in interdisciplinary research projects, mainly in the field of geosciences. He was co-director of the Laboratory of Excellence UnivEarthS from 2014 to 2018 and at the forefront of a seismometer project to be installed on the Moon.
Stavros was keen to promote science to a wide audience. Since 2015, he was a member of the jury for the Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation, and in 2019 he organised an exhibition “The Rhythm of Space” at the museo della Grafica in Pisa. He was also coordinator of the European Horizon 2020 project REINFORCE, which intends to support more than 100,000 citizens to increase their awareness of and attitude towards science.
Stravros was driven by an inexhaustible desire to contribute to the advancement of science by serving, stimulating and animating the community. Steeped in philosophy, literature and poetry, he was also remarkably kind and generous. His thought, his vision, his driving force, will continue to accompany us.
Theoretical physicist Stanley Deser, a co-inventor of supergravity, passed away in Pasadena, California, on 21 April.
Stanley was born to middle-class Jewish parents in Rovno, then in Poland. In 1935 the family emigrated first to Palestine and then to France. After the Second World War broke out they fled to the US via Portugal (they were one of the families saved by Aristides de Sousa Mendes), eventually settling in Brooklyn. Stanley graduated Summa Cum Laude from Brooklyn College in 1949, and received his PhD at Harvard in 1953 under the supervision of Julian Schwinger. After postdocs at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ (1953–1955) and the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen (1955–1957), and a lectureship at Harvard University (1957–1958), he joined the faculty of the physics department at Brandeis in 1958, where he remained until he retired in 2005. After moving to Pasadena, he remained an emeritus professor at Brandeis, and continued to publish physics papers until this year (as well as his autobiography, Forks in the Road, in 2021).
Stanley was a towering figure in theoretical high-energy physics, classical gravity and quantum gravity. His work cuts through mathematical complexity with deep physical insight. His first signature work, the Arnowitt–Deser–Misner (ADM) formalism, gave a Hamiltonian initial-value formalism for general relativity. This work is the foundation of precise calculations in inflationary cosmology, needed to match cosmic microwave background observations; and in numerical relativity calculations needed to interpret the results of gravitational-wave experiments. He leaves behind a lifetime of work in theoretical physics that remains foundational, including co-inventing supergravity (contemporaneously with Ferrara, Freedman and van Nieuwenhuizen) and formulating the dynamics of the superstring with Zumino; showing that general theories with massive gravity are inconsistent; and developing topologically massive gauge theories and gravity with Jackiw and Templeton.
Stanley was an important member of the scientific community. As Rainer Weiss, who shared the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for the observation of gravitational waves, related, he played an important role in convincing the National Science Foundation to fund the LIGO gravitational-wave detector. He was a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; a foreign member of the Royal Society and the Torino Academy of Sciences; he was awarded the Dannie Heineman Prize in Mathematical Physics and the Einstein Medal, along with the Guggenheim and Fulbright awards; and held honorary doctorates from Stockholm University and the Chalmers Institute of Technology.
Stanley will be remembered for his wisdom and ready wit; emails and talks in which every sentence had multiple meanings and were packed with allusions and jokes; his delight and skill in acquiring languages; a love of travel; and a deep appreciation for art and literature.
Stanley was preceded in death by his wife, the artist Elsbeth Deser (daughter of Oskar Klein), and his daughter Eva. He leaves behind three daughters – retired linguist Toni Deser; theatre director Abigail Deser; and atmospheric scientist (and fellow NAS member) Clara Deser – and four grandchildren, Ursula, Oscar, Louise and Simon.
A one-of-a-kind conference MMAP (Macrocosmos, Microcosmos, Accelerator and Philosophy) 2020 was held in May last year in Kolkata, India, attracting 200 participants in person and remotely. An unusual format for an international conference, it combined the voyage from the microcosmos of elementary particles to the macrocosmos of our universe up to the horizon and beyond with accelerator physics and philosophy through the medium of poetry and songs, as inspired by the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore and the creative giant Satyajit Ray.
The first presentation was by Roger Penrose, who talked about black holes, singularities and conformal cyclic cosmology. He discussed the cosmology of dark matter and dark energy, and inspired participants with the fascinating idea of one aeon going over to another aeon endlessly with no beginning or end of time and space.
Larry McLerran’s talk “Quarkyonic matter and neutron stars” provided an intuitive understanding of the origin of the equation of state of neutron stars at very high density, followed by Debadesh Bandyopadhyay’s talk on unlocking the mysteries of neutron stars. Jean-Paul Blaziot talked about the emergence of hydrodynamics in expanding quark–gluon plasma, whereas Edward Shuryak discussed the role of sphaleron explosions and baryogengesis in the cosmological electroweak phase transition. Subir Sarkar’s talk “Testing the cosmological principle” was provocative, as usual, and Sunil Mukhi and Aninda Sinha described the prospects for string theory. Sumit Som, Chandana Bhattacharya, Nabanita Naskar and Arup Bandyopadhyay discussed the low- and medium-energy physics possible using cyclotrons at Kolkata.
Moving to extreme nuclear matter, Barbara Jacak talked about experimental studies of transport in dense gluon matter. Jurgen Schukraft, Federico Antinori, Tapan Nayak, Bedangadas Mohanty and Subhasis Chattopadhyay spoke on signatures for the early-universe quark-gluon plasma and described the experimental programme of the ALICE experiment at the LHC, and Dinesh Srivastava focussed on the electromagnetic signatures of quark-gluon plasma.
A carnival of ideas, a mixture of low- to high-energy physics on the one hand and the cosmology of the creation of the universe on the other
Amanda Cooper-Sarkar emphasised the role of parton distribution functions in searches for new physics at colliders such as the LHC. Shoji Nagamiya presented the physics prospects of the J-PARC facility in Japan, Paolo Giubellino described the evolution of the latest FAIR accelerator at GSI, and Horst Stöcker discussed how to observe strangelets using fluctuation tools. In his presentation on the history of CERN, former Director-General Rolf Heuer talked about the marvels of large-scale collaboration capturing the thrill of a big discovery.
The MMAP 2020 conference witnessed a carnival of ideas, a mixture of low- to high-energy physics on the one hand and the cosmology of the creation of the universe on the other.
Coherent elastic neutrino–nucleus scattering (CEvNS) is a new neutrino-detection channel with the potential to test the Standard Model (SM) at low-momentum transfer and to search for new physics beyond the SM (BSM). It also has applications in nuclear physics, such as measurements of nuclear form factors, and the detection of solar and supernova neutrinos. In the SM, neutrinos interact with the nucleus as a whole, enhancing the cross section by approximately the neutron number squared. However, detection is challenging as the observable is the tiny recoil of the nucleus, which has an energy ranging from sub-keV to a few tens of keV depending on the nucleus and neutrino source. Several decades after its prediction, CEvNS was measured for the first time in 2017 by the COHERENT experiment and the field has grown rapidly since.
The aims of the Magnificent CEvNS workshop, named after the Hollywood Western, are to bring together the broad community of researchers working on CEvNS and promote student engagement and connection among experimentalists, theorists and phenomenologists in this new field. The first workshop was held in 2018 in Chicago, and the most recent in Munich from 22 to 24 March with 96 participants.
Examining CEvNS opens a multitude of promising ways to look for BSM interactions. Improved limits on generalised neutrino interactions, new light mediators and sterile neutrinos derived from the complete COHERENT dataset were presented. These data enable the nuclear radius to be probed in a new way. More physics potential was highlighted in talks showing limits on the Weinberg angle and dark matter (axion-like particles). Notable advances by reactor experiments include new limits on CEvNS on germanium by the CONUS and NuGen experiments, which disagree with the previously published Dresden-II results.
The talks underlined the large experimental effort toward a complete mapping of the neutron and energy dependence of the CEvNS cross section. The observation of CEvNS on CsI and Ar by the COHERENT experiment will be complemented with future measurements on targets ranging from light (sodium) to heavy (tungsten) elements in COHERENT and new facilities such as NUCLEUS and Ricochet. Precision will be achieved by increasing statistics in CEvNS events with larger target masses, lower detection thresholds and increased neutrino flux. Reducing systematic effects by characterising backgrounds and detector responses is also critical. The growing precision will trigger studies on BSM physics in the near future, complementing high-energy experimental efforts.
A half-day satellite workshop “Into the Blue Sky” was dedicated to new ideas related to the CEvNS community. These included measurements of neutrino-induced fission, and detector concepts based on latent damage to the crystalline structure of minerals and superconducting crystals. The workshop was followed by a school organised by the Collaborative Research Center “Neutrinos and Dark Matter in Astro- and Particle Physics” at TU Munich from 27 to 29 March. Six lectures covered the fundamentals of low-energy neutrino physics with a focus on CEvNS, backgrounds, neutrino sources and detectors. The 40 participants then applied this knowledge by creating a fictional micro-CEvNS experiment.
Half a century since it was proposed theoretically, the physics accessible with CEvNS is proving to be extensive. The next Magnificent CEvNS workshop will take place next year at a new location and the participants are looking forward to further exploration of the CEvNS frontier.
This book was written on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Jack Steinberger. Edited by Jack’s former colleagues Weimin Wu and KK Phua with his daughter Julia Steinberger, it is a tribute to the important role that Jack played in particle physics at CERN and elsewhere, and also highlights many aspects of his life outside physics.
The book begins with a nice introduction by his daughter, herself a well-known scientist. She describes Jack’s family life, his hobbies, interests, passions and engagement, such as with the Pugwash conference series. The introduction is followed by a number of short essays by former friends and colleagues. The first is a transcript of an interview with Jack by Swapan Chattopadhyay in 2017. It contains recollections of Jack’s time at Fermilab, with his PhD supervisor Enrico Fermi, and concludes with his connections with Germany later in life.
Drive and leadership
The next essays highlight the essential impact that Jack had in all the experiments he participated in, mostly as spokesperson, and underline his original ideas, drive and leadership, not just professionally but also in his personal life. Stories include those by Hallstein Høgåsen, a fellow in the CERN theory department, who describes the determination and perseverance he had in mountaineering. S Lokanathan worked with Jack as a graduate student in the early 1950s in Nevis Labs and remained in contact with him, including later on when he became a professor in Jaipur. Jacques Lefrançois covers the ALEPH period, and Vera Luth the earlier kaon experiments at CERN. Italo Mannelli comments on both the early times when Jack visited Bologna to work with Marcello Conversi and Giampietro Puppi, and then turns to his work at the NA31 experiment on direct CP violation in the Ko system.
Gigi Rolandi emphasises the important role that Jack played in the design and construction of the ALEPH time projection chamber. Another good essay is by David N Schwartz, the son of Mel Schwartz who shared the Nobel prize with Jack and Leon Lederman. When David was born, Jack was Mel Schwartz’s thesis supervisor. As Jack was a friend of the Schwartz family, they were in regular contact all along. David describes how his father and Jack worked together and how, together with Leon Lederman, they started the famous muon neutrino experiment in 1959. As David Schwartz later became involved in arms control for the US in Geneva, he kept in contact with Jack, who had always been very passionate about arms control. David also remembers the great respect that Jack had for his thesis supervisor Enrico Fermi. The final essay is by Weimin Wu, one of the first Chinese physicists to join the international high-energy physics research community. Weimin started to work on ALEPH in 1979 and has remained a friend of the family since. He describes not only the important role that Jack played as a professor, mentor and role model, but also for establishing the link between ALEPH and the Chinese high-energy physics community.
All these essays describe the enormous qualities of Jack as a physicist and as a leader. But they also highlight his social and human strengths. The reader gets a good feeling of Jack’s interests and hobbies outside of physics, such as music, climbing, skiing and sailing. Many of the essays are also accompanied by photographs, covering all parts of his life, and they are free from formulae or complicated physics explanations.
For those who want to go deeper into the physics that Jack was involved with, the second part of the book consists of a selection of his most important and representative publications, chosen and introduced by Dieter Schlatter. The first two papers from the 1950s deal with neutral meson production by photons and a possible detection of parity non-conservation in hyperon decays. They are followed by the Nobel prize-winning paper “Possible Detection of High-Energy Neutrino Interactions and the Existence of Two Kinds of Neutrinos” from 1962, three papers on CP violation in kaon decays at CERN (including first evidence for direct CP violation by NA31), then five important publications from the CDHS neutrino experiment (officially referred to as WA1) on inclusive neutrino and anti-neutrino interactions, charged-current structure functions, gluon distributions and more. Of course, the list would not be complete without a few papers from his last experiment, ALEPH, including the seminal one on the determination of the number of light neutrino species – a beautiful follow-up of Jack’s earlier discovery that there are at least two types of neutrinos.
This agreeable and interesting book will primarily appeal to those who have met or known Jack. But others, including younger physicists, will read the book with pleasure as it gives a good impression of how physics and physicists functioned over the past 70 years. It is therefore highly recommended.
Andrew Larkoski seems to be an author with the ability to write something interesting about topics for which a lot has already been written. His previous book Elementary Particle Physics (2020, CUP) was noted for its very intuitive style of presentation, which is not easy to find in other particle-physics textbooks. With his new book on quantum mechanics, the author continues in this manner. It is a textbook for advanced undergraduate students covering most of the subjects that an introduction to the topic usually includes.
Despite the subtitle “a mathematical introduction”, there is no more maths than in any other textbook at this level. The reason for the title is presumably not the mathematical content, but the presentation style. A standard quantum-mechanics textbook usually starts with postulating Schrödinger’s equation and then proceeds immediately to applications on physical systems. For example, the very popular Introduction to Quantum Mechanics by Griffiths and Schroeter (2018, CUP) introduces Schrödinger’s equation on the first page and, after some discussion on its meaning and basic computational techniques, the first application on the infinite square well appears on page 31. Larkoski aims to build an intuitive mathematical foundation before introducing Schrödinger’s equation. Hilbert spaces are discussed in the context of linear algebra as an abstract complex vector space. Indeed, space is given at the very beginning for ideas, such as the relation between the derivative and a translation, that are useful for more advanced applications of quantum mechanics, for example in field theory, but which seldom appear in quantum-mechanics textbooks so early. Schrödinger’s equation does not appear until page 58, and the first application in a system (which, as usual, is the infinite square well) appears only on page 89.
The book is concise in length, which means that the author has had to carefully choose the areas that are beyond the standard quantum-mechanics material covered in most undergraduate courses. Larkoski’s choices are probably informed by his background in quantum field theory, since path integral formalism features strongly. Perhaps the price for keeping the book short is that there are topics, such as identical particles or Fermi’s golden rule, that are not covered.
Some readers will find the book’s style of delaying a mathematical introduction unnecessary and may prefer a more direct approach to the topic, which might also be related to the duration of the teaching period at university. I would not agree with such an assessment. Taking the time to build a basis early on helps tremendously with understanding quantum mechanics later on in a course – an approach that it is hoped will find its way to more classrooms in the near future.
I have always been interested in what one might call existential questions: those that were originally theological or philosophical, but are now science, such as “why are things the way they are?” When I was young, for me it was a toss-up: do I go into particle physics or cosmology? At the time, experimental cosmology was less developed, so it made sense to go towards particle physics.
What has been your research focus?
When I was a graduate student in college, I was intrigued by the idea of quantum mechanical spin. I didn’t understand spin and I still don’t. It’s a perplexing and non-intuitive concept. It turned out the university I went to was working on it. When I got there, however, I ended up doing a fixed-target jet-photoproduction experiment. My thesis experiment was small, but it was a wonderful training ground because I was able to do everything. I built the experiment, wrote the data acquisition and all of the analysis software. Then I got back on track with the big questions, so colliders with the highest energies were the way to go. Back then it was the Tevatron and I joined DØ. When the LHC came online it was an opportunity to transition to CMS.
Why and when did you decide to get into communication?
It has to do with my family background. Many physicists come from families where one or both parents are already from the field. But I come from an academically impoverished, blue-collar background, so I had no direct mentors for physics. However, I was able to read popular books from the generation before me, by figures such as Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov or George Gamow. They guided me into science. I’m essentially paying that back. I feel it’s sort of my duty because I have some skill at it and because I expect that there is some young person in some small town who is in a similar position as I was in, who doesn’t know that they want to be a scientist. And, frankly, I enjoy it. I am also worried about the antiscience sentiment I see in society, from the antivaccine movement to climate-change denial to 5G radiation fears. If scientists do not speak up, the antiscience voices are the only ones that will be heard. And if public policy is based on these false narratives, the damage to society can be severe.
Scientists doing outreach create goodwill, which can lead to better funding for research-focused scientists
How did you start doing YouTube videos?
I had got to a point in my career where I was fairly established, and I could credibly think of other things. When you’re young, you are urged to focus entirely on research, because if you don’t, it could harm your research career. I had already been writing for Fermilab Today and I kept suggesting doing videos, as YouTube was becoming a thing. After a couple of years one of the videographers said, “You know, Don, you’re actually pretty good at explaining this stuff. We should do a video.” My first video came out a year before the Higgs discovery, in July 2011. It was on the Higgs boson. When the video came out, a few of the bigger science outlets picked it up and during the build-up to the Higgs excitement it got more and more views. By now it has more than three million clicks, which for a science channel is a lot. We do serious science in our videos, but there is also some light-heartedness in them.
Do you try to make the videos funny?
This has more to do with me not taking anything seriously. I have found that irreverent humour can be disarming. People like to be entertained when they are learning. For example, one video was about “What was the real origin of mass?” Most people think that the Higgs boson is giving mass, but it’s really QCD. It’s the energy stored inside nucleons. In any event, in this video I start out with a joke about going into a Catholic church. The Higgs boson tries to say “I’m losing my faith,” and the priest replies: “You can’t leave the church. Without you how can we have mass?” For a lot of YouTube channels, viewership is not just about the material. It’s about the viewer liking the presenter. I’d say people who like our channel appreciate the combination of reliable science facts, but also subscribe for the humour. If a viewer doesn’t like a guy who does terrible dad jokes, they just go to another channel.
During the Covid-19 pandemic your videos switched to “Subatomic stories”. How do they differ?
Most of my videos are done in a studio on green screen so that we can put visuals in the background, but that was not possible during the lockdown. We then did a set up in my living room. I had an old DSLR camera and a recorder, and would record the video and the audio, then send the files to my videographer, Ian Krass, who does all the magic. Our usual videos don’t have a real story arc; they are just a series of topics. With “Subatomic stories” we began with a plan. I organised it as a sort of self-contained course, beginning with basic things, like the Standard Model, weak force, strong force, etc. Towards the end, we introduced more diverse, current research topics and a few esoteric theoretical ideas. Later, after Subatomic stories, I continued to film in my basement in a green-screen studio I built. We’ve returned to the Fermilab studio, but the basement one is waiting should the need arise.
You are quite the public face of Fermilab. How does this relationship work?
It’s working wonderfully. I have no complaints. I can’t say that was always true in the past, because, when you’re young, you’re advised to focus on your research; it was like that for me. At the time there was some hostility towards science communicators. If you did outreach, you weren’t really considered a serious scientist, and that’s still true to a degree, although it is getting better. For me, it got to the point where people were just used to me doing it, and they tolerated it. As long as it didn’t bother my research, I could do this on my time. Some people bowl, some people knit, some people hike. I made videos. As I started becoming more successful, the laboratory started embracing the effort and even encouraged me to spend some of my work day on it. I was glad because in the same way that we encourage certain scientists to specialise in AI or computational skills or detector skills, I think that we as a field need to cultivate and encourage those scientists who are good at communicating our work. The bottom line is that I am very happy with the lab. I would like to see other laboratories encourage at least a small subset of scientists, those who are enthusiastic about outreach, to give them the time and the resources to do it, because there’s a huge payoff.
What are your favourite and least favourite things about doing outreach?
I think I’m making an impact. For instance, I’ve had graduate students or even postdocs ask me to autograph a book saying, “I went into physics because I read this book.” Occasionally I’m recognised in public, but the viewership numbers tell the story. If a video does poorly, it will get 50,000 viewers. And a good video, or maybe just a lucky one, can get millions. The message is getting out. As for the least favourite part, lately it is coming up with ideas. I’ve covered nearly every (hot) topic, so now I am thinking of revisiting early topics in a new way.
What would be your message to physicists who don’t have time or see the need for science communication?
Let’s start with the second type, who don’t see the value of it. I would like to remind them that essentially, in any country, if you want to do research, your funding comes from taxpayers. They work hard for their money and they certainly don’t want to pay taxes, so if you want to ask them to support this thing that you’re interested in, you need to convince them that it’s important and interesting. For those who don’t have time, I’m empathetic. Depending on your supervisor, doing science communication can harm a young career. However, in that case I think that the community should at least support a small group of people who do outreach. If nothing else, the scientists doing outreach create goodwill, which can lead to better funding for research-focused scientists.
Where do you see particle physics headed and the role of outreach?
The problem is that the Standard Model works well, but not perfectly. Consequently, we need to look for anomalies both at the LHC and with other precision experiments. I imagine that the next decade will resemble what we are doing now. I think it would be of very high value if we could spend some money on thinking about how to make stronger magnets and advanced acceleration technologies, because that’s the only way we’re going to get a very large increase in energy. The scientists know what to do. We are developing the techniques and technologies needed to move forward. On the communication side, we just need to remind the public that the questions particle physicists and cosmologists are trying to answer are timeless. They’re the questions many children ask. It’s a fascinating universe out there and a good science story can rekindle anyone’s sense of child-like wonder.
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