Guido Tonelli is the author of Genesis: The Story of How Everything Began. His team at CERN was instrumental in the discovery of the Higgs boson.
***
What was your emotional response to discovering the Higgs boson? I’m thinking of people who win the lottery and often report getting depressed once their dreams have materialised; can there be a similar phenomenon in science?
The analogy of winning the lottery is a bit off. A better one would be this: you’re rooting for an obscure little football team somewhere, and you keep doing so for decades, come rain or shine. You really suffer with them until something magical happens, and thanks to an unbelievable set of circumstances, they go on to win the Champions League. That’s what it felt like to discover the Higgs boson. Still, more than ten years later, I sometimes wake up in the morning not quite believing that it’s really true. It was such an unbelievably long journey to get there, such an incessant series of constant emergencies. We placed long bets on technology that really wasn’t mature yet, and there were so many ways we could have failed. Yet, we succeeded in doing something that I truly think will have a lasting impact, decades if not centuries from now.
You’re referring to the Large Hadron Collider as analogue to the ships once used to find new continents. Do you feel that this reliance on big experimental rigs has had any effects on the role of intuition and imagination in science?
I do like to think of the LHC and other such sites as research vessels, and it does mean that science has turned into more of a team effort. This isn’t straightforward if you consider that most people who seek a career in physics have an anarchic streak. They have an instinct of rebellion, but in this particular kind of endeavour—high-energy physics—you have to work together in a very coherent way. Then again, there’s also great power in that. Thirty years ago, we could never have imagined that we’d get as far as we have. That’s thanks to thousands of people working together like an orchestra, but also thanks to soloists who constantly come up with brilliant ideas that make the whole machinery run better. Individuals who lift the orchestra to new levels. It’s fantastic when that happens. For example, just over the last few weeks, we’ve been able to observe entanglement between top-quark pairs. Quite an extraordinary feat.
You mention our (western) culture’s fear of the void, traceable in how mathematics has dealt with the figure zero. You also say we need to be brave in order to take in the new truths that science is now serving up, especially as it pertains to how the universe has been created out of ’nothing’. Do you personally feel that ’nothing’ is an intimidating concept?
There’s a small confusion in that a void is not nothing. We tend to mix up the two, but really, from a scientific point of view, they are very different. Physicists had a big problem for a long time in trying to answer where all the energy would have come from that powered the creation of the universe. We now know, from experimental data, that there was no need for energy. The universe, as we know it, really is a void; it’s just a much more interestingly structured void than what was the case before the Big Bang. This is no speculation; it is the current best explanation we have for hundreds of experimental results. That doesn’t mean, of course, that it’s easy to accept. It’s not, not even to me; we have to suffer to accept it, we have to surrender. It’s a bit like the works of Stravinsky and Schoenberg. It sounded like noise to their contemporaries; it’s taken us a hundred years to hear the music.
You call us humans ’homo narrans’ and think of science as one way of telling stories, stories where we can find comfort in the face of uncertainty. I find this a very interesting perspective and would like to dig deeper into it.
Yes, well, I’m aware that the interpretation of science as a form of storytelling can appear relativistic, and therefore provocative. I stand by it, though, because the alternative would be to think of our findings as Truths, and that would mean seeing science as a religion. Science is not an arbitrary story, however; it has to fit within the constraints of thousands of experimental findings, so in relation to other types of stories, it has the privilege of being extremely reliable. Nevertheless, though, it’s still a story, and if you see it for what it is, you’re better equipped to accept new breakthroughs once they happen. To enlarge the world.
You mention that the Standard Model is a temporary thing and that it will likely be replaced or turned into a sub-case. Where do you place your bets as to what will supersede it? M-theory? Quantum Loop Gravity? Something completely different yet to be discovered? In other words, to what extent do you believe nature still holds major surprises for us to discover?
I’m a bit sceptical of anything pretending to be a “theory of everything”; it signals a belief that we’ll one day finally have cracked open all the mysteries, which I simply don’t think will happen. With regards to the different candidate theories that are out there, I prefer not to have any favourites. There was a time when I was very attracted to supersymmetry, which looked extremely elegant, but I and the rest of the science community learnt the hard way that it didn’t agree with experimental results. It might be that one day we will be able to prove the existence of, for example, a multiverse. I would love for that to happen in my lifetime, but it’ll be extremely challenging. Most likely, we still haven’t found the theory that will eventually tie quantum mechanics together with relativity.
Lastly, what would be your advice to young people who are now looking at a career in physics?
My advice would be to take no advice, not from anybody. Turn your attention inwards and listen to what you’re really passionate about, because you certainly need to be passionate in order to become a physicist. If you like creating things, whether it be building your own amplifiers or writing your own code, then go for that. And one more thing: don’t try to avoid mistakes. You will make mistakes, that’s inevitable; the important thing is that you learn from them.