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  • MELISSA FRANKLIN: Hi.

  • You know, they don't usually let me up here.

  • [CHUCKLING]

  • But when they do, there's people sending paper airplanes at me

  • during the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, which takes place every year,

  • and I'm sure some of you will attend.

  • Hi.

  • I can't see you, but I know you're young.

  • [CHUCKLING]

  • You have some glasses, and those are sort of diffraction grating glasses.

  • You don't have to--

  • I just want to say, if you get bored with what I'm saying,

  • just start looking up there, because it's really just very, very relaxing.

  • [CHUCKLING]

  • But later, we're going to actually use them for a demo.

  • But to begin with, I just want to tell you, I'm very interested in the vacuum,

  • in measuring the universe with nothing in it.

  • So I guess I should get the clicker.

  • So this stuff-- the apple, all that virus, I'm not interested in that

  • at all.

  • It's stuff.

  • I get that out of my universe.

  • Now, here's an atom.

  • The atom has a nucleus, and it has electrons.

  • And the nucleus is made up of protons and neutrons, which have quarks inside,

  • which I'm sure you know.

  • And I'm interested in the quarks.

  • I really like quarks.

  • But I'd like to have the universe without any atoms in it.

  • Here is my world.

  • So if you think about me, my name is Melissa.

  • You would look at the quarks.

  • All the quarks that exist in the universe that make up all the matter,

  • and all the leptons--

  • electrons, et cetera, the neutrinos--

  • and all the forces that hold all those particles

  • together to make matter, and black holes, and stuff.

  • [CHUCKLING]

  • Here's what you would find.

  • And unfortunately, I'm really old, but--

  • I was not a part of finding the charm quark, the c quark.

  • And I was not a part of finding the bottom quark, but almost.

  • But after 25 years of trying, I was on the team that found the last quark.

  • You can't find one.

  • It's over.

  • [CHUCKLING]

  • There's only six.

  • So I was on that team.

  • And then I was also on the team recently that discovered the Higgs.

  • And I wanted to tell you what I'm interested in,

  • and why we were looking for the Higgs, and what it meant to me.

  • So here is what's called the standard model.

  • Those are all the particles and the forces.

  • And if you're a theorist, and you have soft skin and stuff--

  • I'm an experimentalist-- you would write this equation down, and you would say,

  • this is the standard model, and this describes the universe.

  • But people like me don't really--

  • it doesn't fit inside my head.

  • I like reading it aloud.

  • When you go home, you could try reading equations aloud.

  • It's fun with friends.

  • It's very fun.

  • There must be a game.

  • It's not a drinking game.

  • It's more of a just good fun game.

  • So here's the thing.

  • For each of these terms in this equation--

  • the way experimentalists like to think about it is a diagram.

  • And this is a Feynman diagram.

  • There's a guy called Feynman, and this is his diagram.

  • And a diagram takes one of the terms in that equation and says,

  • let's see what it looks like if we're human.

  • And so here, for instance, time is going along to the right.

  • And what it's showing is matter and antimatter electrons come together,

  • annihilate into light, which then turns into antimatter and matter muons.

  • These are just heavier particles.

  • And we say, oh.

  • Ha.

  • I can write this down.

  • Can I measure it?

  • So that's sort of my life.

  • I can write down every possible diagram like this and try and measure it.

  • Now, for the people interested in archeology,

  • you might want to understand Feynman diagrams, because 1,000 years from now,

  • after everything happens, probably, you'll

  • find diagrams like this, just sort of like hieroglyphs.

  • And you'll probably understand them.

  • Could be sooner than 1,000 years.

  • It could be-- OK.

  • But I'm just saying.

  • I'm just saying.

  • People who are interested in linguistics or stuff like that, just look at that,

  • and don't just not think about it.

  • OK, here is me.

  • When you're in science, you have a lot of thoughts about yourself,

  • who you are.

  • Here's the top quark on my shoe.

  • That's me.

  • But as an experimentalist, I can make me a line drawing,

  • and it has just as much information.

  • So this is the real me on the left, and before children, and the right me.

  • [CHUCKLING]

  • The me that-- it's the spiritual.

  • For those interested in religious studies, this is the spiritual me.

  • So I want to describe the vacuum.

  • I want to describe the world with nothing in it.

  • I take everything out.

  • Is there something there?

  • I'll give you a hint.

  • Yes.

  • But it's kind of an interesting idea.

  • And if you're a literature person, you will

  • see that Samuel Beckett thought about this a lot.

  • Samuel Beckett starts with two people and nothing else--

  • Waiting for Godot.

  • And then he goes to Murphy, which is just a guy

  • strapped to a chair sitting alone.

  • And then The Unnameable, which is nobody, really.

  • So in literature, we discuss this idea of the vacuum.

  • And the Samuel Beckett, if you haven't read him, then you can start tomorrow.

  • And so if I want to understand the vacuum-- so there's nothing there--

  • what do I do?

  • So I want to tell you one thing.

  • And if this is the only thing that you remember, it's this.

  • The ground state doesn't talk to us.

  • So what do I mean?

  • The lowest energy state of anything doesn't say anything to us.

  • It doesn't reveal what it is.

  • And I want to do a demo with my friend Daniel Davis to show that.

  • So do we understand the ground state?

  • The lowest energy state is just there, like a lump sitting on a chair.

  • And you can't tell anything about that lump.

  • So to begin with, put on your glasses, and pull down the house lights,

  • and rock and roll.

  • So what we're going to show--

  • so these glasses are diffraction grating glasses, and they will act like a prism

  • and separate all the colors that are coming out.

  • So right now, what you should see from an incandescent light

  • is a spectrum of the rainbow.

  • Do you guys see it?

  • Look a little to the right or to the left.

  • AUDIENCE: Yes.

  • MELISSA FRANKLIN: Yeah?

  • OK.

  • Now, next to it, we have something which is just hydrogen gas.

  • Hydrogen gas, normally, you can't see anything.

  • Now what do you see?

  • Do you see two lines, or three?

  • AUDIENCE: Three.

  • MELISSA FRANKLIN: OK.

  • So what we're doing is we're exciting the atom because we're putting

  • an electrical current through it.

  • So I'm just saying, I don't want to just look

  • at hydrogen. I want to put electrical current through it.

  • And then I can see its nature.

  • I can see about its structure by looking at those lines.

  • And then if I look at the next one down, I'm

  • going to put an electric current through helium.

  • Isn't it beautiful?

  • Do you see the lines?

  • Is anyone thinking, I don't know what you're talking about?

  • [CHUCKLING]

  • No?

  • So helium is a different atom.

  • So you can see the structure of helium by the light it gives off.

  • And the final one is neon.

  • AUDIENCE: Whoa.

  • MELISSA FRANKLIN: [CHUCKLES]

  • I love this.

  • I love demos.

  • Daniel also loves demos.

  • OK.

  • Thank you.

  • OK.

  • So you're saying, what does that got to do with anything?

  • Not really anything.

  • Doesn't really have anything.

  • [APPLAUSE]

  • OK.

  • It doesn't have anything to do with anything, but here's the thing.

  • I want to understand the vacuum, but I'm going to have to excite it, OK?

  • If I want to understand the structure of the vacuum,

  • I'm going to have to excite it.

  • So there was this guy called--

  • this is a theorist guy, those are the cute ones--

  • called Peter Higgs.

  • And he solved this theoretical problem.

  • And in order to solve the problem, he had

  • to introduce something called the Higgs field.

  • So let me just say, this is how we understand the Higgs field.

  • Remember the Lagrangian?

  • Remember that equation?

  • If to that equation of the standard model

  • you add what I'm going to call a Higgs field, and I'll tell you what it is,

  • and you put it through a machine, what you will come out

  • is a Higgs boson, which is a particle.

  • And then all the particles in the universe will have mass,

  • and everybody will be happy.

  • But the problem is, this is what a theorist would draw,

  • but I'm the person who has to build that machine.

  • So that machine takes the Higgs field and puts an electric current

  • through it.

  • So what's a field?

  • Is this too boring?

  • Are we boring?

  • No, we're not boring.

  • OK.

  • So this is a wind map of America.

  • And at every point there, it shows the strength of the wind by how white

  • it is, and the direction.

  • So at every point in the world, you can imagine a field tells you

  • the strength and the direction.

  • So if it's a gravitational field, it should tell you

  • how fast you should fall, and in what direction.

  • So imagine that I have--

  • so let's go back one step.

  • So this is the wind field.

  • If I want to excite the wind field somehow,

  • I would get something like a tornado.

  • So an excitation of the wind field would be an amazing amount of energy in wind,

  • like a tornado.

  • So what I want to do is I want to take the Higgs field, which I can't see.

  • And the Higgs field has no direction.

  • And it has no size, so you cannot feel it in any way.

  • I want to take that, and I want to make a tornado.

  • And then I want to--

  • that's my whole life.

  • [CHUCKLING]

  • Actually, it doesn't seem as important as the last speaker.

  • So when--

  • [CHUCKLING]

  • I was thinking, I shouldn't even come up here, really, because--

  • but then I thought, OK.

  • OK, Melissa, it's going to be fine.

  • And I knew that my friend Daniel was here.

  • OK.

  • So here's what we want to do.

  • In order to make an excitation of this field--

  • and I don't even know if it's there--

  • I just need a whole bunch of energy in a very short amount of time.

  • And so what I do is I take a lot of protons,

  • and I collide them together at very high energies,

  • and I'm putting a huge amount of energy into a tiny little space

  • in a tiny little time.

  • And I use my theory that I learned from going to college--

  • I did go to college.

  • [CHUCKLING]

  • I didn't get a physics degree, though.

  • I just want you to know that.

  • Although it might say that my CV.

  • [LAUGHTER]

  • What I want to do is I want to take that Feynmann dagger,

  • and I run it right down the diagram that can actually

  • make a Higgs boson by making all this energy in a really small place.

  • And I say, oh, yeah, I can draw this, because the theorists say I can.

  • And then I just have the LHC--

  • the Large Hadron Collider-- and I just push the button, and this happens.

  • Protons collide.

  • And so what's really happening--

  • I'm walking around a lot.

  • So what's really happening is that about 100 billion protons hit 100 billion

  • protons every 25 nanoseconds.

  • So nano is small.

  • [CHUCKLING]

  • Yeah, it's really small.

  • Every 25 nanoseconds.

  • So 25 nanoseconds is like the amount of time it takes light to go 25 feet.

  • I do that.

  • Protons are going to collide.

  • The quarks inside the protons are going to collide.

  • I can make my Higgs boson one time out of every 10 to the something or other.

  • 10 to the 10 trillion.

  • 10 trillion.

  • I sound like that guy in the bad, bad movie.

  • Anyway--

  • [LAUGHTER]

  • If I can do this, and I can do it like for two years,

  • I can probably get enough Higgs bosons that I can say, I excited the field

  • and I actually got a boson out.

  • There must be a field there, right?

  • And so all I have to do is build a 27-kilometer accelerator

  • in Switzerland.

  • And then hire maybe--

  • I don't know-- 20,000 people.

  • And then I have to build a detector to see what

  • comes out of these proton collisions.

  • And this is the detector.

  • And you'd think those people are really small, but they're French.

  • [CHUCKLING]

  • So you have to--

  • obviously, French people are the same size.

  • But--

  • [CHUCKLING]

  • --the point is, when you're working on this detector,

  • you actually sometimes get a little--

  • you should go to the bathroom first.

  • Anyway, it's very, very tall.

  • It's very tall, so when you're working up at the top, it's a little scary.

  • Anyhow, we built this detector very fast.

  • Sorry.

  • I know that-- and this comes out.

  • All of a sudden, protons, quarks collide.

  • Whole bunch of stuff comes out, and our whole lives for the next five years

  • is just figuring out what happened.

  • What happened?

  • OK.

  • So we waited two years of taking data every 25 nanoseconds.

  • And we weren't allowed to look at the data.

  • And the reason is, if you're going to be studying psychology,

  • then you know that [INAUDIBLE] said that humans are very bad at statistics

  • naturally.

  • So don't trust yourself.

  • So what we do is we blind ourselves.

  • We don't actually-- we don't look at anything.

  • We don't look at the data for two years.

  • And then all of a sudden, one day, we make a plot.

  • And we make a plot of the mass of the Higgs boson,

  • or what we think it might be, and the number of events,

  • and we see something-- the red thing there--

  • that wouldn't be there if there wasn't the Higgs boson.

  • And we go, wow.

  • This is not exciting.

  • [CHUCKLING]

  • OK.

  • But you're saying, wow, that's not exciting.

  • OK.

  • Let's just talk about this.

  • My team is 3,000 people.

  • It's not my team.

  • I'm not the boss.

  • Otherwise, I wouldn't-- yeah.

  • [LAUGHTER]

  • Yeah.

  • I'd probably-- yeah.

  • My team is 3,000.

  • There's another experiment that's 3000.

  • You gotta check each other.

  • That's about the whole Harvard undergraduate class.

  • Imagine that everybody in the whole class--

  • like not just 1, 2, 3, 4, all of you--

  • were all working on the same project.

  • That would be weird.

  • It's a lot of people, so I don't even know who I am, unfortunately.

  • And this is how I feel afterwards.

  • [CHUCKLING]

  • Now I know everywhere in the universe-- everywhere in the universe--

  • there's a Higgs field that I can't touch.

  • But I know it's there intellectually, so I kind of feel weird as I'm walking.

  • And a lot of my colleagues feel weird also.

  • So I just wanted to tell you two more things.

  • Should I stop?

  • Because I think-- no?

  • It's OK?

  • AUDIENCE: Keep going.

  • MELISSA FRANKLIN: So you're thinking, that's a weird thing to do, Melissa.

  • It's a weird thing to want to do.

  • It's very specific.

  • But I kind of wanted to tell you what the whole project was of physics.

  • So it turns out that Harvard has a thing called the Harvard Lampoon.

  • Has anyone ever heard of it?

  • It's the humor magazine, and various other things.

  • And there was a guy many, many years ago.

  • A guy called O'Donnell.

  • And he decided that he wanted to write down the laws of cartoon physics.

  • I thought that was kind of interesting.

  • He didn't make them up.

  • He just wrote them down.

  • He turned out to end up writing for David Letterman and Saturday Night

  • Live and stuff.

  • But what's interesting to me about his laws of cartoon physics are, what

  • is the overarching idea of physics?

  • If we put all the things we know together,

  • what do we find as an overarching idea?

  • So what is the overarching idea here?

  • Well, the first law is gravity doesn't work until you look down.

  • So I'm going to show you three laws, and then we're

  • going to come up with the answer.

  • As speed increases, objects can be in more than one place at the same time.

  • And an anvil always falls more slowly than any person.

  • You guys have watched TV.

  • [CHUCKLING]

  • A lot of Harvard students haven't, but just pretend you have.

  • So what is the idea here?

  • Why are these funny?

  • And Walt Disney says this.

  • [VIDEO PLAYBACK]

  • [END PLAYBACK]

  • Oh.

  • Walt Disney.

  • [VIDEO PLAYBACK]

  • - Impossible cartoon actions will seem plausible

  • if the viewer feels the action he's watching has some factual basis.

  • For example, the idea that only the cow's tail

  • could ring a bell hanging on her neck may seem far-fetched,

  • but it has some basis in fact.

  • There is an anatomical connection between the bell here and the tail

  • here.

  • That is the spinal column.

  • And so it seems entirely plausible that pulling her tail would ring the bell.

  • [BELL RINGING]

  • [END PLAYBACK]

  • MELISSA FRANKLIN: All right.

  • OK.

  • So this is really interesting.

  • So what Walt Disney says is, it has to be plausible but impossible.

  • And that's what makes it funny.

  • So I was trying to think of physics.

  • Real physics.

  • What do real physics, and particularly particle physics do?

  • And so we're more interested in the possible, I'd have to say, in science.

  • But what we do is incredibly implausible.

  • What I just talked about was me describing to you spacetime,

  • and how we measure what it looks like.

  • But "particle physics is the unbelievable in pursuit

  • of the unimaginable.

  • To pinpoint the smallest fragments of the universe,

  • you have to build the biggest machine in the world.

  • To recreate the first millionths of a second of creation,

  • you have to focus energy on an awesome scale."

  • So we're looking for the implausible possible.

  • And for instance, this summer, five undergraduates are coming to CERN--

  • which is the place where the Large Hadron Collider is--

  • to help us figure out the next puzzle.

  • Thanks.

MELISSA FRANKLIN: Hi.

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