This is the penultimate day of ten at L’Ecole de Physique des Houches, beautifully situated at a twist in the Chamonix valley, where we have been discussing particle physics. We have even (unusually for a “workshop”) been working on particle physics.
This is part of a series of workshops which happen every two years, collecting theorists and experimentalists together; I have written before about previous sessions (here and here).
This session has been especially exciting because, an hour away down the autoroute blanche at CERN, the Large Hadron Collider got back into business, as did the big particle detectors (ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb) which record what happens when protons collide at a new record high energy. Hopes, dreams and speculation about what it might reveal over the next months and years are rife, starting at breakfast and continuing late into the evening.
Back at CERN, two of my colleagues from ATLAS, Laura Jeanty and Tova Holmes, have produced In Particular, an excellent first podcast episode which gives a very accurate sense of the atmosphere right now. They interview many of the people involved, gently examining what makes them, and particle physics, tick. And yes, everyone has some philosophy there.
A key quote:
There’s a lot of people who are afraid to get their hopes up, and there’s a lot of people who can only work if they have their hopes up...
It is clear from the discussions here at Les Houches (and this will probably be even plainer in the next ten days when the “Beyond the Standard Model” teams are here) that this applies not just to experimentalists like those in the podcast, but to particle theorists too. I urge you to listen to episode one, and look forward to the next. With high hopes.
Jon Butterworth’s book Smashing Physics is available as “Most Wanted Particle” in Canada & the US. He is also on Twitter.
