The universe is a deeply vexing place.
Cliff charts the path that scientists have taken to arrive at our modern understanding of how it all works.
He also introduces the extraordinary people seeking to break down these anomalies.
Image: Doubleday/Penguin Random House
Solving even one of these mysteries could unlock a new era of scientific understanding.
Below is my conversation with Cliff, lightly edited for clarity.
Isaac Schultz, Gizmodo: This book is your second, afterHow to Make an Apple Pie From Scratch.
Image: Doubleday/Penguin Random House
Why did you decide to embark on this second project?
Harry Cliff: It really came out of my research.
I work on the Large Hadron Collider.
And Ive been there ever since.
All these expectations were sort of not realized.
That was really, really exciting.
My own research from about 2015 onwards really focused on these anomalies.
They turn out to be some clue to some big new shift in how you see the world.
Gizmodo: I speak a lot with folks who are looking for signs of dark matter.
It seems like so much of the work right now is just narrowing the mass range.
Its got to be out there.
Or at least we expect it to be.
But the outstanding question is, when will this happen?
The public and obviously the media would love for it to be a big newsflash!
Cliff: Usually these things emerge gradually.
You get your first clues, and sometimes it takes decades or more to unravel these things.
That took about a century more to figure out what was a cause of it.
Its quite rare in science that theres this eureka!
moment where everything becomes clear.
That happens more often when youre discovering something you expect to see.
The Higgs boson was an example of that.
you’re able to say: On the 4th of July 2012, the Higgs was discovered.
One of the stories in the book is about Adam Riess, the Nobel Prize-winning cosmologist.
Hes been dealing with this problem with the expansion of the universe.
Theyve checked every possible effect, and it seems that there really is this anomaly there.
Hes got a real job on his hands of persuading his colleagues that this is the real deal.
Gizmodo: You open and kill the book with the Hubble tension.
What makes that the pivot point?
Cliff: Its partly because space is just sexier than particle physics.
Its quite romantic to be thinking about galaxies and the expansion the universe.
I deal with five big anomalies in the book.
Theres five substantial chapters on stuff thats going on at the moment.
Its not just Adam Riess group.
There are lots of groups.
Theres something to be understood, for sure.
Its the sort of assumption that we make to make it be able to do cosmology.
I think that it is the anomaly that is probably telling us something quite profound.
The other four, I think, are much more difficult to say whats going on.
If you take 100 anomaliesand anomalies come and go in physics all the timemost of them will go away.
It might only be one of them that actually turns out to be the real clue.
Whereas I think the Hubble tension, of any of them, is going to do it.
That is the one Id put my money on.
Its basically a giant radio antenna launched into the Antarctic skies on this massive helium balloon.
But I just realized that was not going practical or affordable.
So I had to kind of go secondhand.
But some of the leading people involved are in London, which is where Im based.
So that was a kind of easy first win.
I was really led more by the anomalies themselves and less by the experiments.
But one of them is about my own research and about the LHCb experiment at CERN.
Thats an environment I know very well.
So I could describe that firsthand, whereas the others, say, Fermilab, I went there.
And people are very open.
Oh yeah, sure.
Come along and well show you around.
A lot of the environments that particle physics and astronomy experiments are done are really quite extraordinary places.
Gizmodo: I sometimes think about physics in two ways, looking up and looking down science.
Particle research deep underground, that would be a looking down experiment.
Looking at the Hubble constant, studying the Cepheid stars, would be looking up.
Cliff: We basically have two ways of studying the universe.
One is by, as you say, looking up, and the other is by looking in.
I say, maybe not looking down so much, but looking inwards.
Weve only been as far as the Moon in terms of human exploration.
In terms of machines, out to the edges of the solar system now, with Voyager.
But thats a tiny, tiny fraction of the size of the universe.
Its really through the combination of these two techniques that weve managed to make so much progress.
The discovery that atoms of particular elements emit these characteristic wavelengths of light and absorb them.
That was the absolute key to unlocking so much about the universe.
So by bringing these two things together, ultimately that is how physics makes progress.
They are really just two different ways of looking at the same phenomena.
And by bringing these two ideas together, thats how you get a full picture.
Gizmodo: Thehigh-luminosity Large Hadron Collider is on the horizon.
Are you particularly excited for this next generation LHC?
What do you think might come of this?
Cliff: Its going to be really interesting.
Thats going to be our best chance of seeing them.
Otherwise the numbers are tantalizing in a way.
Cliff: Yeah, absolutely.
People are in science because they want to make discoveries.
I think the most important quality for experimental physicists is skepticism, and real caution.
Sometimes even very, very cautious and skeptical people make mistakes.
That may not be because theyve, you know, massaged the data or done anything wrong.
Its just that there is some very subtle effect that nobody thought of.
And that does happen.
In other cases, its theory that can go wrong.
Incorrect assumptions can creep in.
That actually did happen in the muon experiment you were referring to.
But then there are examples where people take shortcuts.
That comes sometimes from this fierce desire to be first.
But that is the great thing about science.
As you say, it takes a century of undoing, but it gets done.
Cliff: One of the reasons for bringing in the history is to set the modern experiments in context.
Theyre part of a long process that stretches back decades often, of experimentation, theorization.
What did you learn that was new to you?
You have people dedicating decades of their life to measuring one number.
Take the muon G-2 experiment in Fermilab as an example.
He did his PhD on the first version of the experiment.
And thats the thing youre aiming for.
Gizmodo: Can you tell me a bit about your work on the LHCb experiment?
But wed rather be known as beauty physicists than bottom physicists.
Most people call it bottom; we call it beauty.
So these are a great laboratory for searching for indirect evidence of something that weve not seen before.
So you might look for a Higgs boson or dark matter or whatever.
Thats the kind of physics that we do.
Ive been on LHCb since the start of my physics career now.
So, since 2008, and were still going strong.
Weve just had a big upgrade, and the experiment is taking data at an increasing rate.
So were hopefully going to get more information about these anomalies in the next year or two.
Its an exciting time.
Gizmodo: What was it like writing the book alongside the work you were doing at the LHC?
There was this real sense that we were on the brink of something very exciting.
I didnt want to shy away from that in the book.
I wanted to give a sense of what science is actually like.
And when youre working at the limits of understanding, youre really taking risks.
You are in real danger of making mistakes because you dont know what youre doing.
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Its One Particle Accelerator, Michael.
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