Cari Cesarotti
speaker
212 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Cari Cesarotti’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Hi, Sean. Thanks for having me.
Ooh, interesting question. I've never had it quite posed like that. I think in some ways... It is quite beautiful in the sense that there's a lot of patterns that we see. And in physics, really the thing that we love to see is patterns. So we see that there are three generations of a lot of things. We see that the gauge bosons kind of fit nicely in one bucket.
We see that there's the pattern of things getting heavier and things coupling more strongly to the Higgs. So in that sense, it is a very beautiful model. But in the bigger sense of where did this thing come from, it's very ugly in the sense that there's not really a fundamental explanation as to why particles look and behave the way that they do.
Fair enough. Yeah. So in the standard model, there are basically two kinds of particles. They're either fermions or bosons. So the fermions are the things that tend to make up matter. Things like electrons are fermions. Things like quarks, which are the particles that you find inside of nucleons, are fermions.
And then the gauge bosons are the particles that effectively tie everything together because they mediate the forces exchanged between these particles. So fermions, often we like to think of as matter. If they live long enough to survive, then they can be stable matter. And then the bosons are the force carriers.
So things like electromagnetic fields, the particle description would be made out of bosons.
Yeah, I mean, that's kind of funny. Whenever I think of standard model, I kind of think of like... you know, like the most beautiful, you know, like the most beautiful model, like the standard model, like the thing that you would think of when you consider a beautiful person. It's like, yeah, okay. So interesting that you have that.
But I mean, yeah, so the model is inherently something that it's not supposed to be a first principles object, right? It models the things that we see, but it doesn't come from a deep, you know, a core principle. So in the sense that, yeah, it could move around if we find something that's in conflict with our current model, that's true.
But so far it's done an amazing job at actually accounting for a lot of the physical phenomena we've been able to see.
Yeah, I mean, so this is a really subtle question that I feel like you kind of roll your eyes at the first time you're taught this distinction in school, right? But yeah, a model is something that we use to account for phenomena that we observe. So it's very empirical in nature, right?
Like the standard model, we don't necessarily know why there are three generations of everything, but we observe them. So they go into the standard model versus something like grand unified theory would be a way of explaining sort of why everything comes together in the way they do. So certainly we can't talk about the details of grand unified theory if we're gonna talk about other things.
But yeah, the difference is, like you mentioned, that something is first principles to motivate where it comes from versus something that's a way to kind of categorize empirical evidence that we've seen.
It does a frustratingly good job, Sean.
Yeah, so I mean, the kind of work that we do as particle theorists, right, is we want to basically stress test the standard model and either confirm very rare predictions that it can make and so sort of see very hard to see phenomena. show up in things like colliders, which is my personal specialty and realm of interest. And then also we want to see where it breaks, right?
We want to see if there are pockets of predictions that are false or that are just lacking, or we see some phenomena that's unexplained by the standard model. And that's where it's fun to be a researcher, right? Is when you try to come up with solutions to why this prediction isn't quite matching your expectation.
Um, I mean, fair enough. Uh, and I think in fact, a lot of people have had that mentality. Um, but there are some pretty big holes in, in particle physics. And I think kind of the phase transition that we've gone through as a field in the past few decades, certainly in my career, which has been, albeit not quite as prolific as yours, Sean.
But yeah, I mean, there's big open questions that are becoming more and more sort of nuanced versus like, ah, what the heck is this, right? Like that used to be the state of affairs is that we'd turn on our little bubble chambers and we'd look at something and be like, oh, what the heck is this? And that was a really rich, interesting time to be a physicist.
And a lot of theories came and went and we were able to make an amazing amount of progress in such a short period of time just from experimental evidence, right? Yeah. And now I think we're in a much more subtle phase of particle physics where the questions are not so much what the heck is this, but where does this come from? Why does this look like this? What are the things that we're not seeing?
You know, like things that are much more fundamental towards why has the universe taken on this profile?
Yeah, I mean, it's so funny that you say it like that, because in some way, I feel a bit flattered to think that people think that, you know, my work is so important that anything consequential could be the fault of mine. It's like, well, thank you. My goodness. But I mean, yeah, it's just it's physics is a field that I think has always kind of suffered from.
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