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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
The fact that there are so many open questions and no one beautiful theory like we had for supersymmetry sort of explains them all to me means that we should just be explorers and we should be kind of agnostic and just do experiments in which we can sort of get the most return on our money in terms of just seeing new things.
So going to that energy frontier, having a clean environment, getting high luminosity, that to me, is how we're going to get unstuck in particle physics. So muon colliders being the fastest way, the cleanest way, and a really novel way to see things that we've never seen before makes it something that I feel like we have to invest.
I know. I think so much of physics, you know, there's like the meme that they have, the midwit meme, right? Where it's like the bell curve and then you have like someone saying something stupid on one side and then someone saying something a little bit educated in the middle and someone saying something, the same stupid thing, but with a lot of wisdom.
And that to me is physics in a nutshell, right? It's like when you first start physics, you're like, oh my God, like... the detectors underground, like what if the ground shakes? And then you're like, no, come on. People have gyroscopes and there's so much engineering and the machine is so heavy. And then you're like, Oh no, but the ground shaking does in fact cause problems.
Um, and this to me is, is the same thing with like, yeah, space use and energy efficiency. Um, At Fermilab, they're literally trying to plan what energy they can reach at a muon collider, given the amount of space we have at Fermilab. Because if you don't own the space, you can't put a collider there, it turns out.
If you are okay with us tunneling into your basement and you live in Batavia, again, please call. But yeah, you just... You run into mountains, you run into underground rivers, you run into state borders. And so you just can't build an arbitrarily big machine and expect that, yeah, you as a scientist are immune to property law.
Um, so that's, that's something silly and also just the cost of building a tunnel tunnels are so expensive. Oh my goodness. So the smaller you can get it, the cheaper it can be. Um, and again, it's not, we don't live in a fantasy world where every scientific thing worth doing is funded.
So if you could have something with a smaller tunnel that gives you a whole bunch of physics results, that's probably the way to go, you know? And with energy, I mean, I don't know how political we get on your podcast. As political as we want to get. I mean, the whole Russia-Ukraine war, that is zapping Europe of all of its energy.
And the LHC is even having reduced run capacity because there's just less energy to be had in Europe. And quite frankly, if you need to choose between warming people's houses and colliding protons, I understand that tough sacrifice we have to make. So yeah, we live in a world where there's global warming and there's war and there's territorial issues.
And the fact that we are scientists doesn't put us above any of these issues. And we still have to be responsible stewards of public money in space.
Look, Germans, use a blanket. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, so I think this is also something very exciting to me. On a personal note, again, since I grew up in Illinois, and definitely my parents were not physicists, but science supporters, generically, is having Fermilab close to your house is...
just gives you an appreciation that things are dynamic and it, it really, you know, it makes you feel much more energetic about the idea that, Oh, I could do research or that, you know, research is happening and it definitely gives you a sense of, you know, excitement about it all. Um, so yeah, I also have this kind of agnostic approach that, oh, I don't really care where it happens.
I just want it to happen. But when you're close to it, you feel it. You really feel it like, oh, wow, there's an energy in the air that's not neutrinos. And you get excited, and it's just cool to be a part of it. So this is something that's really exciting as someone who's currently doing science in the U.S., is the fact that the U.S.
might want to re-enter the world stage of particle colliders is amazing. And I think this is very indicative, and this might be the spiciest thing I say, so... I think the styles of doing physics in the US and other places, um, Europe is kind of my biggest benchmark because of the people I interact with the most, but definitely the style of physics in Europe versus the US are very different.
Um, and I think in the US for better, for worse, we tend to be sort of the people that always want to make sort of wacky theories or just like make experiments measure things that they were not made to measure. Um, and just kind of be, yeah, quite frankly, a bit of the dreamer is that, yeah, maybe we hand wave a bit and we don't worry so closely about the 15th loop correction.
And, you know, we're a little bit sloppy, but the fact that that, you know, when opens up the possibility of like, Oh, let's get weird with it in science, I think is something that I really like about the, the U S atmosphere and physics. Um, So if a place like China or CERN wants to go ahead and do a machine that's like the FCCEE or the CEPC, then that's great.
And the precision physics and really measuring the standard model, I think that that's very in touch with the science goals of those communities. But then doing the weird project that's like, well, can this even work? Do we know what we're doing? This is such a far off shot. And then...
maybe it'll happen to me is very in line with sort of the American ideology towards doing physics, especially looking for new physics. So that to me is kind of the ideal outcome of everything is that countries that are much better about keeping track of factors of two and pi go for the precision machine and then the Americans pool the resources to put a muon collider on their soil.
But of course, all of these projects are international, and international collaboration is not only encouraged but required to pull any of this off. So where it ends up is not zeroth order, but it definitely has an impact.
Showing 161–180 of 212 · page 9 of 11
← Previous
Next →