Daniel Whiteson

Oh, for sure.

It keeps me up at night.

And we might have thrown out the one thing we needed, but we don't know.

But that's always the case, because we always have to make decisions about what kind of thing to look for.

I'll give you another example.

When we analyze our data...

we're looking for particles that come out of the collision and we expect particles to move in a certain way because they have electromagnetic charge and they have a magnetic field and we can use our physics to say, okay, particles always move in this particular path, a helical path.

And if you look at like pictures of collisions, you see particles whizzing out in these spirals, right?

So spirals are everywhere.

And most of our software that looks for particles looks for spirals because we expect everything to move as a spiral.

And is that what you're mostly analyzing is just the paths of the particles from the collision?

That's what it is?

Yeah, exactly.

Because the thing we're looking for, like the Higgs boson or something else new, it only lasts very, very briefly, like 10 to the minus 23 seconds.

So you never see it directly.

You see what it turns into.

So we see the spirals, we see the particles, and we say, okay, that looks like there was a Higgs boson there.

But it's not like I can say, oh, here's the Higgs, or here's a handful of them, or I got a bunch of them in a box, right?

We can only say that they probably were there based on the path of these particles.

So figuring out the path of these particles is important, but we only tend to look for these spirals because...