Trisolaris: From CERN to 3 body problem

• Discussion on the limitations of the Standard Model and the ongoing search for new physics. (10:30)
• The importance of collaboration in large-scale experiments like those at the Large Hadron Collider. (17:15)
• Technological advancements in particle detection and their impact on research efficiency. (22:45)
• Challenges in designing the next generation of colliders and what the future might hold. (28:00)
• The impact of geopolitical factors on international scientific collaborations. (35:20)
• Future prospects for discovering new particles and understanding the universe at a deeper level. (41:00)
• Reflections on the long-term future of particle physics and the potential for multi-generational projects. (50:15)

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

lhc, collider, cern, particle physicist, technology, physics, particles, field, engineering, project, facilities, theory, higgs, sensors, work, build, discovery, difficult, put, years

SPEAKERS

Dr. Matt Kenzie, Chad Ghalamzan, Host

 

Dr. Matt Kenzie  00:00

The ASICs, the electric components, most of these are be spokely designed and then made on a small scale, tested over several periods, and then made on a larger scale in the last 20 years. Then you have more commercial applications where we are trying to now buy more kind of items off the shelf, or try to understand how we can use off the shelf items in both electronics and sensors, and they’re asked some good stories and some harder stories.

 

00:29

Hi, Chad, who did you interview in this week’s episode of the engineer innovation podcast?

 

Chad Ghalamzan  00:35

Dr Matt Kenzie from the University of Cambridge,

 

00:38

and what does Matt do at the University of Cambridge. He’s

 

Chad Ghalamzan  00:42

an experimental particle physicist,

 

00:45

so we’ve had a plethora of rocket scientists recently, but I think particle physicist is raising the bar even further. What did you talk to Matt about? Pretty

 

Chad Ghalamzan  00:53

much everything related to his field of work. He was quite open about the challenges he faces, what the current state of his research is, how it’s progressed over the last decade, some of the engineering challenges that go into building things like the large hydron colliders, which are used at places like CERN, which is a crucial part of their research, very wide ranging conversation about all sorts of different topics. It was a long conversation, which I think we’re going to have. This podcast come out in two parts, actually. And

 

01:28

did he tolerate your complete lack of understanding of his area of expertise?

 

Chad Ghalamzan  01:32

Absolutely. Because this is something I remember hearing a little bit about back in my university days. When you go into engineering, you leave all that theoretical stuff way behind, and this is really bleeding edge of where we are just understanding how the universe works. And it’s fascinating to get a refresher on how important that work is and how difficult that work is, and how specialized and dedicated you have to be to it, because Matt and I talked about you sometimes start a work or work on a theory that may not even just go past your career, maybe two or three people’s career after that, in terms of proving or validating any of these assumptions, sounds

 

02:12

like an excellent episode. So let’s have a listen to Matt. Hello

 

Chad Ghalamzan  02:16

and welcome to this episode of The Engineer Innovation Podcast. I’m joined today by Dr Matt Kenzie, Hi, Matt, why don’t you introduce yourself to our listeners?

 

Dr. Matt Kenzie  02:26

Hi, yeah, thanks for having me. I’m a particle physicist, so I’m interested in the very small things, these kind of fundamental building blocks of nature, particularly how they behave, how they interact, and, I guess how, in the end, they bind to form the universe that we observe today. So I’m an associate professor at Cambridge in the UK. I have a sort of small to mid sized research team, and we have two strands to our work. One is analysis of data that comes from the LHC, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, to try and unpick some of these truths, deep truths, about the fundamental building blocks of nature. And the other strand is on technology research and development, to try and understand how we can most effectively build the particle detectors of the future. So that’s my kind of main work and research role.

 

Chad Ghalamzan  03:23

Now, did you always know that this was the career you wanted as an experimental particle physics? Was this like passion that you had early on? Or did you find your way here more gradually?

 

Dr. Matt Kenzie  03:33

Yeah, and not really. I stumbled into it. I think I was always interested in physics, always interested in how things worked, and I was always quite a good but problem solver, I think, and just liked kind of thinking about these kind of physics problems. And I just really enjoyed my undergraduate in physics, which I did in the UK at Durham. And then I was not really sure what I wanted to do exactly, but really liked physics, and I was fortunate enough to get a PhD position at Imperial. And then, yeah, coincidentally, really by chance, I was put on the project searching for the Higgs boson. So I started my PhD in 2010 and then, really by chance, I landed in the middle of this huge discovery that was made a couple of years later. I was sent out to certain and ended up being part of the team that made quite a significant discovery in our field, and I think then I got a real taste for academia, but also I think that was a big springboard for my career in academia. So I think it happened accidentally. Really, I didn’t have intentions of being a particle physicist when I was a teenager. Certainly not

 

Chad Ghalamzan  04:34

to me. This field of study, maybe the fringe is not the best word, but it definitely for people like me who studied engineering, we use physics, obviously, at the basis of everything we do, but this area of study is more on the periphery for most of us in our field, because it’s not what we apply on a practical basis. Maybe you could help bring a lot of us who are aware of this field, but maybe not kept up in the last decade or plus. Us in terms of the developments, where are we with your field of study? Like, how has it impacted? Like, you said you were there for that big discovery, for the Higgs boson, but like, where are we with EPP, and how does it actually impact some of the other disciplines that, like engineering, when you make such big discoveries like that?

 

Dr. Matt Kenzie  05:19

Yeah, it’s difficult because the field is not very applied, which kind of makes it a bit distinguished from engineering, or those kind of types of physics or science where there is a strong emphasis on the application. Yeah, so we’re trying to probe these sort of fundamental constituents of nature, and it’s always a battle between developing your theory, which kind of just try to describe this physics, and then the data that you receive and one feeds into the other, and yeah, we have this kind of beautiful theory. This is the state of play in the field, really. We call it the Standard Model. It has the constituent parts of nature, these very specific sets of particles, and it can describe how those particles interact. But there are various kind of problems with this theory that we are constantly trying to understand with new data. And it can list several of them probably, but things like, there’s no gravity included in this model. There is no description of dark matter. There is no real understanding of how the strong force interplays with the other two fundamental forces. Some the Higgs discovery was about describing how some particles have a mass, but some particles are massless, and this is really key to how this theory is built. It’s all built on symmetries. Basically, physicists like symmetries. We like patterns. And it means that you can apply an equation or a theory to any set of circumstances, because there’s just a symmetric principle that the laws of physics should be the same here as they are over there. That’s why we have conservation of momentum, and they should be the same today as they are tomorrow. That’s why we have conservation of energy. So this theory is always built on conservation laws and symmetries, but some particles have a mass and some are massless, and that kind of breaks some symmetry. So the Higgs helps us to resolve that. But then this kind of Higgs mechanism is a bit forced into the model that doesn’t really naturally arise. It comes with loads of issues, particularly the Higgs has to give itself a mass, and you end up in a kind of circular situation where the Higgs can’t be stable. So we essentially know that there is something beyond this theory that we haven’t yet understood, and we hope that it explains or describes lots of these kind of observations that we can’t quite match up with our theory. And I guess, what a lot of fundamental experimental particle physicists are trying to do is find this so called new physics, some kind of new fundamental particle, new fundamental interaction, which we can observe and helps to explain various phenomena from the universe that, at the moment, completely elude us. So the Higgs was a pretty big achievement of the LHC, and that’s probably it’s going to be its long lasting achievement, and that has really cemented this theory, the standard model, as a formidable theory of particle interactions. The question is, how do we get on top of what’s next? And are we going to be able to do that at the LHC, or do we need some other facility

 

Chad Ghalamzan  08:16

to do that? Yeah, it was the first result that maybe gives some validity to the theory in terms of a practical, a measurable particle, if I understand correctly, how it fits into the puzzle here, and that it’s really what you’re talking about. This is a massive puzzle here, with some of the pieces known, and some of the pieces at least, you’re starting to understand what pieces you still don’t know or are missing, to get the complete picture of the situation. Someone once recently said to me something along the lines of when he’s teaching things like physics as you teach like physics from earlier on in like academia, high school or and then you go into college and university, every level, you lie a little less when you teach physics like you add that little bit more of complexity to the situation. Okay, we’ll ignore this for now. It doesn’t matter when you’re doing this simple model, but the next level, it’s like, yeah, it does matter. Let’s include that in the discussion here. Exactly. I

 

Dr. Matt Kenzie  09:08

mean, you’re kind of decoupling scales, right? That’s what you’re that’s what you’re doing, if you work on a big scale of the solar system, right? Really doesn’t matter too much about the electromagnetic interaction of couple of particles in that system. And similarly, if you’re looking at a proton, proton collision at the LHC, it really doesn’t matter, or shouldn’t matter too much where Earth is in its orbit or whatever, because the gravitational impacts are small. So yeah, you that that’s 10. Tends to be what you do. You decouple scales, and as your picture changes, the scale gets smaller, or the system gets more massive. You start to realize that, okay? Newton second law isn’t working for me anymore. I’m going to need to do some relativity, or any some quantum mechanics, or whatever it is. And yeah, it’s building on that kind of Yeah, you’re probing smaller and smaller in scale, or higher and higher in energy. Also coming back to your question that you asked originally about relationships with engineers. Ring, if you like, or what are the applications of this kind of fundamental research? And of course, there aren’t really many direct applications, and certainly not that you can think of, I think at the time, this is famous example of hertz discovering radio waves and being asked what they’re useful for. And had no idea, had no suggestion. But 50, 100 years later, that turned out to be quite a groundbreaking technology. Now, discovery of the Higgs seems unlikely to be like that. I don’t think there will be a practical application of being able to make a Higgs. However, there are a lot of spin offs that you get out of these kind of facilities, like CERN, where you have bright minds together and you’re developing different technologies. Since there’s a bunch that can be listed the development of the World Wide Web is copper, commonly one that is used when discussing CERN, because that was developed as a way for particle physicists to communicate a bit more quickly and share their results. But that kind of sprung into what we now know as the web. So I think there are also big societal kind of applications that come as a byproduct, it’s just very difficult to predict or even monetize or value how big those contributions are.

 

Chad Ghalamzan  11:09

Like you said, it may take longer than our lifetime to for those contributions to actually turn into those monetized or something that’s more direct, because sometimes it takes decades, if not longer, for these discoveries to make their way into more practical applications like you already highlighted. And

 

Dr. Matt Kenzie  11:27

fundamentally, it’s about pushing the barriers of human understanding. Really, I think that’s what we’re what most particle physicists are in the field for, and we shouldn’t really lose sight of that. I don’t think we if we’re convincing other people to fund it, that still is at the core principle of what we’re trying to do. We are trying to go to the moon or put a flag somewhere. We’re trying to understand something we don’t know already,

 

Chad Ghalamzan  11:52

no, and that’s and that and that understanding is valuable in and of itself, without making it a monetized thing, and obviously engineering ties to commercial and such. So there’s definitely a different angle to it, but you did there is the system decoupling of systems, and for people who work with simulation tools like ours, that’s something they’re familiar with as well, like looking at different degrees of complexity and such. So there’s some parallels in the way you perhaps, approach your work, but obviously there’s different end uses or different goals of what you’re trying to achieve here. But I guess fundamentally, the methodology doesn’t vary all that differently. No,

 

Dr. Matt Kenzie  12:30

I don’t think so. And I think it’s why people who do PhDs in particle physics or PhDs in engineering or whatever, that as a scientist, you come out with a set of skills that are broadly applicable to quite a huge number of fields, and particularly when it’s so data intensive, these kind of data analysis skills are broadly applicable in a lot of fields and a lot of industries. So

 

Chad Ghalamzan  12:50

philosophically, do you think it’s more liberating that you don’t have to come to a definitive answer? To some extent with your line of work, like you’re exploring more and trying to find the answers and not driven to a solution, like engineers are to, like, produce something or get to a finite item or finite state of something. I mean, it

 

Dr. Matt Kenzie  13:10

is liberating. It’s one of the nice things about academia. It’s undoubtedly true, but I think there are still constraints and pressures on delivering right. And maybe it’s not so results driven. But when you put together a project of any size, really, but even if it’s as big as the LHC, you need some off ramps. You can’t it’s very difficult to get that project off the ground, even in a sympathetic kind of funding environment where people want to support particle physics just because you’re like, we think it would be fun to build a big, shiny new collider. You have to have some achievable milestones and achievable, deliberates deliverables and things that you are going to be able to do. And I think so, I think you are still, in some sense, a bit constrained, and you need to be able to deliver something. I think it’s just that a null result is often as interesting as a positive result, right? And I think maybe that’s the difference. It doesn’t have to be commercially viable. And sometimes not finding something is is as interesting, or even more interesting than finding something, and that’s also a valid outcome and a useful outcome, and something that should be published and that the community needs to know about. So I think that, yeah, that’s probably, philosophically, one of the one of the attractive things about the field there is that kind of freedom. I think it’s also about the journey, right? You start out a research project, and often it does not end where you expect it to, right, because you you find things, you go down avenues, you go down corridors. And you also have that freedom in direction, which I think is another kind of nice benefit of the industry, if you like, of the academic industry is that you can go down sort of various rabbit holes, and sometimes that’s where the best and the most interesting results end up being.

 

Chad Ghalamzan  14:49

So what are some of the roadblocks then you’re facing? Then to maybe elaborate on those points?

 

Dr. Matt Kenzie  14:57

Yeah, personally, of course, this would apply to anyone but. Time, often is one of the biggest ones, right? This should try to figure out how you can most effectively use use the time that you have available. And then I guess that the next thing for an academic comes down to resources, which ultimately comes through funding or department backing, to find to build a research team, to get a lab together, and so on and so forth. So once you have some of those things in place, that can be quite a big, a big barrier. And then in experimental particle physicists, particularly at the LHC, these are huge collaborations, right? 1000s of people involved in putting these projects together, helping these projects run. And they run for many decades. And then, of course, analysis of all of that data that that comes out. So there’s quite a lot of management and bureaucracy that’s needed to sort of manage all of these, these groups, which are spread across countries, across continents, and across different institutes with different funding mechanisms and many of their own different politics. Those are some of them, and the other one from the technology point of view, I guess you can also either you consider your constraint by cost, right? Because if you have an infinite budget, then you can almost do anything, but of course, you don’t. And so it’s then figuring out how you can make the technology work for you within the budget constraints that you have. And so if you’re trying to design a new detector or a future particle facility, then you have to be thinking of new ways that you can develop the technology that you need, and how you can do that more cheaply and more efficiently. Yeah, and I think that this may be an interesting area with where the field looks like it might be going, or where we’re trying to explore in that sort of 2030, years ago, you had no option, really, but to be spokenly design every piece of engineering you need to run one of these facilities and build one of these particle detectors, so the sensors, the Asics, the electric components, most of these are be spokely designed and then made On a small scale, tested over several periods, and then made on a larger scale in the last 20 years. Then you have more commercial applications where we are trying to now buy more kind of items off the shelf, or try to understand how we can use off the shelf items in both electronics and sensors. And there are some good stories and some harder stories, and I may think it’s difficult, it’s a lot more efficient, it’s a lot cheaper. You can order 100 and then you can order 10,000 and you don’t have to manage the whole operation. But of course, what you don’t necessarily have is the intellectual property, or the full control over every component in your circuit, because that is being then protected by the commercial supplier. And so we’re, I think, at the moment, in the field, trying to figure out where the optimum position is on that and how we can navigate using more commercial products. If there

 

Chad Ghalamzan  17:52

was more colliders in operation, do you feel that would be a way for the field to advance further? Is it a lack of facilities. Or is it that, for example, I think CERN has been up and running for 15 years. Is there still knowledge to be gained from running the colliders? Or does the field need to be looking at a whole new way of proceeding? Is it at a point where you’ve learned as much as you can with that type of large hydrogen collider and another type of experiment needs to be conducted to maybe get some different answers, or is it just a rather lack of time to gather enough data to have a processing because there’s enough resources available?

 

Dr. Matt Kenzie  18:38

Yeah, I mean, with the LHC specifically, I think it’s coming towards end of life, but when I say that, I still mean it. It’s going to have another good decade of taking data at least, maybe a decade and a half, maybe even two decades, right? That the machine runs and operates incredibly well. We keep updating the detector components to try and read that data out more quickly, but what you’re limited by the LHC is basically the size of the ring, the side of the collider, and the power of the magnets that are in that ring. And so you either need much stronger magnets, which we don’t really have the technology for at the moment, or you need a bigger, larger circumference ring, so to do that kind of physics, and that’s the direction that CERN want to go in that I actually personally support that. I think that is the way that our field should be trying to go. But LHC isn’t the only game in town. There are several other experiments around the world, colliders of smaller sizes, but also experiments which do completely different things. So in Japan, in the US and in China, there are big facilities. They just do slightly different types of physics. You can’t do everything with the LHC. Yeah, when I’m talking about future technologies, I mean for potential upgrades of the LHC. But then really, I’m thinking probably the collider that comes after that, if there is one, i. Kind of future circular collider, which CERN would would like to build. And yeah, I mean, there are huge challenges, engineering and technology challenges with with delivering that. But yeah, we would just should be careful, because the LHC is not the only game in time. So there’s several other facilities operating, and they have different constraints. They need different technologies. And so it’s not like you can develop one technology that will be applied everywhere, really, each of these different experiments have different needs. They have different conditions, they have different background. Yeah, the technologies might be slightly different,

 

Chad Ghalamzan  20:36

no understood, but it is interesting, because, again, that’s it’s not a field that I’m as familiar with. And realizing that there’s even different types of experiments being conducted, that’s something new for me to understand. I thought they were all based on largely the same principle here. I know there were several different facilities, so that’s interesting. So this is more about where do we go as a next step? Try to get more off the shelf components to help build the next generation or improvements, instead of continuing to build the same style of colliders, just without the bespoke components. Yeah. I

 

Dr. Matt Kenzie  21:12

mean, I’m sort of really talking about the detection technology as well. The stuff which does the detecting. One example is for one of these experiments at the LHC called Atlas, is being upgraded in the next sort of five, five years or so, and they have made use of Gan transistors, which are commercially produced on mass and used in power transformers, typically. So they’re used in electrical sockets electric cars all over the place, but very high voltage and very high frequency switches that are incredibly radiation hard, and that’s one of the biggest constraints that we have at the LHC. But in these kind of high intensity particle lighters, particularly, you put some material in this detector, and it is going to be hammered with radiation for 20 years, basically. And so you need it to not break down, and you need its performance to stay at a particular level. And these Gan transistor gallium nitride are incredibly radiation hard. And so that’s a commercial technology that someone called physicists noticed would be applicable. And those are now going to be rolled out in the upgrade of this detector, where you have your 10s of 1000s of these switches operating various different sensor boards around. So there’s a, you know, there’s a really positive story that comes out of a commercially available technology. One of the other ones that we are investigating is the CMOS sensors. So these are a type of, yeah, another semiconducting sensor. They’re very radiation hard. They are produced en masse by these foundries that make various CPUs and so on. And so, in principle, it should be very easy to get hold of them. But then, of course, when you’re trying to design how these sensors get read out, how the electronics interface with those sensors, typically the ASIC part, the electronics part is indecent. It’s monolithic, so it’s part of the sensor itself. Whereas in the old days, we would design those things separately and bond them together. But it means you, of course, as the researcher, you have a bit less control over what’s happening there. That’s how we make it in the foundry. And here it is, you can use it. Oh, and these are the sort of eight pins I’ll tell you what they do, and the other eight pins on this FPGA, that’s our intellectual property, and we’re telling you what they’re doing. And so then it’s a bit difficult. If you come into that and you say, I want a high frequency pastor, or whatever it is, you don’t have actual access to the to the circuit, and you can’t go back to the foundry and sale. Would you mind just tweaking it a little bit this way? That’s then a whole new fabrication undertaking, which then, you know, then takes out the cost efficiency. And I think it’s really the field and industry trying to figure out where, where we can meet in the middle. We coming from quite different areas. I think the other challenge we face is that, for example, you might buy an FPGA, which does something in your lab to test some sensor, right? And then 18 months later, another group come along and say, Oh, we want to contribute towards this technology as well, and that FPA, G FPGA, is now out of stock. It’s not produced anymore because the commercial supplier has moved on. They’re on the next version, and they don’t supply the old one, and the next version is slightly different. And so it’s then you then have to make the equipment work for you. And maybe the commercial provider has been bought out by someone else, or they’ve changed their licensing structure, or whatever, and that also provides us a challenge where we’re designing these things on 1020, 30, even longer, sometimes, year cycles beyond a single career sometimes. And that doesn’t really play that, I think, with a lot of commercial providers, because they have much shorter timescales, typically, and the technology will move on.

 

Chad Ghalamzan  24:44

And it would be important to highlight and something we talked about even before we started recording today, when we initially spoke about how much engineering goes into building the equipment here, the colliders, the system, there’s, this is a this is where. We didn’t have a chance to speak about earlier, when we were talking about how is engineering and EPP related. But the engineering that goes behind building such facilities, building such colliders, or what have you, this is massive. This is a major I think it

 

Dr. Matt Kenzie  25:14

took, yeah, I mean, I should probably put it into some sort of context. But the plans for this future circular Collider at CERN, for example, the cost estimates are into 10s of billions. It’s a project that essentially, at least the whole of Europe, but probably America and global superpowers will also have to buy into. In this, CERN has a very specific and unique history and structure in that it’s 60 years old, or something was founded after the Second World War, and has been Europe’s kind of particle and nuclear physics research facility since then, and has huge buy in from all of the different governments in Europe. And so it’s essentially, you know, our lab that happens to be hosted there. And in the case of the LHC, that’s a 27 kilometer tunnel ring 100 meters underground. And fortunately, the tunnel already existed before the LHC had to be put there because it was used by the LHC predecessor, called LEP that this future collider, you’re looking at more of 8090, kilometer tunnel, a couple of 100 meters underground. And even from a civil engineering point of view, that’s a very expensive and difficult operation, and that’s just to dig the time. Then you need to put in that tunnel the kind of electromagnetic radio frequency cavities to accelerate these things. You then need the magnets, which bend these particles around that ring, ensuring they touch the wall, and to get the kind of field strengths that we’re looking at there. You then need to super cool the magnets so that they superconduct, so they’re operating at few Kelvin. So the engineering project just to dig the tunnel and put the beam of particles in that ring is huge, and that’s before you’ve even collided any right. So then you need magnets which focus these beams, then collide these beams together, and at the point where you collide them, you then build a huge particle detector, which are these massive, you know, hundreds of cubic meters in volume, digital cameras. But they also need these huge cabins to be excavated where they will sit, and, yeah, they need data processing infrastructure and all kinds of things. So the civil engineering project of it alone it’s mind boggling, really, let alone even the kind of then bespoke technologies of how you build these things, right?

 

Chad Ghalamzan  27:26

And the longer the project goes on, the delta between where technology was when you started it and where it is as you go on gets bigger and bigger. So, you know, you use, I guess, a certain pressure to stay up to date. But you can’t constantly be updating with every you know,

 

Dr. Matt Kenzie  27:41

yeah, and you’re, I think, you’re constantly making gambles of when particular technologies might or might not be ready. And of course, you’re diverting your funding to try and address those issues where you realize, oh, we’re five years behind with the magnets. We’re suddenly going to have to divert money from something we thought was going to be really nice if we’re going to have to sacrifice that, because we need to do to do this. The thing with this future collider is that it would run probably first with electrons in it as an electron, positron, electron, anti electron collider, and a lot of the technology for that, it’s sort of ready, neat and tweaks to put protons in a machine like that. We are a couple of decades away, probably so that talking about then putting protons in that machine is then a 7080 year project, probably

 

Chad Ghalamzan  28:29

7080 years. So, so you’re talking about people who would not even by the time it ends. Probably, right, yeah. So that’s two careers that’s not even your career. That’s like you’re starting something that someone else will pass on, that someone else will pass on. Else will pass on. That’s that you have to be really dedicated to something to do that, like most of us like to see a project we start come to an end, but you get engaged with something like this knowing that it won’t, you’re just passing along the torch to someone else to

 

Dr. Matt Kenzie  28:59

pass I think that’s actually one of the challenges with it, is that convincing people to work on it, you realize that those people will have to work on it for the majority of their career, and may never see any data come from that machine or that facility. And yeah, we haven’t really been in that position before. I guess the time scales get longer and longer. Yeah,

 

Chad Ghalamzan  29:19

and engineering is all about now, shortening things, shorten the design cycle, shortening the product. It’s almost an opposite to this.

 

Dr. Matt Kenzie  29:25

You could take a completely different approach. You could decide, okay, instead, I’m going to dedicate my career to actually trying to massively decrease the space required to accelerate a particle from energy X to energy why? Right? And at the moment, it takes 200 meter linear cavity somewhere at the LHC. But could I, if I could develop the technology to reduce that like two orders of magnitude in my lab? Then maybe you work your whole career on that, and then maybe in 80 years, that technology is ready to be rolled out to a collide. Know which, then, is not operational for 100 120 years. But I think, yeah, so you could take that approach. The problem with that is, I think that people lose interest in the middle. You lose your support, you lose your funders. And speaking of interest,

 

Chad Ghalamzan  30:13

that’s where my next question was going to be. We’re I think, at one point for me, in my recall of the development of, let’s say, CERN in the history in the last 2030, years, there was a while where you heard a lot about it. But now, when you hear about what’s going on in the world, we talk a lot about climate change and artificial intelligence. So is it becoming increasingly difficult to keep people’s interest in projects like this, because other issues seem to be bubbling to the top as what’s taking people’s focus and concentration and funding, because there’s always a finite amount of all these things.

 

Dr. Matt Kenzie  30:52

Yeah, maybe, I don’t know if it’s difficult to answer. I think there’s a natural cycle with these things, right? And so you probably heard a lot from the LHC 10 years ago, let’s say, but that’s because the Higgs had been discovered, but the machine had only just really turned on and started operating. So there were a lot of interesting results coming out. And obviously that Higgs discovery was big news. But then, since then, in kind of related fields, a few years after that, there’s a big gravitational wave discovery, right? And then that’s open up a whole new branch of physics, where Gravitational waves are now a new way of us observing the universe, and then James Webb telescope, I’m trying to think of these other huge frontier, big international collaboration science projects. And so I think there is a bit of a natural oscillation, right? And you don’t need to be hearing from the particle physicists every week, it’s fine for us to go away for 1015, years and try to find out something more interesting. And of course, yeah, we intend to exploit the LHC for all it’s worth and all it will give us. But of course, if we don’t find some of the answers to these questions that are really puzzling us, we have to, I guess, our desire, but also, in some sense, our responsibility is to try and then come up with a design or a plan for something which could lead to that next significant discovery, and then we come to you as the public and the politicians and the funders to try and get that facility built.

 

Chad Ghalamzan  32:16

But you don’t feel there’s less interest or less support for this, even though there may be some other issues, have more recently, I’d say, in the last five years, become a much more zapping our attention and concern, like the apocalypse of AI and the pending doom of global warming.

 

Dr. Matt Kenzie  32:34

I mean, some of these things I see as positive, the AI angle is probably a positive slant to it, because that’s something that is helping us, typically, and also something that CERN is involved in developments of for research reasons, I think we that one doesn’t scare me so much, although, yeah, maybe it’s taking some of the attention. It’s a bit difficult for me to judge. The climate question is a very important and valid one, but also I consider it to be it’s not really my area of science, it’s not really my responsibility. So I feel a responsibility as an individual, and worry as probably anyone would, for the future of my children and the future of the planet, which we may well have ruined beyond repair already. But I think that doesn’t really leak over so much into the research. And I think we typically are not competing with the funding in quite the same way that is more government, policy, application, energy research, whereas we’re a bit more kind of blue skies, horizontal fundamental research that maybe doesn’t necessarily compete. I think what happens is that when you have geopolitical tensions, and that’s something that’s definitely happened in the last few years, right, that means that these big international collaborative projects do struggle, right? Because they rely on open source flow of information. They rely on tit for tat. Funding. You come and help us with this facility. We’ll come and help you with that facility. People are going to be in Europe for 10 years, but then we’re going to loads of the field. We’ll move to the States or move to China or wherever it is. And in a world with geopolitics becoming a lot more isolationist, that definitely poses a big challenge, and places like CERN, that’s really not good for places like CERN, because they rely on funding from everywhere, right? And if you have situations where your two biggest funders will refuse to go in on a project together, you have to pick one or the other, and you can’t have both. So I think we get squeezed for that, and that that’s maybe a bit concerning. And yeah, that, but that’s a kind of geopolitical question, which, again, is just a bit out of your control. And you have to try, and you try and deal with the cause you’re dealt in that sense. Oh,

 

Chad Ghalamzan  34:48

absolutely. But it must be difficult to make those types of choices when they come up, because, like you said, if you have to pick one that produces your resources, that produces the scope and it requires, obviously, you. Uh, rethinking the whole approach, which is obviously difficult to do on the fly. And when you talk about these long term projects like you mentioned, where you have to think out years, if not longer ahead, that makes it even more difficult. That’s even more of a gamble. Matt, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for being so generous with your time. I hope you come back even before series two comes out, and speak again, I think I could have spent another hour talking to you about EPP, about all sorts of things, but thank you so much for your time. Thank you for this wonderful conversation. Yeah, thanks very much for having me, Chad, and thank you for listening to this episode of The engineer innovation podcast. If you’ve enjoyed it, please make sure to follow and leave a comment. I’m Chad kalamzan, and I look forward to speaking to you again next

 

Host  35:51

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