:00:03. > :00:13.employment. We'll give you all the help to do so. We must stop there.
:00:13. > :00:21.
:00:21. > :00:23.Tonight on Newsnight Scotland, they claim they're close to pinning down
:00:23. > :00:26.the elemental particle which has eluded science for a generation. We
:00:26. > :00:28.look at the Scottish academic contribution and ponder the
:00:28. > :00:31.significance of Higgs Bosun for the rest of us.
:00:31. > :00:34.Good evening. Science is closing in on the most elusive thing in the
:00:34. > :00:37.universe. A symposium that's just begun in Paris is to be told the
:00:37. > :00:40.latest developments in the hunt for the Higgs Boson, the theoretical
:00:40. > :00:43.particle that gives everything else its mass. The theory behind the
:00:43. > :00:46.Higgs came out of Edinburgh university in the 1960s. Now dozens
:00:46. > :00:48.of scientists from Scotland are among those looking for it at the
:00:48. > :00:51.European nuclear research centre CERN. One of them has told this
:00:51. > :01:01.programme that the breakthrough is just months away. From Switzerland,
:01:01. > :01:04.
:01:04. > :01:09.here's our science correspondent This is Mission Control for a time
:01:09. > :01:16.machine. Science is turning the clock back 13.7 billion years to a
:01:16. > :01:21.point less than a billionth of a second from the Big Bang. To do
:01:21. > :01:25.that, CERN has built the world's biggest machine beneath the border
:01:25. > :01:28.between France and Switzerland, the large Hadron Collider. This is the
:01:28. > :01:34.capital of superlatives, the coldest place in the universe is
:01:34. > :01:39.here. The hottest place in our galaxy is here, so is theentiest
:01:39. > :01:43.space - a single proton going around the large Hadron Collider,
:01:43. > :01:49.all 27 kilometres of it. It can go around there 11,000 times every
:01:49. > :01:53.second. Dozens of physicists from Glasgow
:01:53. > :01:57.and Edinburgh Universities are working here alongside colleagues
:01:57. > :02:04.from across Europe. The large Hadron Collider is the world's
:02:04. > :02:07.highest energy colliding machine. It accelerates protons up to 7
:02:07. > :02:13.trillion electron votes. That is then converted into new matter we
:02:13. > :02:17.hope, and what we aim to do is to discover new particles.
:02:17. > :02:24.Among them, potentially the most significant particle of them all.
:02:24. > :02:30.Whether or not an apple was ever really involved, Isaac Newton was
:02:30. > :02:33.sure it was a gravitational force, but what newtonian physics and
:02:33. > :02:38.indeed Einstein couldn't show is why even if you take this apple
:02:38. > :02:42.into the weightlessness of space, it will still have mass. What gives
:02:42. > :02:48.it mass? The prevailing theory is a fundamental particle gives that
:02:48. > :02:52.property of mass to everything else in the universe. The Higgs Bosun
:02:52. > :02:57.was first postulated in Scotland along the with the man who came up
:02:57. > :03:03.to it in the '60s - has had a little trouble explaining it in
:03:03. > :03:09.layman's terms. It's - eh, it's - it's - I mean, it's the relation
:03:09. > :03:19.between waves and particles, electromagnetic waves, photoons -
:03:19. > :03:19.
:03:19. > :03:24.waves in this quantity, which oscillates up and down that trough
:03:24. > :03:27.have a quanto which are called the Higgs Bosun. That probably tells
:03:27. > :03:31.you nothing. Finding the Higgs Bosun has been
:03:31. > :03:34.even more difficult. Only the large Hadron Collider has the power to
:03:34. > :03:39.bring it within reach. It accelerates a stream of particles
:03:39. > :03:42.to almost the speed of light and does the same to a second stream
:03:42. > :03:47.travelling in the opposite direction. Then the two streams are
:03:48. > :03:52.smashed head on inside one of four huge underground detectors. The
:03:52. > :03:57.hottest place in our galaxy is a hundred metres below my feet. It's
:03:57. > :04:01.the centre of the At his detector, just one of the experiments ranged
:04:01. > :04:06.around the large Hadron Collider. If you think about it as a camera
:04:06. > :04:10.that takes 40 million pictures every second, then you've got Atlas
:04:10. > :04:15.just about right. That's what it looks like, except in real life
:04:15. > :04:18.it's even bigger - this big. It took 15 years to build, and some of
:04:18. > :04:22.the most sensitive components were made in Scotland. To underline the
:04:22. > :04:27.scale of the enterprise, the Atlas control room is in Switzerland, the
:04:27. > :04:34.central control is in France, but how close has this brought us to
:04:34. > :04:41.the Higgs? Imagine a house with many rooms. A house with exactly
:04:41. > :04:47.signature rooms, OK? We have - and what we do is we open the doors of
:04:47. > :04:52.each room and say, the Higgs is not here. It is not here. It is not
:04:52. > :04:59.here, and today we are left with one room, and we should - this room
:04:59. > :05:03.- we should be able to open the door and decide if the Higgs exist
:05:03. > :05:07.or doesn't exist by the next few months.
:05:07. > :05:11.None of this would have been possible without vast quantities of
:05:11. > :05:17.computing power. That power is used to analyse the results of real
:05:17. > :05:20.collisions and to simulate what Higgs event might look like.
:05:20. > :05:25.simulate currently about two billion events, and each event
:05:25. > :05:28.takes about 20 minutes to simulate, so this is - it would take you
:05:28. > :05:33.maybe 75,000 years on one computer to try and do this. Instead of
:05:33. > :05:38.doing that we have hundreds of thousands of CPUs across the grid,
:05:38. > :05:42.and then we run these simulations all in parallel. It takes a massive
:05:42. > :05:46.infrastructure to try to do that, and some of that infrastructure is
:05:46. > :05:50.located here at CERN. There's many sites that are located all across
:05:50. > :05:53.the world. In particular, there's some Scottish sites as well. Ph.D
:05:53. > :05:57.students from Edinburgh and Glasgow Universities are among the
:05:57. > :06:02.thousands working here. It's not just high-energy physics. It's high
:06:02. > :06:06.pressure too. There is a lot of, like, pressure around and a lot of
:06:06. > :06:10.requirements, and we are really trying to work hard and to get the
:06:10. > :06:15.results as soon as possible. currently a fourth-year Ph.D
:06:15. > :06:21.student, so I feel a lot of pressure. I have to submit in a few
:06:21. > :06:25.months' time, so I am writing my these's, trying to finish the
:06:25. > :06:31.analysis, because when everything is exciting, I don't want to be
:06:31. > :06:36.writing. I want to be on the front line of it. None of this is cheap,
:06:36. > :06:41.although arguably, CERN has already paid for itself by inventing the
:06:41. > :06:44.web. We want to do these particle
:06:44. > :06:48.physics experiments and look at all of these particles coming off you
:06:48. > :06:53.might say, where does that fit in with the rest of the world? It's
:06:53. > :06:57.very abstract, but in fact, these are now being applied to medical
:06:57. > :07:02.science and could replace X-rays or PET scanners, and these could
:07:02. > :07:06.reduce the doses you give to people when you want to diagnose illnesses.
:07:06. > :07:10.For now, though, most attention is on finding the Higgs Bosun. What if
:07:10. > :07:14.they throw open the door of that last room, and it's not there?
:07:14. > :07:18.it's not there, that would be even more interesting for us. Of course,
:07:18. > :07:23.that's the whole point that we've gone on this great trail of
:07:23. > :07:29.discovery, and then what we were hoping to find was the Higgs
:07:29. > :07:35.particle. It's the simplest - it's Occam's Razor. It's the simplest of
:07:35. > :07:40.all things that we see is through the Higgs Particle. If it doesn't
:07:40. > :07:43.appear in the way we think it will appear, then that'll really get the
:07:43. > :07:46.community as a whole really scratching their heads because
:07:46. > :07:52.essentially all of our theoretical understanding which started with
:07:52. > :07:56.Peter Higgs in the '60s in Edinburgh, that's now going to have
:07:56. > :08:02.to move on in some new direction, which, to be honest, we don't know
:08:02. > :08:07.what direction that would be. has been running for more than half
:08:07. > :08:10.a century. Here sophisticated pieces of equipment that once won
:08:10. > :08:16.Nobel prizes are now garden ornaments. One day the large Hadron
:08:16. > :08:20.Collider will also be history. Until then, questions like, how
:08:20. > :08:23.many dimensions are there? Will be enough to be getting on with.
:08:23. > :08:26.I'm joined now by Glasgow university physics professor Tony
:08:26. > :08:28.Doyle, who's been working on the Hadron project, as you saw in the
:08:28. > :08:31.film there. And in Edinburgh is Heriot Watt University vice
:08:31. > :08:39.principal Professor Julian Jones, whose work has been more in the
:08:39. > :08:45.field of applied physics. Just on that film, Tony Doyle, 59
:08:45. > :08:48.rooms - you're in room 60. We're in room 60, which is quite exciting,
:08:48. > :08:52.right? You've gone through all the possibilities up to this point.
:08:53. > :08:57.We're left with a small window. It's not even a door. It's now a
:08:57. > :09:01.small window that we're opening. It may or may not... Are you still an
:09:01. > :09:04.optimist this thing exists? I am an optimist that in the next year
:09:04. > :09:08.we'll certainly determine whether or not the Higgs Bosun exists in
:09:08. > :09:13.the way that is predicted. Before we broaden this - just explain to
:09:13. > :09:17.me, what this would show - it would give us an explanation within
:09:17. > :09:22.standard physics as we know it of why particles have mass. That's
:09:22. > :09:26.basically it. That's right, so how - so the way we understand forces
:09:26. > :09:29.and matter and how they interact is through these particles. What we
:09:29. > :09:33.don't understand is why these particles have mass, and
:09:33. > :09:38.fundamentally, the Higgs Bosun gives mass to all of those other
:09:38. > :09:43.particles. But what it doesn't do is give us the grand unified theory,
:09:43. > :09:47.does it, which is to unite quantum theory with relativity. That would
:09:47. > :09:51.still need a theory of gravity, which it wouldn't give us.
:09:51. > :09:55.Absolutely. That's beyond us, and in fact, we don't have experiments
:09:55. > :10:01.- even though the scale of the large Hadron Collider is certainly
:10:01. > :10:04.very large, right? It's this 27- kilometre... Bigger? We'll need
:10:05. > :10:11.something that can go back to beyond a billionth of a second
:10:11. > :10:15.after the Big Bang, right, so way, way back to something called the
:10:15. > :10:20.Plank Scale. That's not going to challenge us for many, many years
:10:21. > :10:24.to come. Julian Jones, I am just wondering - the excitement
:10:25. > :10:29.generated by this - do you have a - you're trying to get young people
:10:29. > :10:33.in Scotland interested in science. It must be possible surely too use
:10:33. > :10:38.this as almost a magnet - is probably the wrong phrase to use,
:10:38. > :10:42.given what we have just been talking about. Absolutely, and we
:10:42. > :10:46.already see it - demand for undergraduate courses in the basic
:10:46. > :10:51.sciences and physics has certainly grown in recent years. It's a very
:10:51. > :10:55.good thing too. When you say it's grown, has it grown because more
:10:55. > :10:58.young people are going through higher education, or has the demand
:10:58. > :11:01.for science subjects grown relative to the demand for humanity
:11:01. > :11:05.subjects? Yes, it's grown in relative terms. I think there are
:11:05. > :11:10.two reasons for that. Part of that is because of the philosophical
:11:10. > :11:16.appeal of things like the kind of work that Tony and his colleagues
:11:16. > :11:19.do. It's partly too I think because of a realisation that that kind of
:11:19. > :11:23.education contributes to a modern technological economy, and there is
:11:23. > :11:28.a good chance of getting a worth while job out of it. Is it a
:11:28. > :11:34.broader thing than just, I can get a job? Heavens, yes. I think it's a
:11:34. > :11:37.job which contributes, and surely almost everybody watching this
:11:37. > :11:40.programme will feel that it would be worthwhile to rebalance the
:11:41. > :11:45.economy by good, high-value manufacturing, and I think that's
:11:45. > :11:51.inspiring too. There has been a culture of change, hasn't there? 30
:11:51. > :11:56.years ago, science had a bit of a bad image. It was Dr Strangelove,
:11:56. > :11:59.guys that make nasty things like chemical warfare, whereas now
:11:59. > :12:04.people look at this and think, my gosh, that's exciting. Computing
:12:04. > :12:09.and all the rest of it people think is really cool. There has been a
:12:09. > :12:13.whole change of image. For me, the inspiration was the Apollo
:12:13. > :12:17.programme. For people my age, that was what inspired us. Now I think
:12:17. > :12:23.we have moved on. Particle physics really has captured the imagination
:12:23. > :12:27.of the public as a whole. That's the first step in terms of
:12:27. > :12:31.inspiring the next generation of physicists, so that's what we're
:12:31. > :12:35.doing next. That's what Julian was saying. Actually, there are now
:12:35. > :12:38.more people interested in science, technology, engineering and
:12:38. > :12:42.mathematics. Do you think we should be doing more to get a sort of
:12:42. > :12:46.public understanding of science, say, in - amongst your people,
:12:46. > :12:50.perhaps, in schools? I know this stuff is very, very complicated.
:12:50. > :12:55.Absolutely. But the way you explain it, you can start to see why it's
:12:55. > :12:57.so exciting. There is a much clearer understanding now amongst
:12:58. > :13:03.those who practising science that there's a responsibility to explain
:13:03. > :13:08.our work to a wider work to an audience, and I'm sure Tony's
:13:08. > :13:11.university is exactly the same as mine. We spend a good deal of time
:13:11. > :13:13.nowadays going out into schools and working through our learned
:13:13. > :13:17.societies just to try to communicate better than we have
:13:17. > :13:20.done before, and we're seeing the benefits of it as well. I am
:13:20. > :13:25.curious, Tony Doyle - you know, if people watch this and say, what's
:13:25. > :13:32.this got to do with the price of fish? What does it have to do with
:13:32. > :13:36.the price of fish? Famously, non- stick plans, lasers, quantum
:13:36. > :13:40.mechanics, and particle physics - what? The world-wide web, of course,
:13:41. > :13:45.which we needed in the '90s, so when I was a younger scientist then,
:13:45. > :13:48.I needed to communicate with... order to get this massive - and as
:13:48. > :13:52.we explained in the film there, it's almost like parallel
:13:52. > :13:55.programming is involved in this going... Yes. They invented the
:13:56. > :13:59.world-wide web. That's what we did in the '90s. The next step was the
:13:59. > :14:02.grid. So it's not the particles themselves that necessarily have
:14:03. > :14:07.the implications. It's the development of the instruments that
:14:07. > :14:10.allow you to eventually say, gosh, we think we have found it. That's
:14:10. > :14:20.right. We have to leave it there. Thank you very much indeed.
:14:20. > :14:33.
:14:34. > :14:43.A very quick look at tomorrow's That's all we have time for tonight.
:14:44. > :14:47.
:14:47. > :14:50.I'll be back again tomorrow. Until Hello. Lots of cloud and mist
:14:51. > :14:54.around overnight. One or two fog patches too. It all adds up to a
:14:54. > :14:57.pretty grey start on Wednesday. Like obtuse, some places will
:14:57. > :15:03.brighten up with a little bit of sunshine, but for many, it will
:15:03. > :15:09.stay rather glum, particularly in these western areas, to the west of
:15:09. > :15:14.the Pennines across the West Indies, expect fairly cloudy day. In the
:15:14. > :15:17.east, we could get sunshine. Where we get the sunshine, 12-13 Celsius.
:15:17. > :15:20.We could see 12-13 Celsius in the west, but outbreaks of rain are
:15:20. > :15:24.working across Devon and Cornwall. That same area of rain will push
:15:24. > :15:27.into the west of Wales during the afternoon. Further north across
:15:27. > :15:31.Northern Ireland, some brightness is possible early on, but overall,
:15:31. > :15:36.a cloudy afternoon, a little bit of drizzly rain here at times too to
:15:36. > :15:39.end the day. For most of Scotland, it should be dry. Lots of cloud
:15:39. > :15:43.across central and Southern Scotland. In the north, we may well
:15:43. > :15:47.get some sunshine, though again, we might get stubborn fog patches.
:15:47. > :15:50.Thursday night, areas of rain working northwards. Rain may return
:15:50. > :15:53.to parts of Northern Ireland and Scotland late on Thursday. For
:15:53. > :15:58.England and Wales, Thursday promises some bright or sunny
:15:58. > :16:02.spells. Again, where the sun comes out, temperatures into the teens.
:16:02. > :16:06.It will start cloudy across Eastern England Thursday. It may take a