15/11/2011 Newsnight Scotland

employment. We'll give you all the help to do so. We must stop there.

Tonight on Newsnight Scotland, they claim they're close to pinning down

the elemental particle which has eluded science for a generation. We

look at the Scottish academic contribution and ponder the

significance of Higgs Bosun for the rest of us.

Good evening. Science is closing in on the most elusive thing in the

universe. A symposium that's just begun in Paris is to be told the

latest developments in the hunt for the Higgs Boson, the theoretical

particle that gives everything else its mass. The theory behind the

Higgs came out of Edinburgh university in the 1960s. Now dozens

of scientists from Scotland are among those looking for it at the

European nuclear research centre CERN. One of them has told this

programme that the breakthrough is just months away. From Switzerland,

here's our science correspondent This is Mission Control for a time

machine. Science is turning the clock back 13.7 billion years to a

point less than a billionth of a second from the Big Bang. To do

that, CERN has built the world's biggest machine beneath the border

between France and Switzerland, the large Hadron Collider. This is the

capital of superlatives, the coldest place in the universe is

here. The hottest place in our galaxy is here, so is theentiest

space - a single proton going around the large Hadron Collider,

all 27 kilometres of it. It can go around there 11,000 times every

second. Dozens of physicists from Glasgow

and Edinburgh Universities are working here alongside colleagues

from across Europe. The large Hadron Collider is the world's

highest energy colliding machine. It accelerates protons up to 7

trillion electron votes. That is then converted into new matter we

hope, and what we aim to do is to discover new particles.

Among them, potentially the most significant particle of them all.

Whether or not an apple was ever really involved, Isaac Newton was

sure it was a gravitational force, but what newtonian physics and

indeed Einstein couldn't show is why even if you take this apple

into the weightlessness of space, it will still have mass. What gives

it mass? The prevailing theory is a fundamental particle gives that

property of mass to everything else in the universe. The Higgs Bosun

was first postulated in Scotland along the with the man who came up

to it in the '60s - has had a little trouble explaining it in

layman's terms. It's - eh, it's - it's - I mean, it's the relation

between waves and particles, electromagnetic waves, photoons -

waves in this quantity, which oscillates up and down that trough

have a quanto which are called the Higgs Bosun. That probably tells

you nothing. Finding the Higgs Bosun has been

even more difficult. Only the large Hadron Collider has the power to

bring it within reach. It accelerates a stream of particles

to almost the speed of light and does the same to a second stream

travelling in the opposite direction. Then the two streams are

smashed head on inside one of four huge underground detectors. The

hottest place in our galaxy is a hundred metres below my feet. It's

the centre of the At his detector, just one of the experiments ranged

around the large Hadron Collider. If you think about it as a camera

that takes 40 million pictures every second, then you've got Atlas

just about right. That's what it looks like, except in real life

it's even bigger - this big. It took 15 years to build, and some of

the most sensitive components were made in Scotland. To underline the

scale of the enterprise, the Atlas control room is in Switzerland, the

central control is in France, but how close has this brought us to

the Higgs? Imagine a house with many rooms. A house with exactly

signature rooms, OK? We have - and what we do is we open the doors of

each room and say, the Higgs is not here. It is not here. It is not

here, and today we are left with one room, and we should - this room

- we should be able to open the door and decide if the Higgs exist

or doesn't exist by the next few months.

None of this would have been possible without vast quantities of

computing power. That power is used to analyse the results of real

collisions and to simulate what Higgs event might look like.

simulate currently about two billion events, and each event

takes about 20 minutes to simulate, so this is - it would take you

maybe 75,000 years on one computer to try and do this. Instead of

doing that we have hundreds of thousands of CPUs across the grid,

and then we run these simulations all in parallel. It takes a massive

infrastructure to try to do that, and some of that infrastructure is

located here at CERN. There's many sites that are located all across

the world. In particular, there's some Scottish sites as well. Ph.D

students from Edinburgh and Glasgow Universities are among the

thousands working here. It's not just high-energy physics. It's high

pressure too. There is a lot of, like, pressure around and a lot of

requirements, and we are really trying to work hard and to get the

results as soon as possible. currently a fourth-year Ph.D

student, so I feel a lot of pressure. I have to submit in a few

months' time, so I am writing my these's, trying to finish the

analysis, because when everything is exciting, I don't want to be

writing. I want to be on the front line of it. None of this is cheap,

although arguably, CERN has already paid for itself by inventing the

web. We want to do these particle

physics experiments and look at all of these particles coming off you

might say, where does that fit in with the rest of the world? It's

very abstract, but in fact, these are now being applied to medical

science and could replace X-rays or PET scanners, and these could

reduce the doses you give to people when you want to diagnose illnesses.

For now, though, most attention is on finding the Higgs Bosun. What if

they throw open the door of that last room, and it's not there?

it's not there, that would be even more interesting for us. Of course,

that's the whole point that we've gone on this great trail of

discovery, and then what we were hoping to find was the Higgs

particle. It's the simplest - it's Occam's Razor. It's the simplest of

all things that we see is through the Higgs Particle. If it doesn't

appear in the way we think it will appear, then that'll really get the

community as a whole really scratching their heads because

essentially all of our theoretical understanding which started with

Peter Higgs in the '60s in Edinburgh, that's now going to have

to move on in some new direction, which, to be honest, we don't know

what direction that would be. has been running for more than half

a century. Here sophisticated pieces of equipment that once won

Nobel prizes are now garden ornaments. One day the large Hadron

Collider will also be history. Until then, questions like, how

many dimensions are there? Will be enough to be getting on with.

I'm joined now by Glasgow university physics professor Tony

Doyle, who's been working on the Hadron project, as you saw in the

film there. And in Edinburgh is Heriot Watt University vice

principal Professor Julian Jones, whose work has been more in the

field of applied physics. Just on that film, Tony Doyle, 59

rooms - you're in room 60. We're in room 60, which is quite exciting,

right? You've gone through all the possibilities up to this point.

We're left with a small window. It's not even a door. It's now a

small window that we're opening. It may or may not... Are you still an

optimist this thing exists? I am an optimist that in the next year

we'll certainly determine whether or not the Higgs Bosun exists in

the way that is predicted. Before we broaden this - just explain to

me, what this would show - it would give us an explanation within

standard physics as we know it of why particles have mass. That's

basically it. That's right, so how - so the way we understand forces

and matter and how they interact is through these particles. What we

don't understand is why these particles have mass, and

fundamentally, the Higgs Bosun gives mass to all of those other

particles. But what it doesn't do is give us the grand unified theory,

does it, which is to unite quantum theory with relativity. That would

still need a theory of gravity, which it wouldn't give us.

Absolutely. That's beyond us, and in fact, we don't have experiments

- even though the scale of the large Hadron Collider is certainly

very large, right? It's this 27- kilometre... Bigger? We'll need

something that can go back to beyond a billionth of a second

after the Big Bang, right, so way, way back to something called the

Plank Scale. That's not going to challenge us for many, many years

to come. Julian Jones, I am just wondering - the excitement

generated by this - do you have a - you're trying to get young people

in Scotland interested in science. It must be possible surely too use

this as almost a magnet - is probably the wrong phrase to use,

given what we have just been talking about. Absolutely, and we

already see it - demand for undergraduate courses in the basic

sciences and physics has certainly grown in recent years. It's a very

good thing too. When you say it's grown, has it grown because more

young people are going through higher education, or has the demand

for science subjects grown relative to the demand for humanity

subjects? Yes, it's grown in relative terms. I think there are

two reasons for that. Part of that is because of the philosophical

appeal of things like the kind of work that Tony and his colleagues

do. It's partly too I think because of a realisation that that kind of

education contributes to a modern technological economy, and there is

a good chance of getting a worth while job out of it. Is it a

broader thing than just, I can get a job? Heavens, yes. I think it's a

job which contributes, and surely almost everybody watching this

programme will feel that it would be worthwhile to rebalance the

economy by good, high-value manufacturing, and I think that's

inspiring too. There has been a culture of change, hasn't there? 30

years ago, science had a bit of a bad image. It was Dr Strangelove,

guys that make nasty things like chemical warfare, whereas now

people look at this and think, my gosh, that's exciting. Computing

and all the rest of it people think is really cool. There has been a

whole change of image. For me, the inspiration was the Apollo

programme. For people my age, that was what inspired us. Now I think

we have moved on. Particle physics really has captured the imagination

of the public as a whole. That's the first step in terms of

inspiring the next generation of physicists, so that's what we're

doing next. That's what Julian was saying. Actually, there are now

more people interested in science, technology, engineering and

mathematics. Do you think we should be doing more to get a sort of

public understanding of science, say, in - amongst your people,

perhaps, in schools? I know this stuff is very, very complicated.

Absolutely. But the way you explain it, you can start to see why it's

so exciting. There is a much clearer understanding now amongst

those who practising science that there's a responsibility to explain

our work to a wider work to an audience, and I'm sure Tony's

university is exactly the same as mine. We spend a good deal of time

nowadays going out into schools and working through our learned

societies just to try to communicate better than we have

done before, and we're seeing the benefits of it as well. I am

curious, Tony Doyle - you know, if people watch this and say, what's

this got to do with the price of fish? What does it have to do with

the price of fish? Famously, non- stick plans, lasers, quantum

mechanics, and particle physics - what? The world-wide web, of course,

which we needed in the '90s, so when I was a younger scientist then,

I needed to communicate with... order to get this massive - and as

we explained in the film there, it's almost like parallel

programming is involved in this going... Yes. They invented the

world-wide web. That's what we did in the '90s. The next step was the

grid. So it's not the particles themselves that necessarily have

the implications. It's the development of the instruments that

allow you to eventually say, gosh, we think we have found it. That's

right. We have to leave it there. Thank you very much indeed.

A very quick look at tomorrow's That's all we have time for tonight.

I'll be back again tomorrow. Until Hello. Lots of cloud and mist

around overnight. One or two fog patches too. It all adds up to a

pretty grey start on Wednesday. Like obtuse, some places will

brighten up with a little bit of sunshine, but for many, it will

stay rather glum, particularly in these western areas, to the west of

the Pennines across the West Indies, expect fairly cloudy day. In the

east, we could get sunshine. Where we get the sunshine, 12-13 Celsius.

We could see 12-13 Celsius in the west, but outbreaks of rain are

working across Devon and Cornwall. That same area of rain will push

into the west of Wales during the afternoon. Further north across

Northern Ireland, some brightness is possible early on, but overall,

a cloudy afternoon, a little bit of drizzly rain here at times too to

end the day. For most of Scotland, it should be dry. Lots of cloud

across central and Southern Scotland. In the north, we may well

get some sunshine, though again, we might get stubborn fog patches.

Thursday night, areas of rain working northwards. Rain may return

to parts of Northern Ireland and Scotland late on Thursday. For

England and Wales, Thursday promises some bright or sunny

spells. Again, where the sun comes out, temperatures into the teens.

It will start cloudy across Eastern England Thursday. It may take a