Why This CERN Physicist Wouldn’t Fund the Next Collider | Daniel Whiteson

Link to full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8L4WrbXJ5ys

Daniel Whiteson spent ten years at CERN hunting dark matter, so when Danny asks what he would build with unlimited money, the answer is worth hearing. It skips the bigger collider CERN already has on the drawing board. He would put the money into making colliders smaller.

The Large Hadron Collider cost $10 billion, which Whiteson calls the limit of what the public will support. The proposed successor is a longer tunnel running the same technology, and his own estimate for it runs to $50 billion, mostly European money, with China talking about a giant ring of its own. His objection is practical. A collider is a string of small accelerators stacked end to end, so more energy has always meant more tunnel and more billions. If the next one finds nothing, the one after that goes on the moon.

The technology he wants funded instead is the plasma wakefield accelerator. In principle it can push particles to the same speeds inside a facility the size of a lab, which would end the race for ever-larger rings and put LHC-class physics within reach of a single building.

The rest of the clip covers the other new eyes physics is opening. Whiteson explains how LIGO fires lasers down two arms and reads the interference to catch a gravitational wave squeezing space, an effect Einstein predicted and said nobody would ever measure. Whiteson toured Caltech as a prospective grad student, decided the experiment could never work, and watched the team win a Nobel Prize a decade later. The next version, LISA, is three satellites linked by lasers, built to hear gravitational waves from the early universe. Light only reaches back to the moment the universe turned transparent, 400,000 years after the beginning. Gravitational waves pass through everything, so they could deliver what Whiteson calls a fetal picture of the universe instead of a baby picture.

He closes on the observatories now catching interstellar objects like Oumuamua for the first time, and on the photons hitting the sidewalk outside with information nobody is reading. The universe is screaming at us, in his words, and we own too few telescopes to listen.

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Written by Danny Jones Clips