Lisa Randall: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Where can you find the places where the standard model breaks down? What are the places you can see those tiny little deviations? We don’t know yet, but we know the kinds of things you wouldn’t want to look for. One obvious place to look is at higher energy. We’re looking at the Large Hadron Collider, but we’d love to go beyond that. Higher energy means shorter distances and it means things that we just couldn’t produce before. E=mc², so if you have a heavy particle and you don’t have enough energy to make it, you’ll never see it. That’s one place. The other place is precision measurements. The standard model has been tested exquisitely, so if it’s been tested 1%, you want to look at a 10th of a percent. There are some processes that we know shouldn’t even happen at all in the standard model or happen at very suppressed level, and those are other things that we look for. All of those things could indicate there’s something beyond what we know about, which of course would be very exciting. When you just step back and look at the standard model, the quarks and all the different particles and neutrinos, isn’t it wild how this little system came to be and underpins everything we see?…

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