Lisa Randall: evaluation

Transcript context

…Just to take that tangent, looking back now, what’s the biggest, to you, insight to humanity that the LHC has been able to provide? It’s interesting. It’s both a major victory. The Higgs boson was proposed 50 years ago, and it was discovered. The Higgs mechanism seemed to be the only way to explain elementary particle masses and it was right so on the one hand, it was a major victory. On the other hand, I’ve been in physics long enough to know it was also a cautionary tale in some sense because at the time I started out in physics, we had proposed something in the United States called the Superconducting Supercollider. A lot of physicists, I’ll say particularly in Europe, but I’d say a lot of physicists were saying when that the Large Hadron Collider would have the energy reach necessary to discover what underlies the standard model. We don’t want to just discover the standard model, we want to know what the next step is. I think here people were more cautious about that. They want to have a more comprehensive search that could get to higher energies, more events so that we could really more definitively rule it out. In that case, many people thought they knew what would be there. It happened to be a theory called supersymmetry. A lot of physicists thought it would be supersymmetry. It’s one of the many factors I think that went into the fact that the Large Hadron Collider became the only machine in town, and the Superconducting Supercollider would’ve just been a much… If it had really had achieved what it was supposed to, would’ve been a much more robust test of the space. I’d say for humanity, it’s both a tribute to the ability of discovery and the ability of really believing in things so that you have the confidence to go look for them, but it’s also a cautionary tale that you don’t want to assume things before they’ve been actually found. You want to believe in your theories, but you also want to question them at the same time in ways that you’re more likely to discover the truth. It’s also an illustration of grand engineering efforts that humanity can take on and maybe a lesson that you could go even bigger.…

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