That's like you decide who's got first, you're going to have to kind of knock muscles.
So I would volunteer to draw names from the spot and all.
So let's try to first say who you are and how we got to Rita.
What are you doing? I studied physics here in undergraduate, but. Is also.
Yeah. Your check will be waiting out there. This wasn't set up for the first time.
She's going to call out that man and then that person will get the floor for one plus.
True. So it's like, well. On who you are, your vision of the future.
My name is Dave Wark. I'm a professor of particle physics here at the lab.
I'm also at the lab at I'm sorry, at the university.
And also the director of the particle physics department, the Rutherford Lab.
The lab, the job that John formerly had and the and I'm a neutrino physicist, so I have been involved.
I was I came here originally to work on the snow experiment. And since then I've been building a neutrino program in Japan that John alluded to.
I was the international co spokesperson of the TDK neutrino oscillation experiment there,
and I'm now head of the Collaboration Board on the Hyperkalemia Candu experiment, which is its successor.
And know to answer your question, I, we had came out of Canada in Supercam and now we're building hyper communicate and no,
I don't know what we will call the one after that.
So now for my vision of the future particle physics, well, I think John is summed it up rather well.
We have a, you know, a quandary at the moment.
We have a theory which is spectacularly successful in making predictions over a very limited range.
We know that there is much phenomenology that is particle physics that lies outside that range,
which is unpredicted, and we don't have good theoretical guidance.
So all we can do is measure what we can measure. You know, in the end, experimentalists fall back.
You measure what you can measure and wait for the theorists to get cleverer.
Superior is going know how that's going to be, how that's going to happen.
4 minutes. Yeah yeah. It's a good you can use short words on this one.
One point though I would like to bring up is that you cannot just you can't separate.
You know, as I get older, you, you know, you you learn that you can't separate the work you can do from the structures you have available to do it.
You know, there are experiments we'd love to do,
which we can't do because the technology doesn't exist or the capability doesn't exist, or you can never organise the world to do it.
And the biggest structure we have in Europe to do this physics is CERN, which is a magnificent organisation.
It's, you know, an incredible example of humans from all over the world working together in a coherent fashion to accomplish goals.
Restaurant one at CERN is one of most amazing places in the world.
You will see people from everywhere and they all work together.
And I've never heard any political argument at all.
Everybody agrees that Donald Trump is an idiot. There is no distinction whatsoever.
And so this structure is key to our field.
But as John pointed out, once you go beyond the LHC, it's not clear what you do with that structure.
And to me, that is, you know, one of the absolute key questions we have to address.
And now I will pass it on to my fellow panellists who will give you the answer.
That was actually perfect. That was exactly 3 minutes. That was absolutely perfect.
So now we go through the magic bag. You go and you guys, you know, to save the day, we have this, right?
So I agree to the department. Okay.
So. So I'm a professor of physics here, of course. I've actually spent most of my adult life.
And in Oxford, I was an undergraduate here, as many of you know, an undergraduate student.
I'm a particle theorist. I cut my teeth on precision electroweak physics.
And in the 1980s, pretty much in the pre lab era, which is a long time ago now.
And over the over the years, I've worked on particle physics, phenomenology.
I worked on quantum field theory in various ways. These days, I'm interested in quantum gravity,
and I'm one of the relatively small number of people who are really interested in understanding what the properties of quantum gravity might be.
But without invoking string theory. Okay. So and so.
So. So. If it turns out that string theory is nothing to do with the real world, then I'm on the right side.
Even if not, you've been following a noble cause. And even if not, the quest is noble.
However, I would make one point, which is that whatever string theory has or has not to do with the real world,
it has a great deal to do with quantum field theories and the relationships between them as a as a mathematical method.
And you should never read Lisa Modi's book and buy the lot. I mean, that that is not a fair reflection.
Fair reflection of the topic. So, of course, I lost all seven, seven years or so.
Now, I've also been head of head of the physics department here.
So actually, I worry a lot about what the physics department should be doing, what areas we should be moving into,
where we should be recruiting, whether SDF C are going to fund whatever we decide to do.
All that all towards the also usually. No, not at all.
And the answer is always yes, but less than you want.
So my view of funding makes money in, money out.
So, so. So there were a lot of conundrums evolve, evolve that.
And of course, I agree with most of what's been said about the future of particle physics.
I mean, what John has outlined is, I think, a true reflection of the situation now and the way we see them, how we see the way forward.
The one thing I would add, though, is actually goes back to a remark remark made by Ian Wright at the beginning.
He said that there were some numbers that you calculated, you know, theoretical particle physics that were important, 10 billion.
And, you know, those those are, for example,
mainly anomalous dipole moments of the electron and and the view on these all fantastically accurate calculations.
And of course, they are fantastically high precision measures, much, much,
much higher than you could ever possibly make with a conventional accelerator like the Large Hadron Collider.
And so I do think there is one extra area that we should add to the mix in the coming couple of decades,
especially given the fact that, you know, these Excel, these new accelerators are not going to be available any time soon.
And that is ultrahigh precision laboratory, small laboratory based measurements.
Okay.
And basically looking for tiny deviations, tiny anomalies in in all sorts of things in electromagnetism and gravity just comes back to what Dave says.
You know, if you can measure it with ultra high precision in a laboratory based experiment,
I really think that we should do that and we should be looking for for for anomalies.
Well, and we shouldn't worry too much.
Although I'm a theorist, we shouldn't worry too much about whether we can calculate reliably what those anomalies will be.
In any particular theory, we should simply go and measure these things as accurately as we can.
Dipole moments. Electric dipole moments. Gravitational interactions between atoms.
Anything you can think of, because there's a huge amount of very, very high, high precision capability out there now,
and actually in particular in Oxford, which I think we should be thinking seriously about exploiting.
Thank you very much. That was exactly on time. But as the head of the Department of University Action.
Daniel Och, so my name is Daniel tonight I'm a professor here in the department and just at Department of Particle Physics.
I have worked actually on almost everything.
I work on beat physics when I was a student.
So attacking the flavour of the flavour sector, I've worked at the Energy Frontier, first in CDF and now and then in CMS and now in Atlas.
And I'm also quite familiar with the neutrino program because I've been the chair of the Fermilab project at.
Advisory Committee for two years and on that committee for five years.
So I've seen a lot of this program taking shape at some.
So I, I do agree with almost everything that Ian first actually and then John said later.
So but let me say it again. We are in a fantastic position in particle physics today.
We have just discovered the new particles, the Higgs boson.
We have hints that speed violation in the neutrino sector might be large, so we should maybe get something out of that.
And there are interesting puzzle also emerging in the flavour sector in the LHC experiment of doing this precision measurements.
So the future of the field I think is extremely alpha up to 2035, which is not bad.
The looming LHC and the necessary upgrades of the detector have been approved of a
possible upgrade in energy of the LHC is under consideration and will be phenomenal.
I think the exploration of the dark sector continues and bigger stage first stage
four experiments are taking are under planning all over the world in the USA,
this new large laboratory to study neutrinos that you showed magnificent
photographs as just received the cd3a approval which is huge in the US system.
And so I believe that this will happen and I'm certain that Japan will do it, but I don't see any possibility that will not do it.
So nonetheless, the long term future of the field, it is more challenging and therefore I would say that is also more exciting.
We know that what we have discovered up to now, in my opinion, is not the old story.
I cannot believe in the tropical principle.
I think that we must be able, as human being, to find why this is happening.
I can't believe that is just the cancellation that there is. There must be an overall theory that explains what we have found.
So unfortunately, we also know that what we need to do next is very expensive and and we no
longer have this no serum which we had for the LHC when we knew that something
like that Higgs boson is to be there and it must have been there and we should have discovered with the right machine that we built to do it.
So the next step, in my opinion, are clear.
We must continue the exploration of the dark sector. We must conduct precision study of the Higgs boson like the one we did at LAT.
But for the W and this that goes on with these fantastic machines, this fantastic electron positron collider.
And then it c does not reveal the scale of new physics.
We should try to reach the highest energy we can and we can afford.
So planning for the Higgs factory are ongoing at CERN with Click and this FCC in Japan with the ILC in China,
with the CBC that John introduction introduced in both CERN and China are also thinking about high energy proton collider,
which could reach around one on the TV.
All of these projects require a great deal of accelerator R&D from new superconducting field magnets to high gradient,
light efficient circularity structures and all that accelerator technology.
In my opinion, at this point, what is critical is that we do we must do even better than we already do at developing global science,
because the plan for planning this project, for example,
what I am concerned about is that in the case of the Electron Positron Collider, suppose the Higgs factory,
which could reveal a lot of the property of the Higgs boson,
that technology is almost in reach, especially if the price tag could be reduced with more R&D.
So we should really work a little bit harder there, but is also critical that the proponent of this facility in the various region of the world
make sure to work together and really to speak at unison about the importance of this physics.
Because if we don't do so, we will not get even one of this facility.
And I. On Division EMERGENZA. So I think that we do need to bring us more together to develop this global plan that is sorted out.
But of course, it's a bit of an ocean. So before I get the last word.
Yeah, and I know that's your power, but I.
Okay, 3 minutes. So I'm the head of the party, the theory group next to it in the Liberal Party centre.
There are about nine of us theorists and between us we cover almost the whole range of theoretical ideas related to what you have been discussing.
Only my particular interest is not in collider phenomenology or in dimensional
quantum gravity or string theory or any of the other things that we work on.
It's really in what John refer to Astroparticle physics and cosmology.
And that's not because I don't find other things interesting. It's because we, as I said, try and cover the entire range of possible topics.
Because one thing we have learned from history is that you got to cover all the bases.
You don't know where the next revolution is going to come.
And I think it's a reasonable expectation that if you are dealing with the universe as a whole,
that there are going to be clues thrown at you if you are smart enough to unravel what they are.
And just to finish, I also believe that experiment is just as important a theory, needless to say.
And I in fact, belong to an experiment called IceCube at the South Pole that descended detected
neutrinos about 10,000 times higher in energy than anything you need to do.
And Fermilab, because before that there was an experiment called orgy, which detected even hot energy particles.
But of course they are not within our control and we don't have the same degree of sophistication in studying them that our colleagues at CERN do.
So this is complementary. This is not competition. Having said that, let me come to my 2 minutes about particle physics.
And what I want to say is that I think particle physicists are their own worst enemies.
I don't know of any other field of intellectual endeavour in which people have been so successful in
gaining what they aspire to is and also so good at beating themselves up and not having done even better.
One of the advantages of being an Oxford is that you get to talk to colleagues at college or from other disciplines,
and you realise that if your biologist, friends or chemist or whoever had anything like what we have today,
that fundamental underpinning from first principles and understanding at the quantum level of everything that you can know in the laboratory,
every force that you can study, they would be over the moon.
And yet even having discovered the Higgs boson, which by the way, was could not have existed as recently as 2010,
Jaap de Hoop, who got the Nobel Prize for developing Quantum Field Theory.
I heard him give a talk where he said, Look, it's a mathematical loophole.
It doesn't actually have to be true. So as John remarked in the morning,
the fact that it turns out to be true and also almost exactly what a young Higgs wrote down in 1964 is just remarkable.
Even if it took 48 years to get there. So that's my first moral.
It took 48 years. And the fact that we haven't been able to find anything beyond that, I know it really depresses my younger colleagues.
In theory, they are forever moaning about, Oh, but is the new physics, what are we going to do from now on?
And I tried to tell them that it took 48 years to just confirm this triumph of the human intellect,
the quantum field theory of the fundamental interactions,
which, however, as successful as it is, doesn't incorporate the fourth force, the oldest one, gravity,
which shapes the universe as a whole, and that the interface of quantum field theory and gravity lies the biggest problem of theoretical physics,
which again John alluded to, and he said that the universe should have been either had gone into exponential expansion or collapsed.
We're grateful. In fact, you overestimated it would have been ten to the minus ten centimetres.
But the point is very, very, very big.
So the point is, this is something called the cosmological constant problem, which Stephen Weinberg memorably called the bone in our throat.
There is a big theoretical problem that we do not understand and therefore I am confident that there is an enormous amount of work to be done.
We are far from running out of things to do. There is no question.
And on the experimental front, they've already heard from people more qualified than I to describe how we are making progress on new frontiers,
neutrinos that supported in physics, dark matter. But then I have one concern, which is actually sociological rather than scientific.
Which is that we have, of course, finite resources. We have to convince governments and taxpayers and politicians that what you're doing is working.
And whereas this has worked very well, it has always been essentially the model of the Manhattan Project that particle physics is well funded,
centralised, subject to peer review, scrutiny panels, all the rest of it, but it tends to squeeze out small, innovative ideas.
You need to be on a big bandwagon in order to get funding.
So just as an example, we are now looking for dark matter.
It's one of the biggest mysteries in particle astrophysics.
And the truth is that if you ask a theorist and honest to tell you, or she will tell you that we really don't have a clue what it is.
It could be any one of a number of things.
So looking for it in a with a particular experiment, in a particular deep underground installation and a particular mass range is all very well.
You have to do that. But it does not mean that that is where it is.
It could be somewhere else where you're not looking for it.
And maybe you could get to those other places with perhaps cheaper, perhaps more innovative ideas.
And one problem that I see with the current set up of funding is that there is no room for ideas like that.
We are being pressurised to join with collaborations, work on one main aim and the same thing is true in cosmology.
It has become, as a colleague of mine, Simon Whyte, a prominent cosmologist,
said it is the cosmology is in danger of becoming like high energy physics in the sense
that you think that its position and the next frontier that needs to be overcome,
whereas in fact the real issues may not be of that nature at all.
It may be something to do with overturning then that paradigm on which the current so-called standard model of cosmology is based.
So my statement about the future would be that of course we all recognise why we are where we are.
We are doing the best we can and this is what it is. But please let us keep in mind history.
And one thing that our students really lack knowledge of is history.
They do not know all the wrong steps taken. They do not know all the mistakes made.
You just judge history by the winners, by the survivors.
And that is not a good perspective on what is to come.
But like you say things like sort of let's give them a round of applause.
Oh, sorry. Could I beg two minute? One minute. Just something that I would do.
Dashiell, at this hour?
Yeah. All right. So now, just because of something that was just said stimulated me.
So I spent the last five years as CEO of CFC, which means I had to go out and talk to politicians,
economists, businesspeople, local employees, all of these groups about what we have just heard about.
And nobody failed.
Yeah, there was no one in any of those groups who wasn't excited, captured by the in the vision, the sheer scale of the projects except one group.
And those are your colleagues, your close colleagues in other areas of science, which which see particle physics as a great big steamroller,
moving inexorably forward and using what is in their opinion, their opinion too much money to do so.
So if there is one group that you need to think about reaching out to better, it's maybe, you know,
colleagues down in the Clarendon Lab or in other departments and in a collegiate university like this, there are ways to do that.
So those, you know, like people in C or people who are funded through other funding mechanisms and think they're wrong,
but they think that particle physics has more money than it actually does,
often are the ones who are most negative about investment in future big projects.
And we saw this in the United States. We saw this when the UK was was thinking about being part of the Large Hadron Collider.
So it's not the public the public of it. It's not the science minister.
He loves it and he's love it. It's the decision making processes in the bureaucracy.
And often they represent you through peer review panels backed by scientists in other areas.
So. So that's something to think about and work on.
The other thing I wanted to remark on, we didn't talk this morning about computing very much as a technology.
And I think we that was perhaps an omission. And if I was editing the talk,
maybe I would have added something about that because you see a huge amount of interest
in investment in algorithms and big data and setting up the Alan Turing Institute.
And somehow that's been captured a little bit by our mathematical colleagues.
And they're all saying, yes, we need a bunch of mathematicians. No, you need people who are not afraid of large datasets.
And where are those people in departments like this one?
So so that's a way that particle physics can contribute and should think about contributing outside of its own remit.
Whenever somebody setting up an informatics institute or E Science Institute or a big data institute, not just hire the particle physicist,
but involve the active researchers in those areas and see how that can become a little bit of outreach.
So those are two things to try to address some of the problems that were highlighted here about the support for the Endeavour,
not the value of the Endeavour itself. This is a very good point.
I'm just wondering, do you how do you see an example of best practice where the particle community,
some of the globe has managed to persuade colleagues from other parts of science and buy them back,
perhaps in return for particle physicists backing away from it, because that is very, very true.
What you said is a great thing. I can't I can't point to one.
And I can say now, I've been involved in astronomy that the same is true of astronomy as well.
So it's not just particle physics. It's a big problem, I think,
because I think that one of the reasons that the SNC didn't go ahead at its end in the US was a lack of support from the other physicists.
Well, I can point to one. Snowe is one. Right. And they became a useful number to keep in mind is if you compare the cost of snow to Canada,
to the Canadian GDP, it's actually a bigger project than the SCC.
It, you know, it's a larger fraction of the GDP of Canada than SCC was in the United States.
And because it it it had almost the entire community in Canada in this area of physics was involved.
All the peer review panels that reviewed it were people outside that field.
And yet it was supported and funded because it was such a compelling experiment and it could only uniquely it could only be done in Canada.
So the thing was, there was no debate. Why don't you do this over there?
Because there wasn't any place else. You needed the combination of the mine which did that, which there are a few in the world.
But you needed the heavy water. No one gave you that.
But but it did achieve, you know, support of other sciences, I should say, can be a super supercam.
You can make the same decision process happened in Japan and it also got support so it can be done.
I think you're right. One of the big problems is if you ask people outside of our field how much money particle physicists spend,
they wildly overestimate it big in terms of the amount of money per scientist per year.
Actually, if you make a plot of how much different scientists cost per scientist per year, particle physicists do not stand out on.
At least. But interestingly enough, the virologists who who break the bank on that, it's really expensive to work with viruses that will kill you so.
Well, you can do it. Really. Not for long.
Yeah. Those guys don't tend to come back for big grants to open it up to fill in the questions.
So when I get questions. Just picking a focal point.
You just kind of put a couple of times into presentations. But on some things we didn't quite really even know where to look.
We might be looking in completely the wrong place. When deciding what science to do, we say, okay, this is music.
This baby looks like the same thing with approximately 1750 songs.
This. Okay, well, if we can work out whether this is right, so this is what we'll know whether to do.
This next experiment is next six. So do we construct some letter to right.
First thing we need to do is work at this group actually plummets,
but in the same order over a century of 50 years so that we can do version as opposed to it.
But I think it's you know what? So these are the rational ways that we are planning these things.
And again, but we are planning, you know, we also look at the things in in a variety of way.
So for example, for that matter, we start with the stage one experiment and we do the bigger one.
And bigger one is the same with the neutrino.
I mean, you know, but we also want to look in a variety of physics because as we said, you know, we have different problems,
you know, and so the ways that we go at the energy frontier is to go try to go higher and higher in energy.
But I do think that you need to have this complementary way of looking at everything, because if we discover, for example,
as LHC that we have an enhancement in in something that could be consistent with supersymmetry,
it will take an enormous amount of complementary information to know that what we've seen is, in fact, the dark matter.
You know, it's not you know, once we say we need a you know, we need a signature of new physics,
it is true that after we got the signature, a discrepancy, the standard model,
we will have to be like detectives, you know,
try to get the different information from a variety of field in order to know what we have found that we can in any individual part of the field.
So for instance, in neutrino oscillation physics, we do exactly what you propose.
You can you can lay out a future program. It's not it's not obvious, but you can work out the sensible set of steps.
The problem is that because we don't have a good theoretical model for what lies beyond the standard model,
we don't know which of these things is the most important.
You know, we could spend a lot of time and a lot of money measuring a whole bunch of things in neutrino oscillation physics,
and they'd be really cool. And it could turn out that they don't tell you anything about what you want to know.
Or it could turn out that, you know, they will be the key and we just don't know.
And as severe says about dark matter, you know, if you're looking for weakly, inner acting, massive particles, we can lay out a plan.
If we're looking for axioms, we can lay out a plan.
What we don't know is, is the right answer more likely to be weakly interacting, massive particles or axioms or something else entirely different.
So it's hard to come up with a it's hard to come up with a global plan for the whole field.
You have to go to the theoretical models you're alluding to really exist,
the ones that really tell you how all these different bits relate to each other.
We had supersymmetry and that, you know, lays out a plan for what you should look for.
And we look and see anything. So, you know, we don't really have any other models that, you know, that really tell you.
What's more important is more important. So the dark matter problem or is it more important to look for CP violation neutrino oscillations?
We just don't know. So you know I stay says in some areas you can do that if this then that and if not then some other thing.
But the whole program, the future of high energy physics needs to be more like a portfolio of investments,
some of which have a very high probability of paying off.
And so you can put significant resources into the Large Hadron Collider, most obvious one, one based on neutrinos, perhaps in that category,
and some amount of rather small investments in the sort of things that Sibyl is talking
about and probably in this country haven't done enough of the latter recently,
where you you put some resources into some of these precision measurements that John was discussing, some into a variety of dark matter experiments,
a variety of astrophysics experiments, each of which individually may have only have a 1% chance of telling you anything interesting.
So you don't do 100 of them, but you do ten, and then you put 10% of your investments into something which,
if it does payoff, is really quite transformative.
But if it isn't, if it doesn't pay off, you haven't broken the bank on on the stuff that you know is going to work.
And that the difficulty, as you say, is there's no right answer to that.
And you do the program that makes strength, makes use of the strengths that exist in British universities and the facilities that exist,
the projects that are proposed and and try to invest wisely.
And the best we can do is hope to be part of everything that delivers a major discovery in a way like it.
SNOW Where, you know, even though that's a project that took place thousands of miles away,
the UK contributions to it were really pivotal to its success. I think the other points were reminders that science is the art of the possible.
What's possible changes, you know, in manners, which you can't can't predict.
And I mean, you know, when people started inventing quantum computing, for example, as, you know,
as a concept by what they certainly didn't think about, I mean, I know that because I know the guys who did it, you know,
they never they never thought about the fact that the technology which people
worked would in vain in order to try to implement those kinds of schemes,
actually, for example, has potential applications in fundamental physics because of its capability for extremely high precision.
And so, you know, and we cannot foresee what will emerge over the next, you know, the next few decades in in the way of technology,
which will actually enable us to do things which are completely inaccessible at the moment.
And you have to have, you know, two bytes, a challenge like, for example,
you know, the SCC and the LHC were a little bit in competition with each other.
In fact, I have papers written by very important people saying that the experiments that they take to write the LHC will not succeed,
that it was impossible to do tracking at the level of the interaction, density of interactions that we have at the LHC.
We did, you know, at the end, if you have a challenge, you can also say, you know,
I add the data out there, I'm going to be the experiment that is going to be able to analyse this.
They should be able to add something.
Well, since this is a friendly audience that is of discussion a little bit and share some of the concerns that we have in the trade, as it were,
which is that the way you sort of said it would be in a perfectly logical world, you know, run by Spock, obviously you would think so quite like that.
But in the real world, people vote with their feet, they work on what interest.
And obviously, they also had aware of the overall, you know,
funding another envelope that they had to work within and they learned to jump through the right hoops and so forth.
But really, on the one hand,
we are expecting the field to move forward because people are original and creative and don't want to be bound by rules and, you know, restrictions.
At the same time, necessarily, the funding has to be organised and appropriately governed and, you know, peer review and all that.
So there is this fundamental contradiction to the way we make progress, which is having to accept some rules.
Otherwise it would be total anarchy. But at the same time, you can't have too much rules.
No government department can decide. Dark matter has got to be at 120 DB in this sector and will be found in 3.75 years within this funding envelope.
They can't do that and we know that. So I think what John was saying is that they have to make some hard decisions.
They have to decide what would be the best for the community and the country as a whole and go for that.
And obviously, how should I put it much as they would like to?
The Department of Business and Skills is not entirely within the control, and therefore they have to make some sacrifices here and there.
And it might turn out in the longer run that the choice they made was the right one.
But it might also turn out that it wasn't. And the history of particle physics is littered with failures as well.
We don't talk about them, we don't like to talk about them.
But there have been many and the people who have learned from them are the ones who then make progress.
Okay, so I don't think we should be ashamed of failing. By definition.
Somebody has got to fail sometime. We can't all succeed all the time, but otherwise nobody says so.
So all you can say is No. Let's try to do the best we can.
And most important of all, and that is our biggest asset,
be able to attract the next generation to see the intellectual challenge of what we are doing and why beats working
for five times the salary in a bank that's that's all that but the five I think is probably obviously the question.
Okay, so you don't want another series out there that attempt to explain the effects of dark matter by not a physical particle, but boiler room?
Yes. How confident are you that dark matter that a physical particle is actually behind dark matter, which we may be able to detect eventually?
Given the high enough energy, it is a sufficiently good working hypothesis that it is worth pursuing experimentally, which is what we are doing.
Until we actually find dark matter, obviously there can be no certainty that it is a particle and ideas like Mond are
extremely interesting because even if it turns out that dark matter is the particle,
we will have to understand why they work as well as they do.
What is behind the MOND predictions? That would still be something that would remain to be explained.
So I know in fact Malte Milgrom who is the m motion and he uses a very.
The blue guy. He's at the Weizman Institute in Israel.
And in fact, he's extremely open to the possibility that this relationship that he has found is just a chimaera.
It is not the reality. The reality is, in fact, what most of us believe in.
But the only way to find out is by experiment. We are not going to settle the theoretical sort of what works on anything to us.
Are you happy with the outcome? Yeah.
And I would say I think most if you if you did an informal poll of particle physicists after giving them a little wine,
most of them would say don't matter. Is something we're willing to invest some time and effort in, because particles,
you know, seem to be the way that we can explain phenomena like that dark energy.
On the other hand, you would see a lot more scepticism, a lot more sense that maybe there's something missing.
Then in Einstein, in relative relativity, that we're not capturing the, you know, dark energies feels a bit more of a leap of faith.
I'm very glad to hear that because I've been getting hate mail after suggesting it doesn't exist.
You should try some more. Experimental is totally worth making the point. I like to make it that good.
You know that there is this thing called the standard cosmological model?
Yes. Yeah. I do not think the standard cosmological model has anything like the status of the standard model of particle physics.
You know, the standard model of particle physics has been ruthlessly investigated over the last 50 years in many, many different ways.
All kinds of different processes in all sorts of different energy scales.
It's a it's a completely like it's a consistent quantum field theory, which is a consistent mathematical structure that we understand.
It all fits together. I mean, apart from one or two of the things that Daniela mentioned a few minutes ago,
you know, there are no really established discrepancies within that system.
Right. The standard model of cosmology, on the other hand, is just the parameter ization of what happened in the early universe.
And, you know, it's not it's not tested in the same sort of way.
It could easily just basically be nonsense recipe, right?
You just you take two buckets of red paint and mix it with one bucket of food and you get the universe.
It's not, you know, it's it's not tied back into any anything fundamental in which we have a little.
But anyhow, there are many new ideas that they seem to come up.
I mean,
there is an article by Eric van der Linde about emergent gravity and that we might be able to expand it to explain both dark energy and dark matter.
On the other hand, I tried to read the paper and, you know, it's it's beyond me.
I mean, so and I don't think that there is any sort of agreement yet in the theories.
That's that's the way to go.
So I would say I would tend to agree that the consensus is still that at least dark matter should be something consistent with a particle.
Again, if it's an axiom or if it's a weak interacting particle, etc., that is really you know,
what I like to say is that the favoured candidate for dark matter, which is called a wimp, went there to win.
The dark matter, did be either weakly interacting or massive or even a particle.
I like the Holy Roman. And both. Yeah, you sort of finished yourselves.
And I'm worried when I say that that's not a question.
I would like physicists, but it seems that no, you can have 10% more money on your grant next.
Yeah. The question is, was some kind of loaded question.
Oh, come on. I believe I let me guess.
The question is the question is not from the current faculty. Yes.
Well, I think that to my question, I have more questions over how one represents the standard model is presented in this very simplified way
show shows the equation and all this nice matrix of quarks and that mean the discovery of the Higgs.
We sort of make it sound as though we understand everything,
but actually Pakistan model into which age groups and the challenge is on you left, right.
We can make it look really complicated, messy and horrible.
And should we be more willing to admit?
But actually, we almost know from the start of we have to say. But these come based on, well, we have a Lagrangian,
although the one that was in the T-shirt has a little purity joke in it that eight C doesn't stand for mission conjugate.
As you might think, it stands for hot coffee. That is the thing in life.
But but you're right that there is a rather arbitrary structure is just that you have to live, you know, with your ugly little child for long enough.
The thing is the most beautiful thing in the world, right? This is not an elegant model.
Yeah. I don't think we should be presumptuous enough to think that our notions of aesthetics should apply to theory, to physics in particular.
But that's my personal belief. If I were Dirac, I might think otherwise, but I'm not.
Yeah, I think there's also. So there's things in there that you can sort of rationalise post hoc, like why are the three generations?
And it turns out you couldn't have a matter of anti-matter asymmetry without that
sort of a universe without three generations wouldn't be one with anything in it.
And that's precious cluster anthropic principle stuff. But never mind. But the stuff that isn't in there, that's parameters added by hand.
And those are perhaps more troublesome. Yes. Yes. You know, three, three generations with wildly different masses,
quote masses and lepton masses not following an obvious pattern that relates to each other and neutrino masses being something different,
the mixing matrix being very different and the neutrino mixing matrix.
So even within the equations, if yes and they are messy and like I said, it's pages off them by the time you unpack that.
Yeah. But then the stuff that are just constants, you know, and 18 of them is remember that there are that are just arbitrary numbers.
And that's not predictive at all. So I think that's another thing that we don't talk about as much as we probably should is the arbitrariness
of every mass and every mixing animal and every coupling constant in that well and also neutrino masses.
And so it's not, it's not on the T-shirt and they're not on the T-shirts.
Okay. So I'm the one that always got me ever since I was a student.
You know, it's oh, and of course the weak interaction coupled to left handed particles.
Not right. Yeah. Just because we say that. What this what you know.
Yeah, that's obviously clear.
Okay, so that's not a fine. Okay, so, so the answer is, I think, you know,
we come back to what I said a few years ago is a fantastically good description of what we observe, but so is not wrong.
But it's not very deeply understood in many ways. It is not complete.
There is no doubt about it is not complete. And people are, you know, making it clear that they must be wrong.
I think we do. Maybe we don't emphasise that enough, but certainly whenever I give a talk on that, I always say, you know,
this is a beautiful, elegant description of all these experimental results, but it's clearly not complete.
And then you have a slide about all the things it doesn't predict, we don't say and 18 arbitrary parameters of the mutations.
And and another thing that has been asking trying to ask a question for a long time,
but I was structured about your interactions with photographers coming down to the front.
So is very nice because he's taken a huge number of pictures and apparently no audience
is going to take pictures of you ask your questions to the panel has gotten so in.
Yeah and there's a lady in a white jacket over that nervously trying to ask the question right behind the back of your head.
Two questions that the first one is about the effect of Brexit.
This has already been felt in the post-Brexit to handle environment and whether
it's going to be like what kind of effect it's going to be if it actually happens.
The second one about women in the sciences, in particular particle physics,
because the stimulus of this program, which was nationwide, was not that successful, were supposed to be.
So the question is what else should be done to involve more women into physics, and is it necessary at all?
Can I take that one? I was going to say, I think we have someone here who will be willing to speak on that last point.
I have a couple of comments on the last point that if you look at the average of the scientist at CERN, only 18% of the scientists at CERN are women.
Okay. It varies enormously.
So in Turkey, if you look at the statistics now, 35%, so almost 35% of Turkish women at CERN are scientists.
The total number of scientists, the Turkish scientist at CERN, in terms the Japanese are at the bottom of this number.
The only three women from Turkey. Exactly. And, you know, it's just that, you know, but again, you have to pick the statistics.
Okay. The lowest one is that Japan and is 7%.
Okay. And it's clear that Turkish women are not, you know, more talented for physics.
And Japanese women have said that it is clear that every country has a different history and the situation of women in each country for physics,
that it's very much embedded in some things that is happening in society in the UK are not doing very well.
They are below the average of CERN and the percentage of female scientists, British female scientists at CERN is about 12%.
One of the big problems in the UK is that only 20% of I.
School students take A-level in physics.
Q Don't change that number. You will never achieve parity in the UK.
So we have a problem in the UK. How do you fix a problem?
I have no idea because we have tried, I think, to do a lot of action about changing this problem.
I can tell you what I've been doing, okay, which is called the Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics in Oxford.
We bring here about 100 younger students, undergraduate student in physics here in Oxford.
And the idea is really to create to give confidence of these women because they are immersed in a city,
an environment where, you know, they lecture a lot of women.
Most of the panellists are women. And in the conference, in the conference.
And the idea is really to try to give them a lot of role models,
because all of them are used to be in an environment where they are doing a project in a group in which are the only woman with five men.
Okay, here, they can come here and completely be relaxed because they are surrounded by
example of women who have a major impact in the physics that they are doing.
So I do think that creating these you know, this I think that women don't think that they can be a physicist because they just see men around them.
But by seeing a lot of women physicists, they will get the confidence to to do this career.
It takes a long time, but I hope that the sound people of this conference will become.
You know, I don't I don't see my baby having the next Marie Curie. I'm aiming to have women who are teaching physics in a school.
It's very important in in the UK very few teacher of physics nice to physicists.
So physics is perhaps not taught as well as it could be and this could have a negative impact on people that are already not as self-confident.
Okay. So it's a complex problem. The numbers are being flat.
The things that I think the seven PS, you know, they increase from the 60 to maybe the 75,
etc., but that's being flat in the United States and in England since then.
So I hope that we can do these things that change this.
Yeah, we have direct experience in the snow. Steve can back it up of of this effect because we had we got a woman graduate student in
snow just by chance her her undergraduate supervisor was a member of the snow experiment.
So she joined our experiment.
The next year there was a single woman graduate student in the intake and she looked around and what project she wanted to join.
Of course, she joined Snow because clearly we had a woman graduate student, so we were sensitive to women.
The following year there were two graduate students, female graduate students in the department.
They both joined snow as well because we had the only two women graduate department.
So clearly we were the group who was sensitive to the issues, the women.
So we had two more. And so I was going around all the other groups going got I got no problem with gender balance in my experience.
You know what you got you you guys must be your problem, you know.
But it's just, you know, it's just that, you know, of an environment where people feel that they they'll be appreciated.
And what they would say is also true is that you see a variety of these percentages.
I told you the percentage at CERN in particle physics.
But for example, if you go in astrophysics, you will see a higher percentage of women with respect to the amount that you see,
for example, in theoretical in theoretical physics.
Okay. So there is a lot of jumps also within physics.
But again, CERN encompasses, you know, if you count the number of scientists at CERN, it encompass a variety of disciplines.
So I think that's a good average. So I gave you my experience. But you know, should I do the Brexit?
Yeah, I was going to St John on Brexit for my sins.
I've actually given you notice where is good taking his next job. Yeah right.
Yeah that's right. So, so I had actually given evidence to the House of Lords Select Committee on this, so I did the research.
There are three aspects to the way that Brexit will will affect what we've just talked about today.
UK scientists will need to continue to have access to European laboratories and facilities because
almost everything we've talked about in terms of doing the experiments is done outside this country.
CERN is an intergovernmental treaty organisation.
It was actually founded before the European Union and there is no change in.
Any of our status as regards membership of CERN or indeed access to the American or Japanese facilities?
None. None of that comes through the EU. And therefore, on the face of it, everything is fine.
So it is not fine when you take to the next level we receive.
UK universities are very good at bidding into European Union research programmes and then the current research programme in the EU.
Britain is a net recipient. So while we may be a net contributor to the EU overall,
we are getting something like one and a half times the money back in terms of science that we contribute to the
science programmes and that ends up as about £800 million per year coming into the UK from Brussels research grants.
And to set the scale, the total UK research grants going to our universities in institutes is about 3 billion.
So this is almost a quarter, again 25% more and that money will have to be replaced and government has publicly committed to replace it.
And when Theresa may stood up and gave her vague but reassuring statements about 2 billion a year more into research by the end of the decade,
roughly half of that, I think, though it wasn't made clear, is to make good of this shortfall on EU funding.
So the thing you will have to do is make sure that actually happens, because if that money goes into new initiatives in other areas,
instead of making good the shortfall in areas like like physics,
we will have you will have your successor will have great problems balancing the budget here.
And a lot of the good science that's been funded through those mechanisms won't get supported.
The third thing, and probably the hardest is about the movement of people.
So you can hear from the accents on this panel. This is an international field.
This is an international department. This is an international university.
And because so much of the rhetoric around Brexit has been around controlling immigration, that may be the hardest problem to address.
But the quality of research in this country, not just in particle physics, but in everything,
will really suffer if British universities cannot attract the best scientists globally.
And so it's not just an EU problem. It's an international, you know, everywhere problem.
If immigration rules are made much tougher and they're made much harder now,
they are tough for non EU citizens already, but we found our ways around it.
If they're made even tougher, that will be very, very hard.
And if we can't recruit from from the 27 other EU countries, that will be a big, big problem.
So if I were to put priorities in terms of what the science community needs to argue about, it's that last one.
First, the legal structures are broadly okay, at least in the fields we work in.
Some more money has been promised to research. So at least on the face of it, that's a soluble problem.
But the rhetoric around immigration is still so unhelpful and so poisonous.
We probably can't advocate that, you know,
every potato picker in Lincolnshire should be allowed into the country without that or hindrance because the political climate may make that hard.
But every PhD student, every scientist, researcher must be.
Otherwise, the quality of our universities and our research programs will go rapidly downhill.
Okay. So, look, I, of course, also done some homework on this because as he finally pointed out on the head of department, it's a big gap.
So firstly, in terms of research funding in Oxford, in the physics department, it almost exactly maps onto the figures that John just told you.
About 20% of our research funding comes through EU sources.
If you look at people, about 25% of our faculty are EU non UK citizens.
If you look at postdocs, same is true. If you look at graduate students, it's also that number, right?
It only drops when you get to undergraduates, it drops to about 10%.
Now. It's gone up quite rapidly over the last few years.
So, you know, a very significant proportion of all of the the population of the Department of the Sciences,
population of the department, are immediately identifiable, is coming from that place.
And of course, for all those who are coming from from EU, non UK, there's about the same again coming from overseas.
So, so, so you know, immigration issues are actually, you know,
one of the things that caused me quite a bit of grief one way or another, one way or another as head of department.
And and, you know, that is a serious threat.
And and if the place appears to be unfriendly, inhospitable, unwelcoming.
Well, you know, the Stanford the Chicago, there's Princeton.
Right. Is lots of other places that really smart people can go.
So it's a very serious threat on not on the actual level of science, the pull that going, burrowing one layer further down.
The thing that really concerns me is if you look at where the EU funding goes in this department,
what you find is that it disproportionately is supporting high risk blue skies research,
the sort of stuff that the Research Council that John just led wouldn't support right now.
So so what really concerns me is, yeah, the money might get replaced, but.
They might come with all kinds of strings attached about short term economic impacts and all this kind of thing,
because that's that's the government's immediate problem.
The Government's immediate problem is to keep UK healthy economy afloat.
And looking 25 years down the road, you know, it is not high on the agenda right now.
Whether European grants are really focusing on that, actually.
So it's a major loss because the European grants tend to be focussed on people, whereas, you know, our our research councils fund projects and stuff.
And you know, if you, if you want highly innovative research backed people,
not projects because the highly innovative projects always sound barmy, right?
And usually are. But if you find really good people, the first three things they do are barmy and ineffective.
And the fourth thing they do is, you know, to break them all.
And so, you know, it it would be it's a real shame that we may lose access to that.
I, I just want to say something about Brexit because I moved there in 2013.
I have a U.S. passport and an Italian passport, and I'm not a UK citizen.
And so I might face, you know, you know, in three, in the summertime, you know,
you know, maybe not the environment that I thought I joined, you know, in 2013.
But again, looking back at why I came here in 2015,
it was the U.K. really offer a very vibrant scientific environment with open university, excellent possibility.
And that's why it made sense for me to come here from the US.
Losing visa is an enormous loss for this country.
So I feel so sad about this vote. You know, I think that at the end nobody will throw me out as I'm married to a U.K. citizen.
And so but nonetheless,
I feel very sorry because it's a major loss to the to the institution and to the
academic environment of this county and to the air and to Oxford University.
It is such a blow because this place is just such an international.
And yes, it has flourished over the years by giving, you know,
a place for people from all over the world to study and all over the world to research and to lose that.
I mean, I'm in the same position.
I don't have to worry about being thrown out either, but I do worry about the university not being the thing that attracted me.
Yeah. Yeah, that's right.
Yeah. Well, on that note, yeah, if anybody out there wants to contribute money so the British people,
the positive thing is you get out of America just in time.
I would actually like to say something, but actually I first wanted to ask the lady.
You asked about women in science just to change the topic. Did you ask it then?
Should there be more? Was that part of your question? Yes, yes.
I don't think that was addressed. Yeah, perhaps. Well, I think this is very interesting with let's not moan about Brexit.
It's so depressing. Yeah.
So so did you want to respond to her? Question was not just that.
Yes. Perhaps the programme has not could be, you know, more effective.
But there is also an issue about is big science in particular what you're talking about, is it actually inhospitable to women?
Is that an issue here about changing our patterns of work or the sociological constructs that we have to?
I honestly don't think that if you look at the number, I don't think that physics is much more inhospitable than it's becoming a neurosurgeon.
Okay. And maybe there are not many neurosurgeon, but there are sure a lot of women physician.
Okay. Like in the US it's really almost 50%.
So if you look at every science, I mean, chemistry does better.
You know, biology is more women than men. And I don't think that it's an issue of Venus ability.
It's really these issues that women are lacking the confidence to stay in the field.
And that is my feeling. I might be wrong. I don't believe that can be all the angst.
I think that certainly I there are some items coming out in view from the audience, which is I mean,
just what so, so what we're looking around with metaphysics, which is attentive to what trade is.
To me that's poetry 5050 where you have figures.
But the department is very female dominated but is something which has changed over time.
And I think it is at the point, you know, as more people come in, it becomes more.
But then. The whole thing about career and flexibility working and things like that.
But I suspect there is the thing in academia that if you take the career kids and try to come back and you don't have an application,
that's possibly more more difficult. Yeah, but I would say that the structure now and the department is much is much improved.
I mean, honestly, I had my daughter when I was in the US and when I had my daughter in the US, my daughter was born December 20.
I was back at work, I think January 7th, which is not a good thing that they recommend anybody to do it.
But again, there was no pay leave. Okay, now even in the US that is not paid leave, the batteries, unpaid leave.
And every almost institution gives you an extra year or two years in order to make tenure.
So the structure is there. Is it completely welcoming and fair?
You know, I would say that, you know, if you want something, you're you have to work hard to get it.
That is I don't think that physics is I don't know is much less fast than the other fields.
I mean, you know, let's ask that you don't mind. I think if you touched on something which is interesting, if you look like, for example,
if you you know, if you want to be successful in industry to become a manager or CEO, etc.
There are very few women that are CEO. I mean, there are many fields that are like, that is not your point.
I mean, do you do you is that satisfied? You are more interested because I are from Russia.
So the Soviet Union has always been strong and these important women and also in terms of C like business.
So Russia is on top of the table. But how many women are there in top positions?
If changes are also in the Soviet Union, the number in Poland, etc. are decreasing.
Actually, for example, in physics in the Soviet, the Soviet come back in the Soviet Union was so successful.
And what is lacking here, why it is not so successful, even with so much money, even from the governments to post the sort of what.
Well, that would be a problem for that would be a question to you.
Why why would this by the way, I did a physics flight.
I did a physics experiment, the Soviet Union. There wasn't a single woman on it.
So the you know, that that statistic must be clumpy somehow, because I was on it, I was on I worked in the Soviet,
you know, experiments that had about 70 people, 70 Soviets of all every single one was man.
So so, you know, there to be crazy to go down in mind.
It's always radioactive stuff, but it's still there.
Maybe they just some work. Want to work with me? You know, I can remember the audience wants to meet someone to make a comment as well,
because I strongly believe that you need to catch the young woman,
which she's still a teenager, probably a young teenager, because of decisions to go on into adulthood.
In physics, it's in direct competition with only three aliens who continue because you need that mass anyway.
You know, if you know physics or chemistry of biology, you know, this goes down to your own personal experience.
And so you don't really need to go down into the early years of teenagers.
Well, you need to be interesting having an interesting syllabus, and you need to compete.
And maybe this needs to be much broader and it needs to be much more female interested because so many women are studying all this medicine.
And so I think that's where you need to get some answers.
And when you have a strong base there, maybe with a wider syllabus, then you have a higher possibility that they come unstuck.
Yeah, I completely agree. I think that, you know,
as TSC has done a public engagement strategy refresh and we went out to focus groups and looked at what what you could usefully do.
And they all of the answers were go earlier, primary schools, not secondary schools, you know, general public science centre,
things like that, because the pipeline is leaky all the way along, but too few women are getting into the pipeline to begin.
Yeah, they're trying to test them, you know.
So initiatives like the coding workshops for young girls and things like that, you know, it's not about particle physics particularly.
But then I think we should look at ourselves because you made a point about the academic career structure,
which is generic to research universities generally being somewhat unfriendly.
That may well be true, but there may be things about the way particle physics works in big teams, which can become male dominated, for example.
And we shouldn't just say all the problems happen at eight years old,
because there are certainly anecdotal evidence in astronomy of certain prominent individuals
tolerating or even encouraging sexual harassment in their departments and things like that.
So we shouldn't just say this is a societal problem.
It is worth as a subject looking in, which now I don't think from my experience or from my knowledge,
particle physics in this country has any such problems. I think it is quite an inclusive approach.
You're not an exclusive one. There's been a lot of discussion, as you may know,
about very male dominated companies in Silicon Valley and things like that, whether, you know, a lot of technology industry,
which is 100% male and there's something about the culture then in the recruitment process,
in the way that you tend to employ people who look and talk and sound like you.
Those kind of things need to we need to look at that. But I completely agree.
The problem starts right at the beginning and that's the place to put resources and then we should be critical of ourselves in each of the steps.
I think that so you have to do it at every level. You know, you have to keep the women that are out there in the field.
You have to do it.
So you have to start early and try to keep the women that are there, you know, in the field and also, you know, try to allow, you know, you know,
to have a little bit of a more welcoming, you know, environment in the university, etc., because it is difficult to get tenure and to have children.
And if I just want to say yes, I just want to make I mean, what you say about these STEM programs is true.
But I mean, I think also, you know, if you look at what we've done in the department over the last ten years,
you know, we've made huge changes in all in all sorts of things.
And many of them have been focussed on making sure that we are we are not doing things which are,
you know, particularly anti correlated with being a woman in, in physics.
Right. And you know, I think we've made a lot of progress.
We've made a lot of progress on that. I think it will take a really quite a long time, you know, for that to be true.
You look at this panel and, you know, there's one one woman and four men.
You know, we are typical of our generation in physics.
It will be 20 years before you see a panel like this,
which is typical of a younger generation in physics, where actually there are there are more women.
It may not be there are not enough and is dominated by this, you know, 11 problem in in in the UK and the UK.
But these these things, you know, do take they take generations to turn over.
And it's very important that you don't just throw up your hands and say, oh, it hasn't worked, so I'm going to stop all of it.
Yeah, I spoke temptation to do that because you don't see rapid change, but you're not going to see rapid change in these things.
It will take a long time. I think there's a lot of time pressure to on the defence of time.
I sound like on message. Yeah. Listen, I put this kind of together because I knew that would be loquacious and I think in both of those things.
So I first like to ask you to think how to do that.