Translator: Natalia Savvidi Reviewer: Chryssa Takahashi
When I saw this year's TEDxAcademy program,
I was very impressed by the talk
by Simon Anholt, which you will watch in a while,
about the "Good Country Index",
which is about how a country can make something good for the world
and finally improve the living standard of its people.
As for me, I will suggest a solution
through fundamental research.
Of course, the first thing you will tell me is:
"What do all those crazy things
that you are searching with your friends in CERN's basements
have to do with my life or how good can my country be in the world?"
Before I start convincing you of that,
I will start my presentation with these five tables
which are nothing more but collisions
that gave birth to the Higgs particle in our experiments,
3D repsentations of collisions,
which have been edited by a group of artists at CERN.
So, at least I have convinced you
that Higgs is present in our life through art.
Of course, you may convince yourselves
that when Galileo, Kepler, and Newton
were studying gravitational forces
and movements of celestial bodies,
they were certainly not working for NASA
to build satellites or cosmic stations.
I think that you can also believe me
that when Einstein discovered the theory of relativity
he was not thinking about technological applications
in the everyday life
like the GPS, that you all have on your smartphone,
which would be inaccurate by 10 km
without relativistic corrections discovered by Einstein,
when it would be trying to determine your exact location.
So, what were these people doing?
They had a passion to learn how the universe works.
Call it being crazy about it.
They were "crazy" to see how nature works.
So what is our idea?
We take these people,
let them do their crazy things
and use the results of their research
in order to improve our life.
Your first main question would be:
"Isn't this investment too far away?
Three hundred years passed after Newton
before we built a cosmic station", for example.
The truth is that the direct consequences of these discoveries
appear much later or may not appear at all.
Nevertheless there are some indirect consequences
of innovations in experiments
needed for a discovery
which are immediately used in our life.
One of the examples is the Web,
which you are using every time to log in Facebook, which we mentioned before,
started off as a tool so that the scientists of CERN
could exchange information between them.
And nevertheless, it became a part of our life.
In America they discovered all that very early,
so after the end of the World War II,
the physicists left the Manhattan Project,
where they were developing the atomic bomb,
and returned back to their universities.
But they wanted to continue playing at home,
to continue making physics,
and as a result they created
very large laboratories in many universities
and large national research centers
like the ones you see here.
So all that research which started after the war
produced many great discoveries.
Great scientists came out of that,
who trained other scientists,
and these scientists trained other workers
and this played a huge role
in the technological wonder
that happened in America in the following decades.
Europe did the same thing with CERN, which was founded in 1954.
This Monday will be CERN's 60th birthday.
Greece was a founding member.
CERN immediately became a center of research
and now it's considered a world level center of physics.
It is a great achievement,
and we have the large hadron accelerator
which is the largest project at this moment,
and it is successfully functioning in the last few years.
But let us come back to Higgs.
Surely you have heard some crazy things about Higgs,
like it is the "God particle",
it created the Universe,
it gives mass to everything.
it will destroy us,
these physicists running this experiment will destroy the world,
they will create a black hole and so on.
This is not the case.
These three men,
Brout, Englert, and Higgs,
tried to explain the mass that exists, we know that.
Either way, we all have mass.
So there is mass in the universe.
What did these men do?
They tried to write some operations,
made some mathematical calculations
in order to explain how particles acquire mass
and not all of them, but two specific particles
W and Z,
the elementary particles,
which are 100 times heavier than proton,
from which we all are made up.
So when they did these calculations
in order to succeed and make the theory work,
what was needed was the existence of another particle
with some specific properties,
and it was named the Higgs particle.
They believed that if the Higgs will be discovered
then for the first time they will have a complete theory
describing the subatomic world.
Now, how come it was called the "God particle"?
It is thought that the great experimental physicist,
and Nobel Prize winner Leon Lederman,
who is famous for his sense of humor
wrote a book called "The God Particle"
but Lederman called the Higgs particle "Τhe God damn particle",
because it was very difficult to find it,
the particle that was damned by God.
So you can imagine that the publisher of the book
preferred the title to be more mainstream
and gave it the title "The God Particle".
This is the only connection
that this particle has with the God and the like.
So how are we searching for it?
We are searching for it with two gigantic photo cameras
which can take over 16 million 3D photos of particle decays per second.
Because we cannot save 16 million of these 3D photos that you see,
we have a system
which in real-time mode, using electronic ultra-fast devices,
it decides whether the decays are of interest.
These electronic devices are either FPGAs,
which have made a large progress in the last years,
or are custom made in the lab.
And again, we cannot save
100,000 decays from these electronic devices,
we have a system consisting of computers
like the one you have at your home
and these 10,000 computers, in real-time mode,
decide that 400 photos
are interesting for further analysis.
Four hundred photos, with our experiments
are about one CD of data per second.
So at this moment one CD of data per second
is being saved at the center of CERN
and then it goes across the world
so that the data can be analyzed.
Those of you who have experience with engineering
know that designing a system is one thing,
and making it work is another.
The performance of all these systems is higher than 93%.
Imagine what kind of engineering experience is needed to make all that
and all these people who work there
later go to work in an industry or somewhere else,
they acquire tremendous experience
which can be seen in everyday life through the economic development.
Of course, many of my colleagues have done it,
and of course they may be paid much better than researchers,
but they are calling us by phone weekly
to ask whether we found something new.
Did you find supersymmetry?
Did you find black holes? Did you find anything?
The passion remains.
And now let us analyze the experimental data.
Don't be afraid, it's not complicated.
So this is a graphic representation
which shows a signal of the Higgs particle
What is it?
It is the distribution of mass of four particles
into which we know that Higgs can decay.
What do we see?
The units of measurement are gigaelectron volts,
and one gigaelectron volt
corresponds to 10 to the power of minus 27 kg.
So, what do we see?
The blue and the green
are processes than look like Higgs,
but they are not Higgs.
But we know that they exist.
This bump at 90 is the Z-particle,
which was discovered at CERN in 1983,
and a Nobel Prize in 1984 was given for this particle.
The red is how it should be.
The red means: if Higgs exists
based on the computations that these men did in 1960
which were improved during the last 40 years,
and based on what we know about how this experiment works,
this is how it will be visible in our detector.
The black points
are the real data that we got
during the two years
that we were running the high energy experiment.
So what you see now is that if there were no Higgs
the data would follow the blue one.
But what do we really have?
We have a new bump at 125,
and not only this, we have a new bump,
discovered something new,
but this bump corresponds exactly
to our expectations for the Higgs particle,
which was predicted 60 years ago,
which appeared in our detector.
Imagine how excited the scientists were
when they saw this graphic representation for the first time.
The day we saw this graphic representation
I was expecting a friend to visit me in Geneva.
He was going to Milan,
and I would go there from Geneva to pick him up.
Of course, I forgot about him.
I completely forgot that he was coming.
So he called me and asked: "Where are you?"
I said: "Mitso, take the train and come. I cannot come."
He asked, "Why?"
"We found the Higgs," I said.
"Are you joking? What is that?"
(Laughter)
He finally believed me, so we are still friends.
(Laughter)
So...
So, as you can imagine,
a 60-year-old theory
becomes confirmed through a technological wonder.
So this is reason for a Nobel Prize.
So Englert and Higgs
- Brout passed away in 2011 -
got the Nobel Prize.
The most amazing thing is not that the fact that the Nobel Prize
was given to theoreticians,
but the fact that 3,000 people from each experiment
were able to work together in order to achieve such result.
It is not trivial in our days for some people to be able
to work together to achieve something.
So fundamental research is important.
How is fundamental research put forward?
The only way to put forward fundamental research
is to do that exclusively through the university.
University institutions should be supported,
research should be funded,
so that Greece is able to attract young scientists
who will provide great quality of education
to future generations and to workers,
to people who will make applied research for the industry
and so on.
The situation at the university,
I will describe through my own experience.
I was lucky to be at two large state universities,
which both were outstanding,
I had a great time in both of them.
One of them is the National Technical University,
where I got my bachelor's degree and my master's degree,
and the other one is the University of Wisconsin.
Both were founded around the same time.
The Technical University is 11 years older.
If somebody would ask you now
to which one would you go to work,
the first thing to think about would be:
"Where are these two places?"
The Technical University is in Athens.
The University of Wisconsin
is in a location called Madison, Wisconsin,
which looks like a Greek island during the summer,
but in October it's like this:
what you see is a frozen lake.
You see, people are walking on a frozen lake.
So you think: "Which one should I chose to go to work?"
Then you can look at the current situation in these universities.
On the left you see the closest thing to Molotov cocktails I could find
at the University of Wisconsin,
(Laughter)
(Applause)
which is basically a demonstration of physics to families,
a once in a year exhibition,
and on the right are some photos
that were sent to me by some colleagues.
So what do we see? What is the problem?
The educational and research processes are hindered.
Of course, I respect the struggle of the people,
but the others should also respect my struggle
and the struggle of any other researcher.
When I was at the Technical University, together with my professor,
we would enter secretly through the windows into the lab,
would lock the door,
we would be quiet so that they would not throw us outside
because of the seizure of the building,
sometimes we had a fight,
so you understand that there is a problem.
When the educational process is stopped
the university becomes an examination center,
the education quality decreases,
but whoever wants to learn
will take the book and learn from it.
When the research process is stopped
the production of knowledge itself stops.
It is much worse.
So this problem should be resolved.
Therefore, I think, research leads to economic development.
Fundamental research leads to economic development,
the research is supported by the university,
and the problem should be solved, not with the budget,
it is not a problem of a budget.
It is an internal problem,
and it should be solved willingly and with cooperation.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)