Transcriber:
Have you ever taken your 3-D glasses off at the cinema?
The picture looks blurry
and it can be difficult to see exactly what is happening.
This is because 3-D glasses trick our brain into forming a 3-D image
by controlling the color of the light that each sees
using a different filter in each lens.
You could say sometimes seeing things from a different perspective
can make them look clearer and easier to understand.
This is exactly the approach that has helped me with my research,
looking to answer some of the most fundamental questions
we have about our universe.
To put this in a different context,
I could see some people finding my voice difficult to understand
due to my cerebral palsy
as an insurmountable barrier to giving a TED Talk.
Even if I saw that there are alternative ways
for people who have difficulties with communication
to speak to an audience,
I could be put off from using them,
thinking that this dry computerized voice has no life in it
and would put you all to sleep within five minutes.
Alternatively, I could see the dodgy female British synthesized voice
as something to be embraced,
pepper this talk with jokes and gags,
sometimes at the poor communication aid's expense,
and hopefully make you laugh
and keep you engaged with what I want to tell you about.
Luckily for you, I have chosen the second option.
And what do I want to tell you about?
I'm here to tell you
that we have completely misplaced 96 percent of the entire universe,
everything in existence.
That's an awful lot of missing socks.
I am a particle physicist
analyzing data from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland
to answer the most fundamental questions about our universe.
At school, I was the archetypal geeky kid
just wanting to get the other lessons done to get into the science lab.
My work now focuses on what I truly believe
is one of the greatest achievements of scientific research
in the last century.
A scientific model that describes the properties and behavior
of all the known particles in the universe.
And as particle physicists have no imagination,
we call it the Standard Model.
For me, having one model with so much power
is as close as science gets to describing nature
at its most basic level.
When I first heard about the Standard Model,
it really blew my mind
and gave me the passion to focus on my studies in physics.
But I also knew
that I would have to think about them a little differently
to my fellow students.
For example, I had to demonstrate in examinations that I had understood
the practical techniques that I had been taught.
Due to my disability,
I don't have enough control of my hands
to be able to pick up laboratory equipment and use it.
So I had to effectively borrow someone else's hands.
I practiced giving extremely detailed instructions to my assistant
about how to use the equipment in order to perform the experiment.
Seeing experiments from the perspective of a series of instructions
that I had to give as clearly as possible
really helped me get into the mindset I needed
to understand how I could perform well in my practicals, which I did.
Recognizing that I was able to look at such issues in a different way,
helped me to find the tenacity to persevere with mastering
the practical side of my scientific studies
rather than letting my physical limitations stop me.
Now, my research with the Large Hadron Collider
involves me writing a lot of code to analyze the data
used to study the standard model.
I dictate what I would like my assistants to type,
as typing it for myself would be too slow and effortful.
It does take a slightly different mindset to speak your work rather than write it,
especially when all the education you receive
is aimed at people who can quickly scribble things down.
However, I have found that telling myself
that I am doing basically the same actions as everyone else
has helped me to understand how to proceed
in pursuing my passion for physics.
Now, you know how I do my research.
Let's get back to my favorite model and hopefully yours after this talk,
because unfortunately, we have a bit of a major snag.
The Standard Model only describes four percent of the universe.
To understand why,
you have to look at how fast galaxies are spinning.
Newton's laws tell us that they would simply fly apart
if there wasn't some other kind of massive substance within them
to bring them together.
This missing mass is called dark matter,
and we observe that it accounts for 23 percent of the universe.
So what about the rest?
Well, the discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating
rather than decelerating due to gravitational attraction,
points to the existence of a force acting against gravity.
We call this force dark energy,
and it accounts for the remaining 73 percent of the universe.
Neither dark matter nor dark energy are included in the Standard Model.
So there is a staggering 96 percent of the universe
that we know absolutely nothing about.
Therefore, it turns out that my favorite model,
that I thought could describe every particle in the universe,
isn't as all encompassing as I initially thought.
So is there a way to look at the particles
that are already described by the Standard Model differently
in order to discover these absent particles?
You might think that we would be racking our brains to design detectors
that could produce some kind of photograph of these elusive particles
to prove that they are there.
Surely if you want to find something that's missing,
that's the general approach you have to take, right?
Wrong.
We actually just have to accept the fact that these missing particles
are not going to interact with our detectors,
whatever we do.
But that's not game over.
In the same way that I didn't give up
on being able to do laboratory experiments myself,
but instead used someone else's hands,
we use the particles that we can detect
to spy on the particles that we think are there but hiding.
At the Large Hadron Collider,
we accelerate particles to speeds very close to the speed of light
such that they smash into each other
and release enormous amounts of energy.
We use protons that are found in the atoms
that comprise all the matter that we see around us,
including you and me.
However, it is when these protons collide head on
that the really interesting physics happens.
Such colossal amounts of energy are released
that particles that are fundamentally different from the protons
that we began with
are created.
It's a bit like if you smashed two apples against each other,
expecting them to turn into something completely different,
like a pile of cherries.
Using extremely sophisticated detectors,
we are able to tell what kinds of particles have been made,
but only the types we already know about.
So how are we going to find these other mysterious particles?
Fortunately, a fundamental law of nature comes to our rescue
and allows us to study these particle collisions from a different perspective.
Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only transferred.
If you add up the energy of the particles before and after the collision,
you would find that they are equal.
We know the energy of the protons entering the collision
and we make very sensitive measurements of the energy of the particles
that come out.
If those two energies are not identical, alarm bells start to ring.
Perhaps one of the principles that underpin our understanding of nature,
conservation of energy, is incorrect.
Or as everyone is hoping,
the missing energy could have been stolen by particles
that elude our detectors
and could help us answer some of the most fundamental questions
we have in physics today.
Now, I know what you are going to ask me.
Have you found the missing particles yet?
Sadly, we haven't.
Some people might see this as a reason to lose hope
that we are ever going to fully understand
the basic building blocks of the cosmos.
However, I believe that this is perhaps the most exciting time
to be conducting fundamental physics
as we have so much left to discover.
But aside from thinking about some of the most exciting questions in science,
I find that being open to seeing a situation from a different perspective
is most meaningful when applied on a personal scale.
It encourages you to seek out the positive in each person
and situation, no matter how difficult,
and use it to bring out not only our own potential,
but that of those around us.
I feel this is something we could all benefit from at the moment.
It doesn't always mean that you will find what you're looking for right away
or that it will be easy.
But for me, this mindset helped me get where I am today,
and it keeps me going.
Looking at the world around us today,
we are surrounded by big questions without obvious answers.
Perhaps by embracing a new way of thinking,
by being truly open to other people who don't share our perspective,
we might just be able to discover new solutions
to the problems we are all facing.
Thank you.