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Asked by cake2001 to Joel, Kristian, Tim, Venus, Zachary on 13 Nov 2013. This question was also asked by endercake.
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Zachary Williamson answered on 13 Nov 2013:
That marking problem sets makes Zac very, very grumpy.
Silliness aside, my research over the past few years has been in an attempt to discover a very specific property of a particle called the neutrino. Specifically I’m trying to work out the probability that a specific type of neutrino will interact and produce another type of particle called a neutral pion.
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Kristian Harder answered on 13 Nov 2013:
Oh, I am actually not sure I have ever discovered anything, as far as particle physics is concerned. My entire career is based more on *not* finding things.
For example, in my thesis I demonstrated that a particle that some other experiment had claimed to have discovered didn’t actually exist.
Recently, I was involved in a search for a different version of a Higgs boson, with very weird properties. The odds that this particle would actually exist were never big, but we had to look anyway and make sure we don’t miss it if it happens to be there.
The rest of my work was spent measuring properties of known particles as precisely as possible, so we can check how well our theories apply to them in practice.
I guess that’s something that you don’t hear about that much. If we make a grand discovery such as the Higgs, of course it ends up in the press. But the vast majority of our work does not involve discovering something. It involves making sure we understand very precisely what has been discovered earlier. -
Joel Goldstein answered on 14 Nov 2013:
As Kristian has described, most experimental results involve _not_ finding something. We call this “null” results, but they are essential to the scientific method.
The only new particle that I have ever discovered was a Higgs boson which I found almost 20 years before the LHC and at half the mass (60 GeV/c2)! Fortunately, I quickly realised that I had made a mistake and the result was never released. -
Tim Hollowood answered on 15 Nov 2013:
For a lot of time scientists chip away at a problem and then if you are very lucky you make a big break-through. If you are very very lucky, like Peter Higgs, you make a huge break-through that means that 1000 of physicists do a big experiment and find the particle that you predicted years ago.
ok I can’t claim anything on that scale. At the moment I have been working on quantum theory. It’s the theory that explains the physics of small things…for instance all our favourite gadgets like phones, ipods, TVs, laptops all work because as they do because of quantum theory. But there some basic things in quantum theory that are rather puzzling and I think I have a way to solve the puzzles. It’s too early to say whether I’ve got it all right…
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