Radio Galaksija #181: Future of Particle Physics (Prof. John Ellis) [06-06-2023]

Yes, this episode is in English, for change! And with a good reason! Guest is professor John Ellis!

During the LHCP (Large Hadron Collider Physics) Conference 2023, which was held in Belgrade few weeks ago, we had an opportunity to talk to professor John Ellis, one of the most prominent particle physicists who is active in the field of theoretical and experimental particle physics at CERN and other prominent research institutions for more then 50 years. Half a century! 

Professor Ellis is a British theoretical physicist born in 1948 and currently holding the Clerk Maxwell Professorship in Theoretical Physics at the King’s College of London, which is the professorship held by James Clerk Maxwell himself in the 19th century. His activities in CERN are wide-ranging. Currently he is chair of the committee to investigate physics opportunities for future proton accelerators, and also a member of the extended CLIC (Compact Linear Collider) Steering Committee. 

His career goes way back to the beginning of the Standard Model of Elementary Particles, and even now, he is one of the figures which are dealing with all kinds of different topics which are going far beyond the Standard Model.

After 2012, when the Higgs particle, Higgs boson, was experimentally confirmed, a lot of new issues and problems occurred, including the detection of dark matter particles, gravitational waves, etc… 

John is one of the people who work extensively on new solutions, experimental as well as theoretical, to deal with the problems beyond the ruling paradigm, or normal science, in particle physics, in Kuhnian sense, and he is trying to tackle and figure out the direction in which particle physics should go in the near, but also far future – in the next decade, but also in the next few or even several decades. 

We had a conversation with him about the future of particle physics, crisis in particle physics in a Kuhnian sense, about some new experiments which are ongoing or will be built in the near future at CERN and also Oxford University (project AION), we talked about the dark matter and the connection between particle physics and cosmology, as well as astroparticle physics problems, about the unification of theories and “theory of everything” (a term which, btw, John himself coined) and several more topics from John’s rich experience and work.