Tejinder Virdee

The Life Scientific

BBC

Technology, Personal Journals, Society & Culture, Science

4.6 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 20 March 2012

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Jim talks CERN physicist, Tejinder Virdee about the search for the elusive Higgs boson, also known as the "God particle". Last December, scientists working at the Large Hadron Collider caught a tantalising glimpse of the Higgs; but they need more data to be sure of its existence. Twenty years ago, Tejinder set about building a detector within the Large Hadron Collider that's capable of taking forty million phenomenally detailed images every second. Finding the Higgs will validate everything physicists think they know about the very nature of the universe: not finding it, will force them back to the drawing board. By the end of the year, we should know one way or the other. Producer: Anna Buckley Producer: Anna Buckley.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about the
0:03.8	podcast I work on. I'm Dan Clark and I commissioned factual podcasts at the BBC.
0:08.6	It's a massive area but I'd sum it up as stories to help us make sense of the forces shaping the world.
0:15.0	What podcasting does is give us the space and the time to take brilliant BBC journalism
0:20.0	and tell amazing compelling stories that really get behind the headlines.
0:23.7	And what I get really excited about is when we find a way of drawing you into a subject
0:28.3	you might not even have thought you were interested in.
0:30.2	Whether it's investigations, science, tech, politics, culture, true crime, the environment,
0:36.1	you can always discover more with a podcast on BBC Sounds.
0:39.8	Thank you for downloading the Life Scientific from BBC Radio 4.
0:45.0	The Large Hadron Collider at CERN, an experiment that smashes subatomic particles together
0:51.0	at phenomenally high speeds, announced last December that the
0:55.4	scientists involved had caught a tantalizing glimpse of the particle they'd all
1:00.5	been waiting for, a particle that validates everything they think they know
1:04.6	about the nature of the universe, about the nature of matter itself, the Higgs bosom.
1:18.0	Scientists hunting for the elusive Higgs boson, the missing link in particle physics which is thought to give everything in the universe its mass, say they've discovered
1:21.6	strong signals that it exists.
1:24.0	We are discussing with something that is the last chapter we hope of a story which lasts since 47 years and there are people in the audience today that really devoted
1:37.0	a large fraction of their professional lifetime 20 years or so to this goal.
1:43.0	Including my guest today, Imperial College and Cern physicist Tijinder Verdi,
1:48.4	architect of the CMS detector inside the Large Hadron Collider.
1:53.0	Tijinder, welcome to the Life Scientific.
	...

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