Due to what is starting to feel like an overwhelming teaching schedule*, I didn’t get a chance to properly share how excited I was to chat in December with Sean Carroll about his book “The Particle at the End of Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World.” Sean is not only a top-notch physicist, but a passionate storyteller and communicator. I’ve wanted to interview him since I heard him speak at the 2011 Science Writers conference in Flagstaff. As a former high school physics teacher, I was in awe of how he moved effortlessly from the simplest to the grandest ideas in physics and not only held the audience’s attention but challenged us to think. So getting an hour to talk to him about Higgs Boson was a pure treat.
The Higgs Boson surprised the smart money and seems to have shown itself in July, even sooner than expected, in the sensors at the Large Hadron Collider. “They had their own timeline, as the universe often does,” Sean laughed when I asked him how he managed to write this fascinating and highly readable book about the LHC, the history of the Higgs Boson, and –more challengingly–quantum field theory in the same year as its discovery.
The Higgs was surely one of the biggest stories of the year and our interview covered everything from his desire to see more popular writing about quantum field theory to the true magnitude of the discovery, which he didn’t shy away from emphasizing: “A hundred thousand years from now when they talk about the history of particle physics, they will talk about pre-Higgs boson discovery and post-Higgs boson discovery.”
The conversation was great fun and I won’t lie, I may have blushed a little in the booth when he complemented me on having read the book in depth and asking interesting questions about it. Coming from someone who’s previous two interviews were with the Colbert Report (sorry fellow Canadians) and the iconic Canadian science program Quirks and Quarks, it was my pleasure.
You can check it out at Skeptically Speaking.
*Shout-out here though to my great students in EDSE 401 Digital Media in Science Education and EDSE 451 Physical Sciences Curriculum and Pedagogy. Aside from scheduling, I’m not complaining at all!
