• Question: what is your favourite part about discovering nature and the atoms in nature when they collide?

    Asked by anon-217068 to Harrison on 17 Jun 2019.
    • Photo: Harrison Prosper

      Harrison Prosper answered on 17 Jun 2019: last edited 17 Jun 2019 6:37 pm


      That’s a tough one because that are several things that I find thrilling. But, there is no question that contributing to a discovery is simply an amazing experience. My favourite part of that experience is when my colleagues and I first realize that maybe we’re on to something. That was the case in late 2011, several months before the announcement of the discovery of a new particle on July 4th, 2012 at CERN. A few years later, we convinced ourselves that the particle was the Higgs boson. The excitement builds, and builds, and one day we become convinced that what we’re seeing is real. What is extraordinary about a discovery like that is that even if one hundred years from now scientists conclude that we were completely mistaken about what we thought we had discovered a century earlier that conclusion does not alter the fact of the discovery. That discovery will forever be part of Homo sapiens’ intellectual history.

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