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DR. STEVEN GOLDFARB: My
name is Steven Goldfarb,
and I'm a physicist,
a research physicist,
working for the
University of Michigan,
here at CERN, on the
ATLAS experiment.
CERN is the European
organization
for particle physics, located
just on the French-Swiss
border, outside of Geneva.
I'm a physicist on
the ATLAS experiment.
That's one of four
large experiments
located on the Large Hadron
Collider, or LHC, at CERN.
The Higgs has been there
since the beginning of time,
but we haven't yet had a
device that could see it.
This device will either see
it, or it will rule it out.
Either one would be fantastic.
If we find it, we know
we're on the right path.
This whole model is confirmed,
and we know what to do next.
We know we have to measure
that thing, and that we will--
by measuring that, we
will be able to know
where the next new physics is.
There's still a
lot of questions.
As I mentioned, we
have to-- we have
to answer-- a lot of
questions to answer.
Measuring the Higgs will
help provide some answers.
My degree is in
mathematics, but by the end
of my undergraduate studies,
I'd got my heart set on physics.
I took a couple
classes, and I saw
this is really exciting stuff.
I learned about these strange
worlds of quantum mechanics
and relativity.
And I think what drew me to
the field was the fact that--
not just that there's a lot
of interesting information
out there, but these
people in physics
were learning how to
think differently.
Michelson and Morley were sure
they were going to find a good
measurement and see which
direction the aether was
in, based on our planet
travelling around the sun.
We'd-- either we'd see an
acceleration or a deceleration
at different-- at different
times of the year.
They found nothing.
There's marked in our-- as a
chapter in our physics books
as an extremely
important finding.
They found nothing.
Because of that, Einstein came
up with special relativity,
to answer that question.
So if we don't find it,
somebody else who's brilliant
is going to come along and
say, OK, there's no Higgs.
Let me tell you how
particles get mass.
And they'll do something new.
So either way, this is a--
this is a win-win situation,
building the LHC and
experiments like ATLAS.
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