Every morning I have to struggle
with getting up.
It's really hard for me,
then there's so much to do.
Yeah just thinking about it,
I want to go back to bed.
(Laughs)
And it continued until a while like this,
until my nephew came along.
He is now 6 and a half,
and he is the same.
And he has never seen me do it, you see.
He has never seen me stick my foot out
to make my mom put on my socks.
And he does the same thing.
So, now guess what my mom thinks,
'Hold on, so it's in the genes! '
How can this be in the genes?
So, she has this idea now that
it's not nurture but nature.
But how can such a weird thing
be coded in the genes?
I still struggle, my nephew struggles.
and to me it is about
I love my dreams, I love dreaming away,
I like that darkness when everything
is possible. Then you come out of that.
There is light, a lot of it.
A lot of beautiful things but a lot of
ugly things too.
Then you think to yourself,
'How do I make this world a better place?'
And this is a struggle everyday and
still a struggle for me.
I am a night person, I really am.
I call this bright grey.
It's a little more than white,
but less than black.
It's something like it's more than kin,
as Shakespeare said, its little more than kin
so it's a little more than genes
but it's less than kind, I wish I didn't
have it, I wish that my nephew
didn't have it either but so it is.
The struggle in my life between
light and darkness continued until,
well it still continues but continued until
when I was at CERN, help build
the Atlas Detector at the Large Hadron Collider
at CERN. I worked underground for 3 years.
I have a lot of sympathy with the mine
workers.
You go underground at 8.00 AM and
you get out 8.00 PM and start again.
There is no sunlight for 3 years.
There was something all of CERN had to do.
Because all the big detectors are underground
you have to build them underground,
you have to cable it, calibrate it.
You have to do all that stuff underground.
And here is me, I think looking pretty tired.
Would you agree? (Laughs)
The way to see some sunlight,
otherwise everybody gets depressed,
is to go skiing.
Because Geneva, turns out that is between
these mountainary that's called
the Jura and the Alps.
Being between those two mountain ranges
you get a lot of clouds that sit on
the city of Geneva and you don't get
the sunlight at all, especially during winter.
So, the best way is to go up,
all the way up to 3000 metres where
there is sunlight no matter what
or there is light more or less.
There are less clouds covered anyways.
To go skiing I had to learn skiing because
that is what everybody does.
That wasn't a choice but I came to love it
I loved the mountains and I absolutely
adored it.
So, here I was in 2005 starting my first
skiing class ever. Our class instructor,
a CERN guy, a very french CERN technician
had no pity on me whatsoever
and we had to follow him,
in the same exact tracks he was going and
he could go anywhere, down a block even
in the first course.
On the fifth lesson, the last lesson,
I had a really bad crash,
I tore my inner lateral ligament on my
left leg. I was taken to Geneva Hospital
where the doctor took one look at
my left leg and left knee and said to me,
'You have extendable joints, you shouldn't
be skiing at all.'
I went through some really painful theraphy
and guess what happened.
Next season, I was back on the slopes
because I loved it.
I had caught the bug as they say.
Three years later, fast forward,
I'm still skiing albeit this knee problem.
My knees are bad, my knees are
biologically bad. It's genes they said.
They said my mom has bad knee genes,
I've got bad knee genes, my nephew has
bad knee genes, I've been told.
But I'm a physicist, I think I know
f = m*a , I know gravity I can fight this out.
There was a day of white-out.
It was a christmas holiday in Geneva and
I came back to Turkey for christmas
and for the weekend with my mom.
My mom doesn't ski but I took her along
anyways just for the hell of it.
She was with me in Kartalkaya.
A white-out is a perfect example of
bright-grey.
It is when it's so bright and there is
so much fog you can't see anything.
Light reflects off of every single
water molecule there is in air
and you just can't see anything.
It's a white-out.
Here I was in the white-out
and I just heard this voice,
I just heard somebody coming from
the back, I was standing on the side
and he just hit me.
Breaking four bones, collapsing my lungs,
having a lot of hemorrhages.
Oh, I shouldn't continue.
I was in the hospital for a while,
let's just say, had some operations.
I couldn't go to work about a month and a half
I couldn't go back to Geneva either.
And I was in a lot of pain,
I couldn't dress myself,
I'm so used to being self sufficient.
I have lived abroad by myself since I was 17.
Not being able to dress myself was just
unbelievable, unthinkable.
I was losing my mind.
The worst thing is, in Geneva you
have to drive.
I lived on the french side and I had to
drive to work.
My biggest fear was that somebody,
the car behind would come and hit me.
So, I couldn't drive, I was just
so stressed about driving.
So I went and saw a psychologist,
and the psychologist said,
'The only was you are gonna beat this
is if you went skiing.'
105 days after the accident. 105 days.
Imagine four broken bones.
I was in a lot of pain but I went skiing
on the last day that the slopes close
13th April 2008 here I am on a glacier
for god sakes, off pist where there is
nobody else. I took my best friend with me
It's a monday, we took the day off
so that there would be nobody because
I'm so scared of somebody hitting me.
I asked him to ski in front of me and
I'm just following him and we went down to
this beautiful glacier, it is called
the Argentière glacier.
I continued skiing, I've been continuing
since, I just go off pist. I just don't go
on pist where somebody can hit me.
You go around the rules a bit.
You find your own way.
You don't always stick the rules.
And I know that is dangerous to ski
off-pist and often forbidden to go off-pist
but so it is.
I go off-pist and I love the mountains
so much that I share it with my students
This is the Mont Blanc, and this is
my research group now from METU.
We were up there in summer and I love
the mountains.
Here is another photo I took at Verbier
I think you can see why I love this,
just breath taking.
I just feel closer to god,
but not just god but the very foundation
why I'm here.
I see everything from above.
There is that white-out you see?
I'm above that white-out,
I feel I'm above that unknown land where
I don't have control over everything.
There is too much information to be
processed and I'm above it all.
I get that feeling and it gives me
goose bumps just saying that to you.
This all ties in really with my work
in a very strange way.
Let's see if I can make that connection for you
So, I spent many years working at
the Large Hadron Collider on an experiment
called Atlas. I think you heard about CERN
For those if you have never seen it before
here is a photo of Large Hadron Collider.
It's a 27 km ring, 100 metres underground
in Geneva. That's the Jura Mountains,
you also can see bit of the airport there.
I also have some extremely good news,
yesterday the new Director General of CERN
was elected. And its going to be a female
for the first time in CERN's history.
It's Fabiola Gianotti.
(Claps)
She is a wonderful person, I hope we will
host her in Turkey in the next few years.
We've hosted the last director general,
so we hope to get this one too.
Well, we've gotten really famous now
with the discovery of the Higgs particle.
Here is Dr. Higgs with his famous equation
that you may or may not be able to
understand and even those people who
claim to understand may not
understand it completely.
What does it look like?
Here is the collision, particles are protons
very very very close to speed of light
collide at the center of Atlas detector
How close to speed of light, you might say
So close to speed of light that's only
a bicycle speed away from the speed of light
Now, how close exactly to speed of light?
Well, imagine you are here now and you go
to Ankara Esenboğa Airport.
If you could go and come back from
Ankara Esenboğa Airport 10.000 times in
one second, that's the speed of light for you.
Now imagine going only a bicycle speed away from it.
There's truly not much difference, is there?
So, you take these two protons,
that are feeling extremely massive,
much more massive than they are at rest.
They feel about 7000 times more heavy
than they would now.
I wouldn't want to be that particle,
would you? I'm quite happy with my weight
Just think of protons feeling 7000 times
more heavy than they are and they collide
head-on with a another one like that.
And then comes e=mc^2 and all that magic
that nature does naturally.
And what happens is you get extra particles
that are created at that moment.
See, what happens is two particles collide
like this, and things come out perpendicular
to it. That's the collision that
we are interested in.
So, here was a particle coming in and
there was a particle going out like this
and they went boom!
This event could be the result of
a Higgs particle which won the Nobel prize
as you know last year.
But,
we face a big white-out in particle physics
Here is the white-out that Im talking about,
there's too much information.
Higgs particle is so rare, you get about
one per hour if you make 40 million
collisions per second.
It's such a rare thing to be produced.
It's a rarity of nature.
Imagine that you have 40 million
collisions per second and you have, in each
collision, the information that you read
from this detector.
That's 150 million bits of information.
If you multiply that, you get a petabyte per second
Now, you may not be familiar with petabyte
but Google stores about 20 petabytes
right now in total.
So you get a Google-worth in 20 seconds.
Not bad.
Or it's a million gigabytes per second.
So in my mind, these thing go hand in hand
My mind is a complete white-out of information
How do you pick the right collision?
How to find that one particle per hour
that comes out of this huge mess.
Well, what we designed something called
a trigger system.
We don't take every single collision there is.
It's a bit like a soccer game when there
are 10 videos pointing at the soccer field
and there is this one guy who actually
picks which video gets streamed out,
it's done all live.
It's a bit like that, we do this live as well
we do have a trigger system which
immediately decides if there is something
interesting. What we do is very simple,
we look whether something went at right
angles to the collision.
If a collision looks like this,
it's not interesting for us.
If it looks like boom, its interesting for us.
Now we only write about 2000 events
per second to disc.
Imagine that reduction.
That's the biggest reduction you can find
in data.
I was in charge of that system for about
four years.
What have I been looking for?
I've been looking for something called
Dark Matter.
This is another example of collisions.
So, what does Dark Matter look like?
Dark Matter is even worse than
the Higgs particle. It's a particle that
you cannot see.
The dark matter particle, there is about
10-200 going through this room by the way
right now and about 300 km per second.
We even know it's speed.
We know how much of the universe is
dark matter, about %25 percent of
the universe is dark matter.
We don't know it's particle nature.
And, what woud it look like in one of
our collisions? It would look like
a particle that wasn't there.
So how do you see a particle that
isn't there?
Well, the wonderful thing is, there is
this thing called 'momentum conservation'.
If you scratch your head back to your
high school books, no never mind :)
Here is another example.
Think about a billard table and the first hit,
you put the balls into this triangle.
Imagine that one of those balls is unseen.
I hit it and they all go in different places
If I add up all of the balls and how they
went, I can notice that something must have
gone that way,
to set all the velocity's additions correct
Imagine a piece that went missing.
You will notice it from the movement of
other ones.
So this is what it looks like.
Generally in a collision like this one,
when you add it all up,
for those of you who remember some of your
high school stuff, when you add up
all the vectors they add to zero.
For those who dont, if I take this blue
thing out it looks like something must
have gone that way but you don't see it.
So, this is what dark matter would have
looked like in our detector.
So we actually designed triggers to look
for certain signatures because there are
140 million collisions per second.
How do you look for something if you
don't know what it looks like?
It's very hard.
So, what we have been doing for the last
four years at the Large Hadron Collider
is we've been killing theories.
Often, what we have to do,
much like in our personal life,
is we have to say;
'No, that won't do, that won't do'
You kill theories, much like you kill
perspective futures.
And then you look at what you got left.
And maybe you'll never get there,
maybe you will.
But it's still better than the white-out.
At least you are looking for something.
Thank you very much.
(Claps)
