‘The Universe Speaks in Numbers’ – Interview 4

VAL GIBSON

Val Gibson is a leading experimental particle physicist and is head of the high energy physics research group at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University Cambridge. She is a prominent member of one of the teams of experimenters at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, where the Higgs boson was discovered in 2012. In this interview with Graham, recorded in Trinity College Cambridge last December, Gibson talks candidly about the current state of the physics of elementary particles, the future funding of particle accelerators and the theorists whose ideas stand little or no chance of being testable in her lifetime.

This is the fourth of twenty interviews given by world-class experts to Graham on some of the themes he explores in The Universe Speaks in Numbers. A new interview will be posted weekly.

Among the interviewees are Nima Arkani-Hamed, Michael Atiyah, Ruth Britto, Simon Donaldson, Freeman Dyson, Michael Green, Juan Maldacena, Michaela Massimi, Martin Rees, Simon Schaffer and Lenny Susskind.