Much of the universe remains invisible to us. Ordinary matter, the atoms that make up stars, planets, and ourselves, accounts for only a small fraction of what the universe appears to contain. Dark matter, dark energy, the origin of fundamental particles, and the nature of space itself remain among the deepest unanswered questions in modern physics.

In this episode of the ALLATRA Podcast, we are honored to welcome Dr. Michael Albrow, a distinguished experimental particle physicist with more than six decades of research in high-energy physics. His scientific career has been closely connected with major experiments at CERN and Fermilab, including research that contributed to the study and discovery of fundamental particles. Drawing on this extensive experience, Dr. Albrow takes us into the world of particle physics and explores how scientists investigate some of the most profound questions about matter and the universe, from phenomena that cannot be observed directly to the search for physics beyond what is currently known. 

The conversation explores how physicists detect particles through the traces and effects they leave behind, what observations tell us about dark matter and dark energy, and how experiments continue to search for particles and phenomena beyond what is currently known. Dr. Albrow also discusses cosmic rays and the extreme energies they can reach, some of the remarkable questions raised by quantum physics, and the Higgs field and its role in our understanding of matter. The conversation also explores how artificial intelligence and neural networks are used to analyze the enormous amounts of data produced in particle physics experiments, while highlighting the continuing importance of human curiosity, creativity, and original ideas in scientific discovery. 

In this episode:

🔹 Why ordinary matter represents only a small fraction of the universe

🔹 What dark matter is and how scientists detect evidence of something they cannot see directly

🔹 Dark energy and the mystery of the accelerating universe

🔹 How physicists “see” particles billions or trillions of times smaller than atoms

🔹 The Higgs field and what may remain even in seemingly empty space

🔹 Quantum physics, entanglement, and some of the strange properties of the microscopic world

🔹 The search for new particles and possible connections between ordinary and dark matter

🔹 Cosmic rays as nature’s own high-energy experiments

🔹 How AI and neural networks help scientists search enormous datasets for rare and unexpected signals

🔹 Why human curiosity and creativity remain essential to scientific discovery

🔹 The connection between science, art, symmetry, and our perception of the universe

🔹 What future discoveries could fundamentally change our understanding of the universe

The podcast is hosted on the ALLATRA platform.

This material is for informational and discussion purposes only. The statements, assessments, interpretations, conclusions, and hypotheses contained herein represent the personal views of their authors as of the date of publication and do not constitute an official position of ALLATRA or any other public association, organization, project, partner, affiliated entity, or individual unless explicitly stated otherwise.

Publication of this material is intended to encourage open scientific dialogue and does not in itself imply institutional endorsement, confirmation, or scientific verification of the views expressed. The material should not be interpreted as an official statement, expert opinion, or professional advice. 

Full Podcast Transcript

Dr. Michael Albrow

They can connect things far apart much faster than the speed of light, even almost instantaneously.
Things that seem to influence each other when they're far apart.
It could be something that's outside of our known physics that is actually connecting these brains together.
You can show a film of that and it can run it backwards. You can't tell which direction time is going for.
Although we call it dark matter, it's not really dark. That means like black. It's really invisible matter.
We really want to understand this dark energy question.
We don't know how the universe started.
There's an art to doing science, and there's a science in art.

Narrator (intro)

Dr. Michael Albrow, a distinguished high energy physicist whose career has been closely connected with some of the largest experiments in modern physics, including Fermilab and CERN. In recent years, Dr. Albrow has also explored how experiments at the Large Hadron Collider can help us better understand cosmic rays and the processes they trigger when they interact with Earth's atmosphere.
Dr. Michael Albrow is the author of* Space Times Matter*, a book that turns to some of the deepest questions about space, time, matter, dark energy, black holes, and the origin of the universe.

Valeria Smian

So, Dr. Albrow, we're so happy to have you with us today.

Dr. Michael Albrow

Thank you for having me.

Valeria Smian

Thank you very much. It's so fascinating to discuss your past, and you have a long-time career, and that would be great to really talk about that with you today.
You once described yourself as an astronomy kid who became a particle physicist. When you look back now, does it feel like you moved away from the sky, or that you found a deeper way to study it? What was the first question about the universe that truly captured you?

Dr. Michael Albrow

Right. So I first remember, actually, my parents waking me up when I was about eight years old to see a total eclipse of the moon. And I'd already noticed the moon in the sky and thought, what's that thing doing up there? But then I became really interested when I was about 10 or 11. I know at 10, there was a total eclipse of the sun. It wasn't total where I was, but it was three quarters partial. And that was so exciting.
Have I moved away from it? Well, through my teenage years, yes, I was really keen on astronomy, and I was lucky enough to live not far away from an astronomer called Patrick Moore, who everybody in Britain knew him because he had a TV program, which I didn't see because I was away from home, and we didn't have a TV anyway.
Have I moved away from it? I moved away largely from being an amateur astronomer when I decided — after my physics degree, I had to decide: should I go into astronomy as a profession, or particle physics, which was fascinating to me already then? And I thought, if I do astronomy as a profession, I cannot do particle physics as an amateur. That's not so easy. But if I do particle physics as a profession, I can always enjoy astronomy. I always did. But it didn't stay my main passion through my years. Although, living in cities, the sky was not nearly as clear and beautiful as it was when I was a kid. Even 30 miles from London, you could see the Milky Way with your own eyes.

So when I was a kid, yes, I made a telescope out of an old pair of binoculars by adding another lens to it and making it more powerful. And yes, so I had a mentor who was Patrick Moore, and he lived eight miles away from me, so I could cycle around to his house. He was already writing books of astronomy for kids, like Guide to the Moon and Guide to the Planets. I already had those. But I joined the Junior Astronomical Society, which met in London, and I wanted to go to a meeting in London. I was 13. By train, I had to go by myself. My dad might have let me, but he noticed that the president, Patrick Moore, lived not far away, and called him up and said, would he take me to the meeting? So we met at the railway station, and he took me. And after that, I could go around to his house and look through his 12-inch telescope in the evenings.

And I started a little astronomy club among kids called Langley Green Astronomical Society, which is a rather pretentious name, but it was just half a dozen kids. But so that was that, and I never really moved away from it. Although I don't spend my evenings looking at the sky, but I move far, far, far away in the sense that when I was a kid, I could look at the Andromeda galaxy and other nearby galaxies. But now, as I moved away from it, I look at the whole universe out to the beginning, you know, the very big bang, and see — and now the universe opened up to us with first the Hubble, now the James Webb.

So what I notice more now, actually, than last… most people didn't think about it, but if you thought about it, why would it be dark? Because in every direction you look, your line of sight should hit the surface of a star somewhere, no matter how far away it is. So the whole sky should be as bright as the surface of the sun. It's called a paradox. It's not really a paradox. It just means that the universe is either not infinite, or it's static, or it's expanding. In fact, we know it's expanding now, and maybe it's not infinite either. So this has become more of a passion of trying to understand the dark between the stars. What is there?

And in particle physics, which has been my career — 60 years since I started doing research — we've understood so much about the particles of matter that make us up.

But that's only about 5 % of the stuff in the universe. Cosmologists tell us that there's much more in the universe than the matter we know about, which is only about 5 %, and then you have dark matter and dark energy, which is mysterious — dark energy, mysterious. I have some ideas about that, but it makes up three-quarters of the universe in terms of stuff, and what is it? So for me now, as a particle physicist, this is more exciting thing to find out what it is.
And there's dark matter particles, which we astronomers say that should be out there, because it's got gravity. It holds galaxies together and bends light from distant galaxies — called gravitational lensing. And we think that's probably made of particles we haven't found yet. But what are they? We're looking. We haven't found them. Maybe they're too massive to find, even at the Large Hadron Collider. Or maybe they're just very weakly interacting. In any case, those are mysteries, and I've been, through my career, always motivated by the possibility of finding some new particles, and that's been a part of my story. And that's going to be the story of my next book coming out, about 60 years of research and adventures there, if you like.

I no longer spend a lot of time at a telescope looking at the sky, because, for one thing, the sky is fairly polluted around here — there's too much light around, and you have to go out into the dark. I joined the Dark Sky Association to get out in the dark, and I encourage kids to go out, always get away from the cities and look at the night sky. So amazing when you see it. But unfortunately so many kids in cities have never really seen much in the way of stars, and it's a shame. It's a shame. We should have at least a night a year when all the city lights turn off and you can maybe see the stars, even though the sky is rather polluted around here, unfortunately.

Valeria Smian

Yeah, but that's so amazing, really, to see and understand that basically a kid making a telescope, like, himself, right? That's so amazing, and it's kind of like inspiring, and I'm sure that a lot of young generation might be inspired by such stories too. Not to ignore this inner desire to learn, to see the sky, the space.

Dr. Michael Albrow

Right, right, right. I always want to encourage kids to… I mean, I think most kids, they're interested in the sky and planets and stars and so on.

But when I was 13, I made a sort of discovery. There was a bright comet coming, which was very exciting because I'd never seen a comet. I knew that — I'd been watching for this one as it came around the Sun: Comet Arend-Roland. And I was so excited when I first saw it, and I saw that there was — I knew comets' tails pointed away from the Sun, blown by the solar wind, but this one, it had like a beard in the opposite direction to the tail, which I thought was odd. I drew it in white ink on black paper, and I drew night after night. The next night it was gone, it wasn't there. And it was a very unusual thing to see that, and I sent a note to the journal of the Junior Astronomical Society, and they published that, which was exciting.

The message is that even kids can make a discovery if you know what to look for and see that something unusual — it could be in the sky. You could see a bright fireball or something else. But also, it could be — if you're interested in dinosaurs, fossils, you might find a new fossil, or in plants or insects, whatever, whatever. Even kids can make a discovery if you know what to look for, and you need to be lucky. I was lucky. Okay.

Valeria Smian

Yeah, I remember I was reading that you're always saying that you were always lucky, and you're still lucky. But I think that kind of luck goes always with this inner desire to learn and never stop this desire. So that's why you always can discover more and more and more.

Dr. Michael Albrow

Yeah. You need to be lucky. You can make your own luck in many ways, right? Exactly. And curiosity, and also asking questions. I remember — is it a false memory? — but seeing the moon in the sky when I was a kid: what is that doing up there? Why doesn't it fall down? And so being curious and always asking questions about things. Why don't we float up in the air? Why are we falling down? I think when kids are in the crib or bassinet, and drop their rattle on the floor, and mom picks it up and gives it back to them, they drop it again, drop it time and time again, and they're discovering gravity, right? They're doing an experiment, a physics experiment, and they're just kids.

But somehow, and it's sad, often in teenage years, kids, they get less curious about things. Maybe it's how things are taught at school: you have to learn a lot of stuff and so on. Maybe that's part of it. I don't know, but I've always been interested in education.

And although I was never a school teacher and I was teaching at university for a while, but at Fermilab, where I was working, we had an organization called Fermilab Friends for Science Education. And I joined that and helped set up a program that was in 2005, which was 100 years since Einstein's centenary year. I mean, since 1905, when he had his great ideas about relativity and so on. I set up a challenge: could we get out to 10,000 kids in their schools this year and give them science demos? And we set up some programs, and we actually made it, which was a great satisfaction.

Largely, we made it not just — I mean, we set up several programs, and you could go out to show kids about electricity magnetism experiments, just to show them fun, not to teach them, but to show them the stuff is fun. But one of our staff at Fermilab, he called himself Mr. Freeze, and he did experiments with freezing bananas in liquid nitrogen and smashing them with a hammer and stuff like that. So that was a great show and got to hundreds of kids that way. Exciting curiosity is part of the job, part of the thing, part of the fun.

Valeria Smian

Now, if we talk about your book, how did the idea to write a book, "Space Times Matter", come to you, especially in this format of stories? And maybe you can share your favorite story from that book.

Dr. Michael Albrow

Well, how it came about was actually when I fully retired from Fermilab, which was 10 years ago. I'm still doing physics, but I wanted to write more. And I was actually in the Rotary Club in Naperville, near Chicago. And one of our members was editor of a local paper, and it was a monthly freebie that came out. And they had a column about fashion, about art, about — even a dentist had a local column. "Why don't you have a science column?" Column — every month I could write something. And she said, "Well, we could try that if you don't want paying for it." I said, "I don't want paying for it. I just want to get stories out there." Every month I had a deadline. I had 400 words. Tomorrow, oh, yes, OK. So I got to do that.

Sometimes there was something obviously exciting right then and there in physics. Other times I would write just a general piece. And after six or so years, there were 70, 75 of those. And then she said, "We need more advertising space. Thank you for your contributions, but we won't continue that."

So then I thought, well, I'd like to — people would read them and probably throw the paper away — but I'd like to collect them and put them in a book. And I made it up to 100 with 18 science poems that I got by joining a poetry soiree group and finding out, yes, you can write poems, it's the language, they don't all have to rhyme and meter and so on these days. So that's how the idea of the book came about.

And I was in the Chicago Writers Association. We had meetings there, and there a publisher contacted me, and we thought we'd put that together as 100 Short Stories About the Universe. That was with Fulton Books, and that came out a bit over a year ago, actually, March last year, 100 Short Stories About the Universe. And I call them stories. They're not fiction. They're nonfiction stories.

About favorites — you ask about favorites. Well, it's hard to give a favorite, actually. I don't…

Valeria Smian

I was thinking about that, but…

Dr. Michael Albrow

It depends who I'm talking to. So, a couple of pieces. At the beginning, there's a couple of pieces I call science, non-science, and nonsense. Okay. And the science is physics, chemistry, and some of the things we do. Non-science is all the other things that are important, like music and art and emotions, love. These things are not science themselves. We — chemists may figure out what happens to the brain chemically when you're in love. I don't know. And then the third thing is nonsense, which is things that may look like science but are not. And there's so much nonsense around these days, you can publish anything pretty well. And that's really quite serious, actually, because it becomes hard to tell the difference between truth and falsehood.
So those are two pieces that I think are fairly important to try to encourage people to think about what you see and hear. The fact that it may be in black and white doesn't mean it's true at all — or what you see on TV, or even now in films or internet. So much can be fake, of course, even now with AI producing fake videos. So that's a favorite piece.

A couple of pieces encouraging girls and young women to go into science. Because in my field of particle physics, at the PhD level, only about 22%, 23% are women. And you say, why is that? Why is it not much higher? Because once they decide they're interested in physics, they're just as good as the men are. And I think that change comes about at school, somehow, in teenage years, when girls may be not encouraged to go into hard science, deciding maybe to go into biology or softer sciences like that. So I want to encourage girls and young women to go into physics, because they're talented. We could use it, you know?

So those are some of my pieces. But I don't have a favorite, so just — it's a broad brush, OK, about mostly physics, astronomy, but also the general subjects.

Valeria Smian

Thank you so much for encouraging really women to go to the physics, and actually inspiring kids as well. So when I was reading those stories, I really — when I was reading, I was inspired, and I understand how much is that important. And you can feel, like, your desire when you were writing that, that you are really encouraging people to do that.

Dr. Michael Albrow

Yeah, yeah.

Valeria Smian

Now, if we move a little bit more also about your lectures too. So, you're making a striking point that ordinary matter, like atoms, stars, people, planets, is only a small fraction of what the universe seems to contain. For a non-scientist, that is almost shocking. Are we living in a universe where almost everything important is invisible to us?

Dr. Michael Albrow

No, I think importance is the wrong word, in a sense, because what's so important is life and matter. Now, it's true that of all the stuff in the universe, astronomers, astrophysicists, cosmologists say that all the stuff that we know about in atoms, in stars and planets and gas and dust, all the stuff that we know about and study in physics, it's only about 5%, which sounds terrible, but it's a very important 5%. It's the most complex thing to see. But the fact that dark matter, which is holding galaxies and so on together, is about five times more. I wouldn't say it's more important. It's just five times more, and we want to understand it. And, of course, it's a challenge when we have something that we just don't understand in the physics world. We're driven to try to understand it.
The dark energy is even more. Now, the dark energy — the story there is an interesting story, because Albert Einstein, he, after his relativity, he applied relativity to the universe, but he thought the universe — it might be finite and with no boundaries, like the surface of the Earth is a finite two-dimensional surface with no boundaries. He thought space might be like that. He didn't term… He thought it was — he didn't think it was expanding in the universe. He thought it was just the same yesterday, today and forever. I don't quite know why he thought it was like that, but he did. But his equations said that it was — that was unstable, and it should be contracting or expanding. But because he thought it was neither expanding nor contracting, he added a term in his equations called the cosmological constant. When Edwin Hubble said, "Oh, we see the galaxies rushing away. It's actually expanding," and Einstein said, "Oh, I could have almost predicted that," but he skipped that. He said it was his greatest blunder not to predict the expansion of the universe, or contraction — it could have been either.

What has happened more recently is when astronomers looking at distant galaxies and measuring their distance and their speed away from us found that it seems to be expanding faster and faster, as if the universe is blowing itself apart. So that revived this idea of this cosmological constant of Einstein. But for me, from my point of view, that's just a term in an equation. What does it really mean from the physics point of view? It's the physics… What's the physics of it? Not just the maths. Maths is…. Physics is only using a subset of maths. There's so much mathematics that doesn't have anything to do with physics, if you like.

So the big puzzle is about this dark energy. Is it something very simple, sort of like a term in repulsive gravity? Or is it actually a field filling the universe that, like other physical fields, should have particles that go with it? And this is really a far-out idea, but if it's a field that has particles that go with it, the particles would have very strange properties of being mutually repulsive. In the equations, it turns out that if they have imaginary mass squared, they're repulsive. Now, that's a strange concept. We're used in maths to having imaginary numbers, OK? The square of an imaginary number is a negative number. It's possible that these particles that have negative mass squared, if they do, they travel faster than the speed of light, always faster than the speed of light. They're called tachyons, which is thought of the year I started my PhD, actually, in 64, 65.

There was no evidence for these particles. We've looked for them in experiments, no evidence for them. That doesn't mean they don't exist. It means that if they do exist, they're much lighter than any particle, like electrons or neutrinos even, and they're very weakly interacting. And maybe you should think of them more as just waves than individual particles, like radio waves. They're made of photons, but the photons are such low energy that we think of them just as radio waves, you know. This is a sort of radical idea, that maybe dark energy is a field filling the universe that is — the quanta of the field, or the particles that go with it, are these tachyons.

Now, that would be very interesting, because it means that we can — in fact, that they can connect things far apart much faster than the speed of light, even almost instantaneously, if they've got very low energy. That's not an accepted idea. It's just that some people have been thinking about that.

If there are particles, why should there be just one? There could be more than one. In fact, there could be two or three with different masses. At the very beginning of the universe, when it blew up and became the Big Bang, when it was the size of a soccer ball, that was an exponential expansion of space. It could have been one of these tachyonic fields, and now it's expanding more slowly, but another field. So — and there could even be a third tachyon-type particle that's intermediate mass.

Now, it's a science fiction story to say this could couple to our brains. That's — my physicist colleagues would say, "Stop talking about that. We can't — you know, that's just outside the domain of physics." But there's plenty outside the domain of physics, and once you're retired, you can start thinking about these far-out things without — I'm not paid anymore anyway, so they can't lose my job.

Valeria Smian

Yeah.

I actually really like the way you described, a lot of times, that there are a lot of things that are still unknown for us and still not understandable for us. There is always a space to, of course, learning and understanding, and got the ideas to prove it or not to prove, right? So to understand whether it could be a living idea…

Dr. Michael Albrow

Yeah.

Valeria Smian

And also, so, as you already actually mentioned, right? So you spent your career in experimental physics, and many of the things that we discuss, like dark matter, dark energy, long-lived particles, are really not directly visible. And in modern physics — maybe you can explain more to people what does it actually mean to see something, so they will understand that.

Dr. Michael Albrow

Yeah. Yeah. So, right. So I talk about seeing particles, even though they're billions or trillions of times smaller than atoms. How do we see them? Well, you don't see them directly with your eyes, like I see you or I see this chair. But we can still see them by the effects they make, by the trails they make in many cases.

So a couple of analogies here. You say, have you ever seen a shooting star? You're out at night and you see a shooting star. Actually, it's called a shooting star. You know it's not a star. It's really a meteor. And they're often smaller than grains of sand and 50 kilometers up. But you can still see the trail they make because of the heating of the air as they go through at incredible speeds. But you say you saw the shooting star — you didn't actually see, or even the meteor, you didn't see the meteor. You see the trail it makes.

Even sometimes, you could be outside on a summer day and you see a white line on the sky, and the front is moving, and you know there's an airplane there. I see — I don't see the plane, I see the trail it makes.
And when particles go through material, like through a gas or a liquid, they leave a trail of ions along their path — that is, kicking electrons out of the atoms. And once electrons are kicked out of the atoms along a track, it can be made visible in a bubble chamber. For example, in a bubble — a particle goes through — a charged particle goes through a liquid that's nearly boiling but not quite boiling, but as it goes through the liquid, it deposits enough energy to just make it boil: bubbles along that track. You see a trail of bubbles, you photograph that, and you've got a track. So this is a way you can see those particles.

Now, electrons can do that, even though electrons — they are — well, how small they are, we don't know. They're certainly smaller than a trillionth the size of a proton, for example. Do I mean that, a billionth the size of a proton? The protons themselves are 100,000 times smaller than the atom. The smallest atom is hydrogen. The proton in the middle is 100,000 times smaller than the atom. It's nearly all empty space, the atom, with just an electron waving around that proton.

But now we see particles called quarks that are particles inside the proton. And they are at least 100 million times smaller than the proton. How can we see them? Because we can collide protons together, and these quarks can kick out sideways. The force between them becomes so strong. And they can turn into showers of particles that we can see through the trails of ionization they make in a gas, or in some cases, in liquids, in bubble chambers. So we see them by the trails they make.

Now, seeing is in your mind's eye. It's not with your eyes. But things we can see with our eyes directly are limited to about the wavelength of light. But we can see things much smaller than that by the effects they make.

In my next book, I talk about when I was, I think, 12 or 13 years old, and my dad had — I had a luminous watch. There were radium watches in those days, glowing in the dark. I remember taking one. He gave me or lent me his radium watch. I took it out of the bedclothes at night. And after my eyes had got dark-adapted, I looked with a magnifying glass at this sparkling. And I saw little sparkles. Little sparkles. What are the sparkles? They're actually alpha particles, which are helium nuclei, 100,000 times smaller than the helium atom. But they excite the sulfur, the zinc sulfide, in the luminous paint. I'm seeing alpha particles with my own eyes. And you can still get spinthariscope toys to see those.

So these are ways in which we can see things that are much, much smaller than you can see directly with your eye by the effects they make.

It's always an amplification. They ionize atoms, many of them, for example. So this amplification process enables us to see these things that are incredibly small. And in my book, I talk about how even going smaller and smaller and smaller than quarks, down to maybe the ultimate smallness, which is a so-called Planck scale. That's another story.
But so when we do these experiments, like at CERN, the Large Hadron Collider, colliding protons on each other, and a billion collisions a second are happening there. And we record them electronically and so on. We also sometimes take pictures of the collisions, and we see pictures of the tracks coming flying out. We've reconstructed those tracks from what we have in the computer, but still you can see them. Wow.

And these bubble chambers — I've mentioned bubble chambers — and they used to take thousands of millions of pictures of these bubble tracks in bubble chambers. And I never myself used them in my research, but at CERN there was a big bubble chamber called Gargamelle, and I'd walk by the building, and you could hear it going bang every so often, and bang.
And I went in there, and there's the operators there. I said, "Can you see inside that thing?" They said, "Yes, there's a little porthole." You can go and lift up the lid and look inside, and it's all dark. And suddenly there's a bang and a flash of light, and you see the white tracks that they photographed there. And to see that in real time, that was really cool, to see that. Although hundreds of physicists analyzed those photographs, they did that in the lab. Did they actually go and look in the thing when it was operating and see it for real time, you know? That's more exciting, right?

Valeria Smian

It is.

Dr. Michael Albrow

Yeah.

Valeria Smian

That's amazing. Thank you so much for drawing those pictures, because when you explain it, you truly can see that, right? I'm so excited. Also, I wanted to ask you also about the lecture, one of your lectures. The most fascinating part of your lecture is the idea that even if we remove atoms, radiation, and gravity as much as possible, space would still not be nothing.

Dr. Michael Albrow

Yeah.

Valeria Smian

What is left when we remove everything normally we call matter?

Dr. Michael Albrow

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like a long way down. So I imagine a little cube like a grain of sand, the size of a grain of sand, and there's trillions of atoms in there, but you can imagine taking them all out and getting rid of all the atoms and trying to make an empty box. Is it empty?
Well, for one thing, it's not empty, because all material that has a temperature above absolute zero radiates microwaves. You can exclude them by making the box really cold, but you've still got a gravitational field in there. Well, you can take it into space and let it float around space, and that gets rid of the gravitational field in there. And then you still have particles coming through, like neutrinos: there are trillions of neutrinos coming through our little finger every second from the sun. But if you make this box very, very small, then there's periods when there won't be a neutrino in there. What is left in there? There's still something in there.

There are two fields that we know would be still in there. One is called the Higgs field. And this was really — several theorists were wondering how particles get their mass, in particular the carriers of the weak force, called the W and Z bosons. Theoretically, initially, they should have zero mass, but they get a mass by what's called symmetry breaking. Now, there's a mechanism they devised, with a field filling the universe, that gives particles their mass as they plow through the field. Professor Higgs said — well, first he submitted a paper, as others did, about this idea, and the paper he submitted was rejected by the journal. And he looked at it again, and then he realized that if this field exists, there should be a particle that goes with it, like the photon is a particle of the electromagnetic field. And so he resubmitted it. Anyway, that was published. But that's why it's called the Higgs boson field.
And it took us until 2012 to find this particle. That was very exciting, to find it. But that shows that there is a field through the universe that seems to be uniform everywhere. If you ask, how come the electrons in your little finger have the same mass as an electron in the Andromeda galaxy, even though they could be created together with a positron out of pure photons — that's the field. So that you can't get rid of, but it's very low density, so there's not much in there.

And then there's this famous dark energy. If that is a field, and not just a number in an equation like Einstein put in there, then that field is everywhere, and you can't get rid of it from a little tiny box that's in there. So those two fields — you can't see how you could possibly get rid of them.
Now that, I should say — that dark energy field, which people suppose it's uniform and constant, not changing with time, but that's an assumption. It could actually be non-uniform. It could be changing with time. I think it probably is changing with time. I think it's going to die away in the far future, because as it is, it's expanding the universe faster and faster, and that means the universe would have an infinite future that's nearly empty, and I don't believe that anything in physics can be infinite. That's the realm of mathematics. But this is again not established science, but I think that….it's likely that the dark energy will eventually fade away. The science now, that it is changing with time — that's not established. But if it fades away on the time scale I'm talking about, it's 10 to 30 years or more. It's not happening as we speak, really, noticeably. So yeah, anyway, the dark energy field and the Higgs field should be unavoidably in any little piece of space, no matter how small it is.

Valeria Smian

And now, if we talk about the dark matter — so, for most people, dark matter sounds like some mysterious, invisible substance filling the universe. But if you had to explain for a non-scientist what it really is — if you can explain it, like, with a very, probably, simple language: not a thing that we found, but a set of observations that don't add up without it — how would you describe it? And among those observations, which one do you find the most persuasive?

Dr. Michael Albrow

First, I would like to say that although we call it dark matter, it's not really dark. That means like black. It's really invisible matter. It's something invisible. And that means it doesn't interact with electromagnetic waves. Neutrinos are like that too. But there aren't enough neutrinos in space to account for the gravitational attraction that dark matter seems to have.

So initially, the idea that there's more matter in the universe than we can account for in stars and gas and dust, planets — a small fraction of that — even black holes, although we're finding more and more black holes, so that's another issue. That came about because when you look in — astronomers look and see a cluster of galaxies, and Zwicky, actually, way back — I think it was even in the 30s, I'm not sure about that — but he looked at how these galaxies are flying around and realized that they should have all flown apart if there hadn't been more matter in there holding them together by gravity. He called it "dunkle materie" in German, and called it dark matter, but I'd say it's not dark.
And then Vera Rubin, and she studied the rotation curves of galaxies, like the Andromeda galaxy. And you can look at a galaxy like that — how do you measure its rotation? Well, the stars that are coming towards you have the light shifted slightly to the blue, and going away, slightly to the red. It's called a Doppler shift, right? And its analogy is when you're standing on a railway station, a train comes by and goes [imitates the sound of a fast train], or a car goes by [imitates the sound of a fast car], high pitch - low pitch.
So she measured the stars on the right and left side of the Andromeda galaxy, and she measured that one's coming towards you on one side, away from the other — galaxy is rotating. From the rotation curves that she measured, there had to be more matter in holding them together, or they would have flown apart. She's given most credit for discovering this dark matter. But there are many others, and it's pretty convincing. Some people have tried to say, well, maybe the force of gravity is not behaving the way we thought it was, or Einstein thought it was. Very much accepted now.
We think there must be matter there. It's got gravity, but it doesn't interact with light. Now I say neutrinos are like that, but they're not enough, apparently, to do this. So there's something else.

This dark matter, it could interact — it may not interact with matter we know, like protons and electrons and atoms, at all, only gravitationally. And that would make it very hard to find out what it's made of. We're hoping that it does interact with particles we know, like protons, and can be made in proton collisions then, if they have enough energy. But these particles are very massive, say more than a few thousand times the mass of a proton, we wouldn't have enough energy to create them, even at the Large Hadron Collider. And people wonder if even a high-energy machine would find them.
Another possibility, which is more attractive to many of us, is that they do interact. They're light enough to interact. They're light enough to be produced at the Large Hadron Collider. But they interact only weakly with normal matter particles, like neutrinos do, for example.

So I've been working in recent years on a proposal to look for these dark matter particles. A dark matter particle is stable because it's been around in the universe for so long. But there could be so-called portals, or particles that connect normal matter particles like protons to dark matter particles. And they could be produced at the Large Hadron Collider, and weakly interacting, so they could travel through many meters of iron without interacting and then come out the back and decay back to normal matter particles. So they're called portals. 

Theorists are very inventive. They think up many possible portals, including something called a dark photon. Dark photon — what does that mean? That sounds a strange thing. Photons aren't usually dark and bright.
But a dark photon is a particle. It's like a photon in its spin and so on, and no electric charge. But it's got a mass, and it couples very weakly. So that's one possibility. Another is that there's another Higgs boson-type particle, which is lighter than the Higgs boson that we found. Another one there that could be a portal to the dark side. So there are many experiments going on, a whole industry looking for the signs of these particles being produced. And that would be exciting because it's a gateway, a portal to the dark side of the universe, the dark side of the particle.

So we still don't know. The idea that gravity is modified is not very popular. It's possible that they don't have any interactions with the particles that we know at all. And then, as I say, we'd really be in the dark. We wouldn't know what it is. But hopefully we can discover these particles that connect to dark matter.

If they don't couple to normal matter particles at all, then you can imagine these dark planets flying around in the universe that we couldn't see except through gravity. You can look and see if you see any sign that a planet made of dark matter can pass in front of a star and change — you could see it by the gravitational effect. But of course astronomers look for things like that; so far, no evidence for that. This is a frontier, right? And all frontiers are exciting to look for.

Valeria Smian

Yeah. And if we talk about dark energy, dark energy is often described as the most mysterious part of the universe. You said very honestly that we do not really know what it is. What would count as a breakthrough here? Would it be more shocking to discover that dark energy is constant, or that it changes with time and space?

Dr. Michael Albrow

The end of your question, about could it be changing with time and space — I think it could, and that wouldn't be incredibly shocking to me if it did. It's assumed to be pretty uniform, but you can imagine that it's not completely uniform, that even you could have waves in the dark energy somehow, if there's a field that could — it could have waves in it, maybe. Maybe impossible to detect such weak things, I don't know.

Where I think is a very interesting frontier is in the level of thing called entanglement. You may have heard about entanglement, right? So this is a strange behavior in quantum physics of things that seem to influence each other when they're far apart and could not be communicating at a speed of light or less. So this is always what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance". 

And it does seem that even though special relativity forbids — assuming it's true, which we believe is true — forbids particles with matter that could be brought to rest from traveling faster than the speed of light, or even at the speed of light, because that would require infinite energy. And I say infinite energy is not a physical thing. I don't think we can have that. But the idea that some things that are not made of normal matter particles can be communicating in some sort of sense, or influencing things that are far apart — that would be a really exciting progress, development, to do that. And I don't say that we could send spaceships faster than the speed of light or anything like that that has matter. But the idea that influences could be so-called superluminal is something that is — well, this is the area of things that are entangled.

So you can take a particle, for example, a particle with a neutral pion, in this case, two gamma rays. The two gamma rays fly off in opposite directions at the speed of light. They have a spin or a polarization. And you could have two detectors that are thousands of miles apart, and if the one over here detects that the spin is up, the other one will find that its spin is down. But if you change the orientation of the polarimeter so that it's 45 degrees to the right, this one's going to be 45 degrees down to the left. And it seems that one knows what the other one's doing, which is weird. It's weird. John Bell is a brilliant physicist at CERN. He made a theorem that could demonstrate that it really does happen faster than the speed of light. So something is going on there.

And you're getting into the realm of science fiction to be able to communicate somehow feelings faster than the speed of light. I mean, people have been trying to do telepathy experiments and so on, but they never seem to work out very well. But you do wonder that physics is limited in what we can study, and when it comes to the field of emotions, human emotions, and things like that, feelings. But you know, when you have a big crowd on a football match, people get really so emotionally connected to each other. Maybe not just what they see and hear — and, in fact, smell, if you like — could be something that's outside of our known physics that is actually connecting these brains together, or the feelings together.

And so this is the sort of thing — if I talk about it, my physicist colleagues would say, "Shut up and do something else," you know. But I can think about these things, and maybe you can think of forces of good and evil. It's outside the realm of physics, but it's inside the realm of humanity. So we should be more broad in what…. Now that I'm not paid anymore, I can afford to be thinking outside the box now.

Valeria Smian

Thinking outside the box, yeah… If we talk about time, so many people think of time as a river moving from the past to the future, but physics often treats time as — in a stranger way, let's say, right? So after a lifetime in particle physics and cosmology, do you think time is something fundamental, or something that may emerge from a deeper structure we do not yet understand?

Dr. Michael Albrow

That's a very deep question, obviously. So I think that there are different forms of time. There's a time that we know and love: we remember yesterday, we don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. That is, I think, distinct from the time of fundamental particles.

Now, when I talk about fundamental particles, let me distinguish, on the one hand, the simplest particles that we know: electrons, positrons, and photons. So positrons are like positively charged electrons, the antimatter particle electron. By the way, they have a practical application when you have a PET scan — it's P is positron, whatever. If you had a universe only of electromagnetic interactions — gravity too — with electrons, positrons, and photons, then you can show a film of that and it can run it backwards. Time goes both ways. You can't tell which direction time's going for. It's distinct from the time that we know, which is based on complexity.

In particle physics, there's the weak interaction. And it was found that the weak interaction, which is responsible for some radioactive decays and takes place on a scale smaller than protons, that doesn't — it violates time symmetry. In other words, you can show a process of weakly interacting particles, and you can tell whether time is going in one direction or the other. It doesn't — it's not time reversal invariant like electromagnetism is. And I think that these are distinct forms of time, if you like.

Now, we believe that the weak interaction was not there at the very, very beginning of the universe. It came about by a symmetry breaking during the Big Bang. When that came about, it gave rise to lots of so-called broken symmetry; it's giving rise to the masses, different masses of the particles. It gave rise to the weak force through this Higgs mechanism I mentioned before. It's the weak interaction that violates this time reversal. And that is, in a way, responsible for the complexity in our universe.

Let me give an example here. Think about protons and neutrons. Protons and neutrons, they're almost the same, except the neutron has got no electric charge, as a proton's got an electric charge. The neutron is slightly bit heavier than the proton. So, not much, but enough more massive that it can decay, and will decay, to protons, left alone — proton and electron to carry away the charge, and then neutrino. The reason why the neutron is a bit heavier than the proton — well, first, the result is very important, because if it was the other way around, protons would decay to neutrons and there'd be no hydrogen, right? No atoms. And that would mean probably no life.

But — and why is the neutron heavier than the proton? It's only because these — both basically have three quarks inside them. These quarks — and the two types, called up and down, just funny names — but the proton's got two up quarks and one down quark, and the neutron's two down and one up. So the difference is that a neutron has a down quark, whereas a proton has an up quark, and the down quark is a tiny bit more massive than the up quark. And that's — why is that? Nobody knows why it is. It's an — it's arbitrary symmetry breaking, and that came about when the weak interaction came into existence. And the neutron decays by the weak interaction, by the way. And it seems like a random thing, and I call it one of the miracles of physics that allow us to exist, allow life to be here. And there are other miracles too, like how the universe got to be so, so big without blowing itself apart completely.
So what I'm saying, I think, coming back to the question about time: time is mysterious, but there are different times for fundamental particles and for us. And a scrambled egg doesn't unscramble itself and become — you can tell which direction that time is going.
And of course, Einstein sort of unified space and time, so together with Minkowski, three dimensions of space and one dimension of time. This is our four-dimensional so-called space-time. Now, when Einstein said maybe space is three dimensions of space that's closed and finite, he didn't say maybe time is closed and finite as well. But that's what I think could be the case. So time is a closed loop. And that's another form of time. Time is one of the most mysterious things. And how much time do we have for this talk?

Valeria Smian

Yeah, thank you so much for sharing. Now we also talk about the glueballs. So one of the most poetic ideas connected with your work is the glueball, a particle made not of quarks, not of electrons, but essentially of gluons, of the carriers of the strong force. So for a general audience, what would it mean to discover a particle made only of force? Why would that be so profound?

Dr. Michael Albrow

Well, for the general public, you wouldn't know anything about that. I mean, for a physicist, it's an interesting new class of particles, because when the atom is broken apart to the nucleus, which is protons and neutrons and strongly interacting particles made of three quarks bound together, they're bound together by exchanging quanta of the strong force, which are called gluons, analogous to photons, which are quanta of the electromagnetic force. And finding the photon was, of course, very critical for understanding electromagnetic force. As a physicist, the idea that glueballs could exist as independent particles that are made out of gluons stuck together by the strong force — they do interact with each other.

And Gell-Mann and Fritzsch, who invented quarks, later they thought they stuck together by exchanging these gluons, and maybe you could have a particle made of gluons without any quarks. The light— and there could be a whole series of those glueballs, so-called. And the lightest ones, if they're really light, they could be almost stable now, and then that would have all sorts of implications. Are they in dark matter or whatever they are? But we've looked for them, and they clearly are not very light.
In fact, I was fascinated by the idea. The lightest glueball, it could be popping out of the vacuum because it doesn't have any electric charge. It has the quantum numbers. It has no spin. The lightest one has no spin, no charge. It's just like a little excited piece of vacuum. So the vacuum could be full of these glueballs popping into and out of existence. So that was really fascinating.

And I've been looking for them since…way, way back, more than 40 years ago. And we haven't found them below the proton mass, which is a unit 1 GeV. So, if they do exist, they should be heavier than that, and then it becomes very complicated, because a glueball, let's say two gluons bound together and orbiting, they can convert into a quark-antiquark pair, which is a well-known type of particle called a meson. So, in other words, because they're not so light, they mix with these mesons. And it's like, if you could see one there, it's a pair of gluons stuck together, but then it immediately flickers into a quark-antiquark and then back. So we now think that there are probably three of the glueball states, but they're mixing together with quark-antiquark states, which makes it very complicated.
And basically, the strong interaction, when you get down to these low-mass things, is so complicated and difficult to make calculations that a lot of theorists go away from that. It's sort of messy. As an experimenter, it's very fascinating to look for those things. It became unfashionable, theoretically, to study these things. But we have good evidence now. There are no pure glueballs, no state made only of gluons, because they immediately can convert to a quark-antiquark pair and then back to gluons. And it's like flickering into and out of existence, a meson — a glueball, a meson — a glueball. So it's still fascinating, but it's complicated and interesting for physicists, because it tells you about the strong interaction between these quarks and gluons, but the general public don't need to care about it too much.

Valeria Smian

Now, if we talk about the cosmic rays. Cosmic rays are nature's own high-energy experiment, but we still struggle to understand the most energetic ones. What is the biggest unknown today? Where do they come from? How are they accelerated? Or what exactly happens when they hit the atmosphere?

Dr. Michael Albrow

So, like three questions, really? I mean, first: where do they come from?

Valeria Smian

Yeah.

Dr. Michael Albrow

Well, the sky.

Valeria Smian

What is the biggest unknown, let's say, from these three parts?

Dr. Michael Albrow

One thing fascinating for me is the interactions when they hit the atmosphere. So they come through space, and they hit the top of the atmosphere, and they start interacting. The energy is converted into new particles that makes a shower of particles, a cascade, if you like. These energies are thousands of times higher than the energies we can make in the highest energy accelerator we have, the Large Hadron Collider, right? Even though that collides protons head on, which gives you a lot more bang for your buck, these particles still have much more energy. It's possible that there are new phenomena that come in, maybe new particles come in, that are being produced in these showers in the atmosphere, we haven't detected at the Large Hadron Collider or the low energy machines because they're too massive.
There have been some so-called anomalies, strange things like, for example, a particle called a muon, which is like a heavy version of the electron. There's evidence that there are more muons than we expect. But what do we expect? We expect them based on models or simulations of particle collisions that we test at the Large Hadron Collider. Now, maybe those models don't apply with much higher energies because there's new physics coming in. If there's new physics coming in, new particles, that would be really exciting.

But the difficulty is, of course, that we can't — these very high energy collisions, they're very rare. The ones at the top energy of this end of the spectrum, that you have something like, at the very top end, one per square kilometer per century, OK? How on earth could we detect those?
Well, you make a detector that's 1,000 square kilometers, which is actually not so much, but a cosmic ray project that reaches the highest energies is called the Auger Observatory, started by Jim Cronin, who, by the way, was part of discovering that time goes not forward and backwards in weak interactions. So he said, these showers, they spread over so many square kilometers of the ground that we could detect them by putting a water tank every kilometer, and 1,300 water tanks around a desert, three times the area of the city of Chicago. And they've detected cosmic rays at the top energy of the spectrum.

Now, there's actually a cutoff in the energy, because when these cosmic rays have such high energy, say they're protons or nuclei — the space is full of microwaves from the Big Bang. And when you come through this microwave bath, the microwave photons get blue-shifted, or more energetic to you, until they become like gamma rays to you, and that enables particles to be produced. Okay, this makes a cutoff in the spectrum called the GZK cutoff. There's some energy which is something like a trillion times higher than the LHC energy, but anyway, and we've seen that cutoff. So that's an upper limit. If we see cosmic rays coming from above that, they're local.

I'm sort of rambling on a bit about it, but where they come from — they obviously come from extremely energetic things in the sky, and they could be from interactions with pulsars and black holes, really energetic phenomena. But it's very hard to pin them down, because as charged particles, protons or nuclei, they come through the magnetic field in the galaxies, and that bends their paths around. So they no longer seem to come straight from their origin. Now, the most energetic ones do have — they come straight enough through the magnetic fields in the galaxy that you can see a bright spot. And they've seen a cluster of cosmic rays coming from the direction of a distant galaxy. But they can't pin it down completely, because resolution is like the size of the full moon on the sky. That's about as fine positioning as we can get.

It's clear there's something very energetic going on there in the sky, and to produce these things — and how can they get such high energies? It's very complicated. You have moving magnetic fields. 

So say you had two pulsars. A pulsar is a star that's collapsed down to be about one or two kilometers in size with the mass of the sun.

And they're spinning very fast. So they're pulsing. They were discovered, actually, by a young woman astronomer — discovered these pulsars. Say you have two pulsars in orbit, then you have the extremely high energy magnetic fields that could accelerate particles. These are incredible energies. I'm not saying that is how it happens. It's one of the possibilities. So this is extreme physics.

And it's so interesting for me, having started my science life in astronomy, to have astronomy coming back to particle physics in this way. And I was part of this Auger project for a while. And that was exciting to be part of that project, doing astronomy with cosmic rays. 

And now, by the way, we used to do astronomy just with electromagnetic rays, right? With our eyes, and then radio and X-rays and gamma rays. And now we do it with neutrinos and gravitational waves. These are new astronomies opened up. And I give talks about the new astronomies: gravitational wave astronomy, cosmic ray astronomy, neutrino astronomy. We've seen neutrinos coming from supernova. A great project — a cubic kilometre of ice in the south, in the Antarctica, instrumented to see the neutrino interactions.

And anyway, coming back to science and music, which we haven't got to yet — but I'm hoping that we can get some science films about gravitational wave astronomy and neutrino astronomy synchronised with music. That's another sort of side project that I'm involved with a little bit.

Valeria Smian

Now let’s talk also about that most searches for new particles assume whatever is created will decay almost immediately, right at the collision point. But what if long-lived particles are produced that travel a measurable distance through the detector before leaving a signal, like a delayed reaction rather than the instant one? Is it possible that such particles have already appeared in past experiments, but the detectors simply were not designed to notice something that takes its time to show up? What are your thoughts on that?

Dr. Michael Albrow

We've known about so-called long-lived particles for some time — the particles like the K0 meson or pi mesons that can travel many, many meters before decaying. All the ones we know that do that would interact very strongly with material, and so they wouldn't get through a wall of iron, for example. The only particles we know that would get through many meters of iron are the neutrinos that penetrate so much. But they're so light, they can't decay to any other particles. 

So the class of particles I'm hoping to look for have the properties of being long-lived, to travel tens of meters or hundreds of meters, but still penetrate through lots of iron, and then decay, because they're not dark matter that live forever. They decay because they are portals to the dark side. So they would decay back.

Now, that's a whole class of particles that we have not found. They may or may not exist. Through my career, I've been hoping to look for particles that may or may not exist, and some of them I found, like a part of finding the top quark and the Higgs boson. It's possible. Whether they do exist or not, we don't know, of course. But we have to look, we have to look, and that would be exciting to find them. That'd be great to find such particles, because they're connecting normal matter particles to dark matter particles, and they're a whole new class.

Theorists have plenty of ideas about what there may be. Theory is a very different subject in a way, because they are deep into mathematics. But many theorists spend their lives thinking about some idea that could be completely wrong, nothing to do with it.

Now, experimenters can't be wrong. Well, there are so many checks and balances that when you publish an experimental paper, it's pretty well right — it better be right. A few get published that are wrong, but they have to get corrected, because science is self-correcting. That's why we have to have…

Valeria Smian

Part of the process…

Dr. Michael Albrow

Yeah, it's the process, how it advances. And people have all sorts of ideas. If you're a theorist, you may… and many theorists have been working all their lives on particles called supersymmetry. It's a beautiful idea. Maybe it's right, but there's no evidence for it. You know, retire and even die without knowing if they've been wasting their time… well, not “wasting their time,” but doing something that is not part of the real world. It may be part of another universe somewhere, but not in our universe. Maybe, I don't know.

Valeria Smian

Now, we moved a little bit to the AI topic. So you're basically the one who lived through the enormous changes in experimental physics, from earlier collider experiments to CMS, and from human pattern recognition to huge data systems.

Now AI is starting to play a role in scientific research. In your field, what do you think AI will change most? The speed of analyzing data, the ability to spot rare signals, probably, that humans might miss, or something else entirely?

Dr. Michael Albrow

We've used AI in neural networks and so on for decades, actually, in particle physics, and I've never been in love with it, really, because I think of like a black box, and you feed all these things in and out come answers, and it may be obscure. But we use these tools, and they become more and more sophisticated. A lot, using them as tools a lot. We produce every second, when the Large Hadron Collider is operating, producing billions of collisions. We have to filter out this tiny fraction that we think are most interesting. And that's all done while using sophisticated so-called neural networks and so on.

AI — you can start to throw some events at some AI machine and say, "Can you see anomalous things here that we don't expect?" An analogy would be in astronomy, when you look: James Webb takes pictures with thousands of galaxy-like objects, and you can ask AI... You can have people looking at them, seeing if they see anomalous things that they don't expect. But now you can throw it to AI, and AI can say, "This one doesn't look like anything we've seen before." It sort of takes a lot of the fun out of it, I think, in a way. But such things happen.
More happening in our experiments, we use computer-assisted pattern recognition things, which is sort of like AI in many ways. In a way, humans still have to produce the sort of original ideas. AI, it's like looking in the whole library, reading all the physics papers. So I can ask AI, "What was the history? What's the history of the mass measurements of a certain particle or something?" Instead of having to go back and look in my books in my library, it would do it for me. It makes it very easy to do things like that.

I don't think AI is going to come up with a new original theory, but it can go through all the books published, all the papers published. I mean, I was surprised that after my previous book came out, I can ask ChatGPT about all theory of tachyons and dark energy, and it comes up, because it's — I say it's read my book. It's just fed in. It's not got original ideas in it. I hope always the human mind, the creativity of your mind, will be critical here. When you ask it to — I could say, "Okay, let me design a device to produce energy out of this particular nuclear reaction," and it'll do a fair job of that. One has to check, because it can make mistakes, but it's getting fewer and fewer mistakes, I think.

I don't know what the future's going to bring. And it's going to change some people's jobs much more than it's going to change a physics researcher's jobs, I think. Accountancy or something like that can be more readily handled by computers.

I remember the first computer I saw when I was a graduate student. I never saw one when I was a kid. We didn't have them. Even through my undergraduate days, no computers. Only when I started my PhD, we had a computer — wow — and it was the size of a big refrigerator. And you programmed it with punch paper tape or with putting in an octal number on switches. Now everybody's got one in their pocket, right?
But I sort of have this science fiction idea that we have all life on Earth, that's a biosphere. And there's all the electronic life, the World Wide Web, internet, all connected, and this is a future conflict between us and them. We can't let them take over completely. I'm not an expert on that, but…

Valeria Smian

Dr. Albrow, beyond your experimental work, you have also collaborated with artists on projects exploring symmetry, broken symmetry, order, and chaos. Tell us more about this interaction. What drew you to this field, and what scientific ideas lie behind it?

Dr. Michael Albrow

Yes, yes. So what really got me focusing more on this is we had an artist, Chandrasekar, she's an Indian artist, brought up in India in a scientific family, and she had an exhibition at Fermilab. We had moving, rotating art exhibitions there, and she gave a colloquium about how it was inspired by science topics, like by space and time and the Big Bang and black holes. And I loved her art as abstract, but inspired by science. So I said — oh, I took her to dinner with her husband. And I said, look, you should have a coffee table book of your art. It's really beautiful. And she hadn't done that. I said, well, if you ever think about doing that, please, can I write about the science behind your inspiration? And so she said, I said, well, that could be a good idea. Then COVID happened, and everything didn't happen.

And then afterwards, she called me up, and she said she'd been invited to do an exhibition at the American University, the Katzen gallery here in D.C., in Georgetown. And could I remember and write a bit about the science? So that worked out. We had an exhibition there with 24 pieces of her art and my science writing to go with each one. So I didn't try and use science to describe her art at all, but when she has a piece, ["Black Hole"], and I write a bit about black holes. And then we had a subset of that at the Cosmos Club in DC, and then the Kennedy Center, and the Reach at the Kennedy Center, and then we had another one at the Athenaeum. And now the latest one is at the National Academy of Sciences here. It's actually closing there this coming weekend. It's been there for a few months with 18 pieces of her art — more art — and mostly my science poetry goes with it.
And it's worked out a very nice collaboration, so there'll be more in the future, I think. She's very prolific. I don't know how she does so much amazing stuff. That's been a nice collaboration. So there are six exhibitions so far together. And I think now at the American University, we published a catalogue of those pieces. It soon sold out and printed more, and they sold out, because I think people go and they love the art, but they don't have time to read about the science bits. So they take it away. Anyway, I'd like us to put together a bigger collection. That's another project.

But then the science of music. It’s another thing, right? I never was a musician or played. I just loved classical music, and I was at a concert in Chicago of the Holst Planet Suite, with other big-screen videos of the planets in motion, done synchronized with the music in a beautiful way. And that was exciting. And by chance, I met one of the founders of that organization, called KV 265, which is a catalog of a number of pieces of music by Mozart, the tune of which is "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star". So that was appropriate for an astronomy video, right? They have now reached over half a million people in concerts around the world with science on a big screen. And it could be about… some of it astronomy, some of it… water… or science films. And José Francisco Salgado, who was an astronomer at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, and he left and became a full-time videographer. But he goes around and he gives talks about the science that goes with the concerts. So I've been associated with them, hoping that we will be able to put together some films about — short films, maybe 12 minutes — about gravitational wave astronomy and black holes merging and so on, synchronized with music.

And recently in Baltimore, at the Baltimore Symphony, there was a series of five concerts for kids — school kids, actually. There were about a thousand kids at each one of these concerts, and it's probably the first time they were exposed to symphony music, but they're on a big screen with their science films. So bringing together science to concert audiences in that cool way, that's really fun.

Valeria Smian

So yeah, it's really really inspiring, and I think we should have more (

Dr. Michael Albrow

Yeah) such things. And what motivates you to do this work, like combining this science and art? And also, what do you think, in music, how people experience the invisible world of particles, or how do you see that? How do you envision it, and how you feel that?

So, we have this different domain. I mean, especially physics, which is a very — think objective things, we measure things. But so many physicists especially have been really strongly into music. And it's somehow – it's a different part of the brain – but somehow there's some sort of synchronicity. I mean, you know, Einstein played the violin, and he was a very good violinist. Fabiola Gianotti, who was the Director-General of CERN — she was quite a good pianist. Many physicists love music. Why it is — I mean, it's somehow different sides of your brain working together, and art as well.

I see so much of art as science in art. I mean, bubble chamber pictures, they're art. Actually, you can look at anything with an artist's eye, if you like, and see things, like you look at plants. I mean, I'm not a biologist, but plants are beautiful. There's a lot of science behind that, too. It's an interesting sort of equilibrium, balance between this — science and art. There's an art to science, if you like; there's an art to doing science, and there's a science in art. And how deep the connection is — it's interesting. That's getting into psychology, how the brain works, consciousness. Consciousness — the hard problem is consciousness. But there's never any conflict; there's a synergy, synchronicity somehow, between science and art and music.

A lot of science is very beautiful, people say. You can have quite a… some theories could have some sort of beauty to them. It's almost artistic beauty to some of the theories. And ugly, ugly theories don't tend to make it. Although I must say, there's a beautiful theory called… that Fred Hoyle had about space and time being the same at all times, in all places. It's called “the perfect cosmological principle”. It was a beautiful idea, but it just wasn't correct, because we found that the universe is expanding, and so he had to give up his idea. That's how science works. Even if you think it's a beautiful idea – but the reality is probably even more beautiful, if you find the beauty in things.

Valeria Smian

That is very interesting, and I… So, Dr. Albrow, it's really a great pleasure to hear about your past. And really, you went through a lot of things through years of your career.
And after decades at the frontier, after the top quark, the Higgs era, diffraction, forward physics, dark matter searches, what still gives you the feeling of wonder? What question keeps science alive for you personally?

Dr. Michael Albrow

So many. I mean, one wonders so much about things like the world of the quantum. Okay. So what are electrons? Are they waves? Are they particles? What are photons? Waves and particles? There's something wonderfully mysterious about that, in a way. I think that we can't really get our minds around this because it's such a different level, in a way.
I mean, there's a famous experiment called Young's slit experiment, where you send light through two slits and it makes an interference pattern on the screen behind it, like that. And then you can turn the light intensity down. And Einstein showed that, among others, that light behaves sometimes in particles. Ask the question: which slit did the particle go through? It's not a particle when it's going through the slits. It's a wave. The wave goes through. It's a particle when it's created or detected. You have a lamp and it emits particles of photons. They're particles when they're emitted. You may detect them on a screen or a photographic plate meters away. And when you detect it, it's a particle. But in between, just think of it as a wave. It's a wave that goes through both slits and interferes with itself.

But this is a mysterious thing, right? And the wave can take a path that is longer than the path directly from the source to the detector. Feynman's written a wonderful book about this, quantum electrodynamics, and how the photon can go through all possible paths. Because it's hard to get your head around this, that's what makes it fascinating and interesting.
And it may be tied up with this question of entanglement we mentioned before, superluminal things going on, faster than the speed of light. That is a frontier. I suspect that in 20, 30 years' time we will really understand that, but we're not really there yet.
What was the question again? There’s so many things fascinating.

Valeria Smian

Yeah, the question, yeah, I think it's… what still makes you wonder after entire your over 60-year career, in passing through a lot of different stages, right?

Dr. Michael Albrow

Yeah, a lot of stages, because when I started out, my PhD experiment — we were about 10 people on the experiment. And we did it from conceptualizing it to building detectors and making them work and then analyzing the data – all that was in a small team.
And then it seems it grew and grew and grew. And there's a phase transition – sociological phase transition – that happens when your team gets beyond about 50 people who could all know each other pretty well and they go to a party together. And then to 250 people, you don't know everybody then. And now the experiment I'm on at CERN, called CMS, is more than 3,000 physicists involved in that. So, of course, you go to a meeting and you don't know more than a few percent of them. And then you go — the whole thing fractures down into small subgroups where you do know everybody in a small subgroup. Changed so much over the years.
Mysteries of the universe, and is our universe the only universe that there is? That doesn't seem reasonable to me.
I mentioned before the idea of strange symmetry breaking between the neutron and proton allowed hydrogen to exist, and therefore us. There's another miracle of physics I talk about, which is called how carbon was formed. Carbon is the only element of the hundred or so we know that allows complex molecules like DNA and so on. And how did carbon get formed? It only came about because — there was no carbon came from the Big Bang. You had hydrogen, helium, a little bit of lithium. To get carbon, you have to get three helium nuclei together to stick together to make carbon. So how does that happen? Well, you can get two to stick together to make beryllium, isotope beryllium-8. It's very unstable and falls apart in 10 to the minus 17 seconds. The third helium has to arrive in that time to stick together to make carbon. It seems like a miracle. It's a balance between electric repulsion among the protons, taking the final part, and the strong interaction.

So this is what I'm coming to say, is that these strange miracles that allow complexity and life to exist in our universe. If our universe is the one and only — we used to think the world was the one and only world, right? And then the galaxy was the one and only galaxy. And now it seems that, logically, if you don't believe that there was a sort of creator who designed the universe so that life could exist, there are a vast number of other universes out there, 10 to the huge number, and that all… physics is different in all of them. It could be basically that the different particle masses and forces are different. They came about by the symmetry breakings.
Now, this is, for me, a fascinating thing. But on the other hand, say, “Well, yeah, but can you disprove it? How can you disprove it? You can't disprove it.” So they say, “Well, it's not science if you can't disprove it or prove it.” But still, it's got explanatory power. It explains things to me.

I mean, you may say “kicking the can down the road”, because you've got all these universes — where they come from? But there are boundaries to what we can get. But the issue of why is our universe unique? Is it unique? I mean, maybe if you have ten to hundred universes and they're all different physics, and ten to ninety nine point nine of them sterile, but you still have a vast number that still have the right physical parameters, the right masses of particles and forces that allows complexity to exist and allows time reversal to be broken, which allows us to…

These are obviously deep questions, but you may say, well, they're not... They're more metaphysics than physics, because we can't actually... It may explain so many things, but can it be disproved or be proved? People say, “If you can't disprove it, it's not science, go away.” But I'm comfortable with metaphysics, with thinking about these things. These are the biggest mysteries that we have.
And we know now with the quarks and leptons, these fundamental particles of matter. And there are 12 different ones with different masses. Is it a random number, random masses, or is it a pattern to them we haven't found yet? I think there's a lot of randomness coming in here. I think that they were somehow — symmetries were broken in a way that gave them different masses.

Valeria Smian

That can be a final question, and it would be very interesting to know and think about that. If you allow yourself to dream a little bit, what kind of discovery do you hope to see in your lifetime that could reshape how humanity understands the universe or lives in it?

Dr. Michael Albrow

My lifetime may not be long enough, I don't know — I'm 83, coming up next week — but we really want to understand this dark energy question. Dark energy… and it's maybe tied up with superluminal things happening, faster than speed of light. And are there more forms of this invisible energy — I prefer to call it invisible energy than dark, which sounds like black — and how is that related to the expansion of the universe?

We don't know how the universe started. It could possibly have started at what's called the Planck scale, which is 10 to the minus 34 centimeters, 10 to the minus 34 meters — doesn't matter really — but that's a space you can get out of three fundamental constants, which is speed of light, which relates space and time; Planck's constant, which relates energy and time, and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Well, and then the gravitational constant of Newton, which relates mass and bend space-time. And from those three, you can put them together in a way to create a distance, which is called the Planck scale.

Maybe our universe popped into existence from some sort of strange outer space-time, popped into existence at that scale. And then it doubled and doubled and doubled and doubled in size until it was about this size. That's called inflation, and it seems like a good description of how the universe came to be from the Planck scale size to this size. And then something happened: it stopped expanding so fast and became heated up and formed matter particles. Did that Planck scale object that came into existence somehow — somehow that could have happened in this outer space-time gazillions of times over, producing all these different universes?

Some people would say that when it started as a singularity, a point of zero size and infinite density. I don't believe in that. I don't think anything in our physical universe can be infinite in density. The universe should have a total energy, zero total energy, when you contrast the energy of matter and the dark energy as well as the zero. When big bang…. When black holes evaporate down to, as some had said, to a singularity, I said, no, they can't do that. They go down to a Planck scale object.

These are all frontiers of our understanding of these things about the universe's properties, but space, time — mysteries, mysteries. We'll always have mysteries, I think, but we're making progress on many fronts. But the frontiers of knowledge expand, the frontiers of ignorance expand too, right? That's the adventure. That's the big adventure.

Valeria Smian

That's for sure. That's for sure. There are a lot of, a lot of things to learn and a lot of mysteries,

Dr. Michael Albrow

Yeah.

Valeria Smian

which we need to explore. And hopefully we're going to see this and see it in the scientific community, and see all those experiments, and to go always forward.
Dr. Albrow, we are so happy to have you with us today. And thank you so much for this amazing conversation.

Dr. Michael Albrow

Thank you.

Valeria Smian

For a lot of those explanations, and you drew a lot of pictures to our viewers, and shared a lot of understanding. So thank you for that.

Dr. Michael Albrow

Thank you, Valeria. It's been a great pleasure. I love talking to you. I love to talk about these things, too.

Valeria Smian

Of course, of course. And I think it's very, very much useful, this kind of explanation to the audience, to the international audience, so more people understand and see how the science works, how, in simple terms, we can understand the work of the scientists like you.
So thank you again for all your incredible scientific paths. Thank you for continuing doing this. Thank you so much for sparkling new ideas and sharing your inspiration with the people.

Dr. Michael Albrow

Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure.

Valeria Smian

Thank you.