A particle physicist life

Hi there!

I am Benjamin, professor at Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris. Introduction: done!

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Okay, this was maybe a bit too short. Now, then a longer version about me, myself and my life. I teach physics to undergraduate students, perform research works in theoretical high-energy physics and (try to?) transmit my passion for fundamental sciences to others, from students to the general audience. More practically, a first half of my time is dedicated to teaching, a second half concerns scientific research and a third half (or maybe an extra 75%) turns out to be administration (there is no free lunch). When your hobby is your job, hours and money matter less and there may indeed be more than three halves in a pie...

Now, what do I want to write about on Steemit? About my research work definitely. I would like to share the dreams and the magics that animate most of the people in my field including me. I would like to explain why fundamental physics is interesting, what are the great puzzles of our era and how we may manage to solve them in the next 20-30 years. I will not write all of this into one single post, as I could probably write a full book about it and get everyone bored before I start, but I will discuss little by little all of this during the next days, weeks, months and decades (although this sounds a bit too far in the future, but who knows?). Let me however flash below a few keywords that may make you dream and think, ... or not.

We have big machines. And by big I mean, really, really really big (and people with big machines...). More seriously, let me take an example made of two rings of 27km long where protons, a tiny beast living in the nuclei of the atoms (I may discuss this later), are super-accelerated and smashed against each other. That is what the Large Hadron Collider at CERN (in Switzerland) does (I will again elaborate in some further posts). We can view the center of the collision as the energy gathered by two high-speed trains running at full speed that collide into each other, but with all the matter and energy located into one single point. This may sound crazy, but we hope that this will allow us to understand better how the universe works, even go back in time by several billions of years in some sense (time travel does not exist, which is why I wrote ‘in some sense’!) and test various of our theories explaining the laws of Nature. Yes, I have used the plural form. We have more than one theory in mind, and the true one is probably still to be discovered. That is all what particle physics is about. We do not know much and we want to understand more! In particular with respect to what is dark...

One of the great unknown of our time I will write about along my posts concerns dark matter. Why is it called dark? Because it is dark of course. We cannot see it, we have no idea about what it is, but it is known to pervade our universe. There is even more dark that visible matter in it. And even it dark matter is invisible, we are trying to detect it and produce it. This dark matter gives work to our experimental colleagues (try to google ‘ice cube’ and ‘dark matter’ and you will find that this goes way beyond drinks) and also to theorists like me who could design theories where dark matter interacts via dark forces with particles living in dark sectors. I hope I convinced you that all of this is very dark. So that it could give ideas about making movies (except that some already did...).

I will discuss all of this, and even more, into greater details all along the posts on this blog, trying to explain what I do, what researchers in my field do and why it is important that we do this. I am also happy to answer and clarify any doubt anyone may have related to physics, if I can of course. I do not know everything, but I am always happy to share what I know!

Except physics, I also like traveling and discovering new places around the world. Although during these time, I mostly travel for my work, so that the time I have for visiting is kind of limited. I will write a bit about my trips, sharing my personal viewpoint (as for the rest, there are probably already many good write-ups available on the web). I also like programming and developing computer codes, which is something which plays an important role for my research.

This is it for now! Have a great day!