Kid's day talk

Tomorrow is Kid's Day at SLAC.  I have been given the honor - perhaps responsibility is a better term - of giving the opening talk to the 12-16 group.  I wasn't given a lot of guidelines, but I have about 5 minutes to talk about how I became interested in my field of research.  I suppose I'm supposed to excite and inspire these young people and then they get to ask me questions.

It is a little awkward for me to talk about how I got excited about particle physics.  First of all, it was mostly a naive sort of 4th grade pretension.  Second, I've left the field.  But I feel like the reasons I enjoyed particle physics research (when I did) or found it mind-blowing are many of the same reasons I'm excited about the new research I'm pursuing.  Except that I never valued practical application before.  Another huge problem is trying to explain why neutrinos point to problems in the standard model... when I have 5 minutes to explain this to a group of people including junior high students.  I think/hope they have heard about electrons at this point, but neutrino mass is not going to be particularly accessible or exciting.

So I've decided I try to get them exciting about the magic of "discovery" science and help them realize how close they are to being part of it.  When I was their age it wasn't obvious to me how I could be part of particle physics - I thought all of the questions had been answered already.  There is so much they can do as the scientists of ten years from now...

So here is my talk, as I plan to deliver it:

I became interested in particle physics when I was about your age. I read books about these strange things - called elementary particles - and the experiments that were done to understand them. Many of these particles are very exotic - you have to use an accelerator like what we have here at SLAC to produce them, and then they disappear before you can even blink. Some particle are common - you may know about the electron, proton, and neutron that make up atoms. These particles are easy to detect and don't disappear. But there are a few particles that are around us - muons and neutrinos, for example - that don't make up atoms but that we can sometimes see. Muons come from space or are produced in the atmosphere and you can do some relatively simple experiments to actually SEE that they are there. But it doesn't matter if you see them or even know they are there - they are part of the universe and they have always been there, even as people were first discovering fire or inventing the wheel.

This is what I love about science - finding out how the world around us works. Finding out what makes up atoms, molecules, materials - even you and me. You can ask a question like "How much does this particle weigh" or "How does a single cell become an entire organism" or "why does bakind soda and vinegar foam up when you mix them" or you can simply look around and try to find something new. Then you do an experiment - you make a measurement or test an idea.

Here's the amazing thing: if it works - and sometimes it doesn't, science can be messy - you could be the first person EVER to see this. You could be the first person to know how much that particle weighs or to even know that particle exists. Imagine it - there are billions of neutrinos passing through you RIGHT NOW from the sun and these particles have been coming from the sun for as long as the sun has been shining. But it wasn't until 1956 that a group of scientists were finally able to do an experiment to show that they are there. This means that when my grandparents were your age no one knew these particles even existed. They always were there, but there was a specific moment where we suddenly knew something that we didn't before. As a scientist, you get to be there in the room when that knowledge first appears, and then it is your job to share it with humankind.

The scientific breakthroughs of today could be in the textbooks you use in college, possibly your children's high school education. I remember growing bean sprouts in elementary school- you start with a bean and end up with a plant. About 150 years ago - this is after electricity existed and California was already part of the USA - people weren't sure that plants came from seeds. They knew that some plants definitely grew from seeds, but they didn't know that ALL plants came from seeds - some thought plants could just grow out of dirt, appear randomly. Now everyone knows that you can't grow a plant unless you start with a seed.

The reason we can make progress in science is because the younger generations - like you - can spend your time learning what the older generations are discovering. It can take a long time to make a discovery - to learn about something no one else has ever learned. But once someone does that - and perhaps write a book about it - you can then learn it fairly quickly. All of the math and science you are learning now in school is the foundation for when you come up with a new idea, something you want to discover.

I've learned a lot since I was your age. Some of the things I learned in high school were discovered by people I now work with - discovered when they were about my age. But I've caught up to them now. I can come up with new questions - things that haven't been asked before. I use all of the math and science that I've learned - that people before me discovered - to plan a new experiment. And if all goes well, I'll see something at the end of that experiment that has never been seen before - perhaps a particle no one ever knew was there. Maybe, in a few years, you will learn about this particle and come into the field and ask a question that no one - including me - had thought to ask before. You'll be a scientist.