Gauguin's Questions by Stephen Baxter

Author:Stephen Baxter
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: CERN, Collision, LHC
Publisher: Comma Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Afterword: Gauguin’s Answers

Prof John Ellis

Clerk Maxwell Professor of Theoretical Physics at King’s College, London

Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?

These are fundamental questions about ourselves and our place in the universe that all human beings must have asked at some point in their lives. It is also the title of a painting by Paul Gauguin currently hanging in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts that depicts people pondering these questions at various stages in their lives. I first saw this painting while spending a summer in Boston as a PhD student, and was so impressed that I bought a poster of it and put it up in my office to remind me why I came into work each day. Gauguin’s questions are universal, and probably all of us have asked them from some perspective or another at some stage. The people in the picture are probably seeking metaphysical answers, whereas the task of particle physicists is to ask Gauguin’s questions from a scientific perspective and, hopefully, find at least some answers. At least, this is how I interpret my job as a particle physicist.

Almost 40 years after that visit to Boston, I was invited to give an ‘inspirational’ opening talk at a particle physics conference, and decided to use Gauguin’s questions as the connecting theme – what Alfred Hitchcock would have called a MacGuffin. Since then, I have used it in many outreach talks to students and the general public to explain the motivations for particle physics – the ‘big picture’ that is sometimes lost among the technical details of our work. I was therefore particularly happy that Stephen Baxter chose Gauguin’s questions as the theme for his story, giving its metaphysical theme his own personal twist. Those acquainted with his large-scale worldview will not be surprised that this story unfolds over several millennia and encompasses many lightyears. Key roles are played by the most advanced tools for addressing the questions, such as gargantuan particle accelerators and gravitational-wave detectors, but also by artificial intelligence (AI). At one level, we particle physicists study Gauguin’s second question by colliding particles at ever-higher energies, aiming to establish the fundamental constituents of the matter in the universe and the forces that shape their behaviours and establish our physical natures. This is the mission being continued by the central character of Stephen’s story, an AI operating a super-high-energy collider on the Moon, in principle on behalf of humanity, but in practice autonomously. It is entirely appropriate that Gauguin’s painting should have been transferred to the reception room of this collider, following a climate catastrophe on Earth.

We particle physicists also indirectly address Gauguin’s first question because, by colliding particles at ever-higher energies, we study the fundamental processes that governed the evolution of the universe within a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. One aspect of this question is the puzzling origin of the universe’s matter. The particles and interactions that we know about could not have caused matter to

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