How to Do Big Science in a Climate Emergency? | CAS Inquire

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11/13/2023 Added

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Ken Bloom, chair and professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, gave this talk for the CAS Inquire series on Nov. 7.

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[00:00:02.080]Good evening, everyone.
[00:00:03.590]Thank you so much for being here.
[00:00:04.764]Thank you for taking part in this CAS Inquire lecture series.
[00:00:08.589]For those of you here in person or online, we appreciate you taking part in this.
[00:00:12.951]This is, as you know, the third featured
[00:00:15.568]talk within this year's CAS Inquire lecture series.
[00:00:18.957]Our organizing theme for the whole year is Sustainable Futures,
[00:00:23.755]and in keeping with the culture and the identity of the college
[00:00:27.010]and as is really well embodied by this Inquire program,
[00:00:31.170]this theme of sustainable futures is being explored
[00:00:34.995]through a diverse range of intellectual orientations
[00:00:38.451]and disciplinary perspectives, including from geography,
[00:00:42.209]philosophy, languages, and literature and geology.
[00:00:46.068]And tonight, we have the pleasure to gain some insights
[00:00:50.061]from the field of physics this evening.
[00:00:52.946]In particular,
[00:00:53.651]we have the distinct pleasure of continuing our series
[00:00:56.100]with a presentation from Professor Ken Bloom,
[00:00:58.415]Professor and chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy with the talk.
[00:01:01.804]As you can see how to do big science in a climate emergency.
[00:01:07.173]Professor Bloom received his Ph.D.
[00:01:09.085]in physics from Cornell University, and after serving as a research fellow
[00:01:12.776]at the University of Michigan, joined the faculty here at UNL in 2004.
[00:01:17.977]Dr. Bloom is an international leader in the field of experimental particle
[00:01:22.439]physics.
[00:01:23.546]His research, which focuses on the Higgs boson and investigations
[00:01:27.372]of deviations from the Standard model, is part of the massive
[00:01:31.465]and highly collaborative experiment at the International Large Hadron Collider
[00:01:36.397]and has generated well over a thousand publications
[00:01:39.082]associated with more than 100,000 citations.
[00:01:42.672]Professor Bloom was selected to direct the US component of the CMS collaboration
[00:01:47.570]of $40 million a year enterprise
[00:01:50.590]involving scientists at 45 universities.
[00:01:53.945]Professor Bloom is also the PI of a 50 million multiyear NSF
[00:01:57.267]grant supporting a major part of CMS operations.
[00:02:01.260]He's a member of the Department of Energy's High Energy Physics
[00:02:03.844]Advisory Panel and a Fellow of the American Physical Society.
[00:02:07.803]And it's a real honor to have him speaking to us tonight.
[00:02:10.219]So please join me in welcoming him to the podium
[00:02:13.574]and thank you, Mark, for your kind words.
[00:02:22.197]And then hello, everyone, and especially all the people on Zoom.
[00:02:25.586]It's a good idea that you're on Zoom because you wouldn't able
[00:02:27.800]to get a seat in this room had you tried to come in person.
[00:02:31.659]Okay.
[00:02:32.196]Thanks to thanks for being here.
[00:02:34.679]I mean, just a couple mornings going in, number
[00:02:37.296]one, all going to my own
[00:02:40.551]and my own title slide.
[00:02:42.933]Number one, you know, there is science in this presentation, right?
[00:02:45.617]There's some equation. There's some math. It'll.
[00:02:47.362]It'll be okay.
[00:02:47.899]We'll get you through it.
[00:02:48.805]Number two, I'm having some rather significant back
[00:02:51.556]issues, and I will give this talk standing up as much as I can.
[00:02:54.811]I might need to sit for a while, so that's not my preferred way to do it.
[00:02:57.965]And I apologize for that.
[00:03:00.750]So I'm coming at this through
[00:03:02.259]the lens of my own personal big science, and that's particle physics.
[00:03:06.588]And our goal in particle physics is to understand
[00:03:09.675]the nature of the universe at its most fundamental level.
[00:03:12.460]What is everything made of in its most basic way,
[00:03:15.177]and how those how do those elements interact?
[00:03:18.935]So what do we mean by, you know, what is everything made of it?
[00:03:21.519]At what level are we talking about that,
[00:03:23.901]you know, we're going beyond just the high school chemistry level
[00:03:27.055]of of atoms that everything in the world is made of Atoms.
[00:03:30.679]Atoms are already pretty small right there.
[00:03:33.027]You know, they're at the scale of ten to the minus ten meters.
[00:03:37.188]But we're really looking at atomic substructure, right?
[00:03:39.772]We're looking at the nucleus, which is a factor of 10,000 smaller than that.
[00:03:43.697]The atomic nucleus is itself a composite object.
[00:03:46.885]It's made of the neutrons and protons.
[00:03:48.697]Those are a factor ten smaller, and then protons are made of forks,
[00:03:53.629]and the quarks are at the scale of ten -18 meters.
[00:03:57.454]Right?
[00:03:57.723]So a factor of, you know, a factor of 10
[00:04:01.447]to 18 smaller than our usual the scales we're used to as humans.
[00:04:05.272]And, and the electrons also which are, which are of that size
[00:04:10.439]at the largest.
[00:04:11.345]Right. In fact
[00:04:13.224]I say ten to the -80 meters, there might be smaller structures,
[00:04:16.646]but you know, we just
[00:04:17.284]we don't have instruments that allow us to resolve anything smaller.
[00:04:21.075]So we treat these as if this is the smallest.
[00:04:23.122]So we can see now, at this point, maybe two questions you have.
[00:04:26.108]Number one, how do we know any of this?
[00:04:27.719]Number two,
[00:04:28.759]I thought I was coming
[00:04:29.598]to a talk about big science, and it seems like awfully small science by contrast.
[00:04:33.389]So okay, about those things.
[00:04:35.805]So first of all, how do we how do we know about objects in the world?
[00:04:40.066]How do we see them, quote unquote?
[00:04:41.375]I mean, how are you seeing me right now?
[00:04:43.120]It's because there's light in the room.
[00:04:44.395]The light is scattering off me.
[00:04:46.609]It bouncing off me and it's going into your eye. Right.
[00:04:48.723]And this is how you see me and the way you are.
[00:04:52.112]The sizes, the scales, the things that you can see
[00:04:55.165]depend on the wavelength of the light that's being used. Right?
[00:04:57.615]So if you want to see things like a thunderstorm or a building,
[00:05:00.735]use radar that's very long wavelength light.
[00:05:02.983]If you want to see molecules, you need very short wavelength light.
[00:05:06.036]And the sort, the sort that you have in x rays.
[00:05:09.660]And quite similarly, we see elementary particles
[00:05:12.781]by scattering other particles off of them and the size that you can see
[00:05:17.042]of a particle depends on the wavelength of the particle And quantum mechanically,
[00:05:21.437]you know, even matter has a wavelength associated with it.
[00:05:24.088]That, that that depends on the energy of the particle.
[00:05:27.275]And so studying the smallest particles requires the highest energy probes,
[00:05:31.436]right though the wavelength that's lambda of a particle
[00:05:34.456]that goes in inverse to the energy.
[00:05:35.798]So if you have a high energy probe, you can study small length scales,
[00:05:39.287]but also you gain other things from going to high energies.
[00:05:43.180]Because of Einstein's equation that says that energy in master
[00:05:45.830]or equivalent, you get a probe very high mass scales.
[00:05:48.179]You can use these scattering experiments to create new massive particles
[00:05:52.541]that we don't see in everyday life.
[00:05:54.420]And also energy is related to temperature.
[00:05:56.735]So we're really able to create a very high energy, very temperature,
[00:06:01.298]high temperature environment on a small time, on a small scale,
[00:06:05.023]an environment that is similar to the conditions
[00:06:07.136]of the very early universe close to the Big Bang.
[00:06:09.586]And so we're able to look at what the universe was behaving like
[00:06:13.914]in the period that would be ten to the minus 10 seconds after the Big Bang.
[00:06:16.867]So it's really also sort of a time machine.
[00:06:18.779]And if you can understand the way the universe behaved,
[00:06:21.531]then maybe you understand how it got to be the way we are now.
[00:06:24.517]But of course, to get these high energy
[00:06:26.463]particles, you need some very large infrastructure.
[00:06:28.375]And that's the beginning of the of the large the big science story here.
[00:06:32.435]And so here's like it's the biggest infrastructure we've got.
[00:06:34.650]This is the Large Hadron Collider.
[00:06:36.864]So it's on the Swiss French Quarter.
[00:06:38.475]This is, you know, okay, this is the click is can we turn down the lights
[00:06:41.528]here to see these slides better than we know how to do that and see
[00:06:46.964]maybe.
[00:06:48.272]Yeah. Okay.
[00:06:48.843]Now it's over here.
[00:06:53.003]Okay. That's got to be better. Yeah.
[00:06:54.547]Oh, is that you? Good. Hold on.
[00:06:57.332]Let's.
[00:07:00.452]No, no. Celebrate.
[00:07:01.660]We want.
[00:07:05.049]I'm just going to.
[00:07:06.089]I'm just going to keep pressing buttons until we get the ones we want, right?
[00:07:09.579]I want
[00:07:14.075]just good enough.
[00:07:15.383]Okay.
[00:07:17.027]Okay.
[00:07:17.329]So here, there's not actually a line on the ground, right?
[00:07:19.510]This is just a it's just. It's just a diagram.
[00:07:21.557]But this is the scale of it.
[00:07:22.496]You can see you can see to the right the Geneva Airport.
[00:07:26.120]You can see Lake Geneva.
[00:07:27.395]This is the main CERN site over here.
[00:07:29.945]And here is where we lived when we were on sabbatical ten years ago.
[00:07:34.173]Now, the whole thing, it's it's 100 meters underground.
[00:07:37.025]It's 27 kilometers in circumference, big.
[00:07:40.313]But really big, Right?
[00:07:41.454]I mean, here's the link in Hadron Collider, right?
[00:07:43.165]If you were to put the the LHC ring in Lincoln
[00:07:46.688]and this is the size it would be, so it would be sort of going from from
[00:07:50.144]band Orange Street to the South up to Superior up in the north.
[00:07:53.332]Right. So it's it's large, but it's ponderously large
[00:07:57.392]except it's this is this is
[00:07:59.237]you know, in France and Switzerland and there's not 27 st going across here.
[00:08:02.123]You have to go through a bunch of small towns to get from one side to the other.
[00:08:05.847]Why does it need to be so big?
[00:08:07.994]Let's take a look. So this is inside the tunnel right?
[00:08:10.041]So there's it's 27 kilometers of this going going around, right?
[00:08:13.195]You can barely see the curvature of it.
[00:08:14.839]Why does it need to be this big?
[00:08:16.450]Okay, so here's the key
[00:08:17.859]physics fact that you need, which is that if you have a charged
[00:08:20.879]particle, it will take and you put it in a magnetic field.
[00:08:23.966]It's going to take a circular path through that magnetic field and the circle
[00:08:28.361]and the momentum of the particle and the magnetic field are related
[00:08:32.186]through the equation in the top, right?
[00:08:33.662]That if you want to get a very high momentum for the particle, you
[00:08:37.185]you want to either make the going to you need either a large magnetic field
[00:08:41.950]that's me in the equation up there or a very large circle.
[00:08:44.768]So we had
[00:08:46.513]we actually had the tunnel is built in the eighties for for other experiments.
[00:08:50.204]We were sort of fixed to a tunnel of this size
[00:08:52.788]and we had a target size for the momentum of the particles.
[00:08:55.908]And that meant that we had to achieve a certain magnetic field to to do that.
[00:09:00.639]8.3 Tesla is the magnetic field and you generate this field through
[00:09:03.860]electromagnets, you need a 12 kilogram current through through the electromagnets
[00:09:08.188]to able to generate a field that size that is a very sizable
[00:09:12.349]electric current.
[00:09:13.389]And to get that we need to use superconducting magnets.
[00:09:16.610]So these magnets are kept
[00:09:17.583]in liquid helium temperatures very close to absolute zero,
[00:09:20.603]perhaps the coldest ring in the universe.
[00:09:22.314]And you need 40 megawatts of power, you know, just
[00:09:25.133]just for the purpose of keeping these magnets cool.
[00:09:28.555]So, you know, the individual cylinder,
[00:09:29.864]as you can see there, these are the superconducting magnets.
[00:09:32.850]There's a total of 1232 of them.
[00:09:35.366]Each of them are 15 meters long and they go all the way around the
[00:09:38.655]the 27 kilometers are keeping a superconducting infrastructure.
[00:09:43.117]That sounds difficult.
[00:09:44.895]You can imagine
[00:09:45.667]taking a different approach, like just using normal conducting magnets.
[00:09:49.526]Then you wouldn't have to deal with all the liquid helium,
[00:09:51.371]but you couldn't have the currents as big.
[00:09:53.586]You couldn't have as a magnetic field as big.
[00:09:55.163]You need a much bigger tunnel
[00:09:56.639]like on the scale of 100 kilometers instead of 27 kilometers.
[00:10:00.330]And then the power consumption, because you have the resistive magnets,
[00:10:03.014]would be a thousand megawatts instead of just 40 megawatts.
[00:10:05.564]So it was important to invest in the superconducting technology.
[00:10:08.953]So big tunnels, this is. Okay.
[00:10:11.604]So here's the
[00:10:12.577]the the elevated the Skyview again the four major experiments at the LHC.
[00:10:17.106]I worked on the one that's in the upper left that you have to drive
[00:10:20.730]to the small towns in France to get to this is a contact me on solenoid CMS.
[00:10:25.964]It is a compact if it's 15 meters high and 22 meters long, it's compact relative
[00:10:30.595]to the other big experiment there, right for the rear, the smaller one,
[00:10:34.252]this is an exploded view right there.
[00:10:35.896]Those pieces on the right slide in and it all fits together.
[00:10:39.788]And the proton beams run,
[00:10:42.640]you know, sort of left to right through the middle of the detector.
[00:10:45.861]Why does a detector like this need to be so big?
[00:10:48.747]Okay, First of all, here's a here's like a real photo of it in the cavern.
[00:10:53.981]And you can see on multiple levels
[00:10:55.357]there are the different stories of the the of the cavern where we have this
[00:10:59.987]What the detector functionally is, is a 100 megapixel camera
[00:11:03.074]that's operating at 40 megahertz.
[00:11:04.684]Okay. 100, 100 megapixels.
[00:11:06.362]Your phone has that at this point.
[00:11:08.275]But your phone does not take 40 million pictures a second.
[00:11:10.825]And that's what this can can do. Right.
[00:11:12.167]So every 25 nanoseconds we're having protons collide
[00:11:15.455]and we're basically taking pictures of them.
[00:11:17.166]In doing so, we're using a lot of data, multiple petabytes of data per year.
[00:11:21.125]A petabyte is a million gigabytes, and all the data has to be
[00:11:24.682]stored, moved around, processed,
[00:11:26.427]made available to physicists to analyze and make measurements with
[00:11:30.453]Why are these detectors so big?
[00:11:32.131]So this is a cutaway view.
[00:11:34.043]This is a transverse slice through the detectors
[00:11:36.560]so the beams would be going in and out of the screen
[00:11:38.774]and colliding like so, and then particles get ejected transverse to that.
[00:11:42.968]And, you know, you can see along the the
[00:11:45.418]the horizontal axis there, the radius goes out to about seven meters.
[00:11:49.947]The problem is
[00:11:51.155]that the particles that are produced have very high energies.
[00:11:54.209]So if you want to stop them, to measure them,
[00:11:57.161]you need a lot of material to slow them down and block them.
[00:12:00.382]So, you know, these the various sections there.
[00:12:02.798]Okay. I should sorry, I skipped a bit. Right.
[00:12:04.476]I mean, the
[00:12:05.348]different layers of this detector that the particles pass through on their way out
[00:12:09.106]are made of different materials.
[00:12:10.381]Different kinds of particles will interact in different ways
[00:12:12.931]and different sections of the detector as they go through.
[00:12:15.347]That helps us identify the particles.
[00:12:17.360]We measure the energy of particles by bringing them to a full stop
[00:12:20.514]and basically measuring the amount well, we measure the amount of energy deposited
[00:12:23.702]in some material. You need a lot of material.
[00:12:25.782]And that's one of the reasons the detector is so big.
[00:12:27.896]Another thing that goes on, remember, charged particles
[00:12:30.647]take these circular paths as they go through magnetic fields,
[00:12:33.566]and we have a magnetic field inside the detector
[00:12:36.687]that is allowing you to have this curve path as you go through here.
[00:12:40.914]And by measuring the curvature of that path, you
[00:12:45.780]so you know, the radius of curvature, you know the magnetic field,
[00:12:48.162]you can find the momentum of that particle.
[00:12:49.940]So the equation we had before, but these particles are of such high energy
[00:12:54.805]that, you know, the radius of curvature is very large.
[00:12:57.523]And so you really need a lot of detector to be able to see
[00:13:00.476]the particle curving, even with a strong magnetic field behind there.
[00:13:03.965]So that's why you need a detector that's this big.
[00:13:08.294]And by the way, okay, so seven meters, right.
[00:13:10.173]So the speed of light is about a footprint. Nanosecond.
[00:13:12.555]So it takes about 21 nanoseconds for the particles
[00:13:15.709]to transverse the whole detector after they emerge.
[00:13:19.366]And remember, the collisions are happening every 25 nanoseconds, right?
[00:13:23.124]So collision happens.
[00:13:25.037]You got 21 nanoseconds for the particles to get through.
[00:13:27.150]A few nanoseconds later the next collision happens and you got to be ready for it.
[00:13:30.439]One of the technical challenges of this
[00:13:34.398]to run an instrument this
[00:13:35.706]big, to have to be able to analyze a data set this big,
[00:13:40.270]you need a lot of people and and we have a lot of people
[00:13:43.222]a lot of people are interested in doing this.
[00:13:44.732]It's the compact neo and Solenoid
[00:13:47.249]collaboration is a truly global enterprise marked in blue.
[00:13:50.537]All the countries that are participating, about 6000 people in the collaboration
[00:13:54.664]in some way or another at this point,
[00:13:56.610]about 2000 physicists, a lot of students, engineers, technicians, 57
[00:14:02.314]countries participating in this, 25 255 institutes in those countries.
[00:14:06.407]The US were the single largest participant by head count for about 28% of the 40
[00:14:11.105]physicists, 50 member institution, the United States, the single largest
[00:14:15.534]country participating, but by no means a majority of the collaboration, right?
[00:14:19.627]So it's it's you know,
[00:14:22.681]the Europeans, of course, are the know the biggest component
[00:14:25.197]besides us, But we have participation from all over the world.
[00:14:28.552]We need to go there sometimes I need to fly the 5000 miles
[00:14:31.706]from Lincoln to to Geneva. Right.
[00:14:33.384]We have people who need to go there to operate the experiment.
[00:14:35.666]CERN in Geneva is the natural place for people to gather,
[00:14:38.383]to meet and discuss things and make it all go.
[00:14:42.812]But, you know, we have meetings, other places, too.
[00:14:44.658]I know, you know, particle physics.
[00:14:46.403]You know, you get the you get to travel the whole world
[00:14:47.845]and see the same people, the same people wherever you go.
[00:14:51.637]And we go to conferences.
[00:14:53.080]It's a worldwide enterprise.
[00:14:54.086]The conferences are all over the place.
[00:14:56.334]So it's part of the big science
[00:14:59.019]is the big number of people we have involved.
[00:15:02.206]I'm truly proud of what we achieve
[00:15:05.696]in this collaboration and with this experiment,
[00:15:09.454]we published more than 1200 papers on the data
[00:15:11.534]that we've reported since 2009, covering a wide span of particle physics
[00:15:15.158]topics, most notably the discovery, the Higgs boson.
[00:15:18.278]In 2012 that led to the Nobel Prize for Higgs and Engler to
[00:15:22.371]who predicted the Higgs boson, you know, 50 years earlier.
[00:15:26.331]So we're doing science.
[00:15:27.237]We're educating people right.
[00:15:28.646]The thousands of students
[00:15:29.753]who've been working on this experiment over the years,
[00:15:31.699]some of them will go into particle physics.
[00:15:33.779]Many of them will go into lots of other fields, you know, various industries.
[00:15:37.403]We're developing a global science and technology workforce to all this. And
[00:15:42.906]in these times of great dissension and conflict,
[00:15:45.892]the fact that we can pull people together from all over the world
[00:15:49.617]for a shared peaceful purpose is, I think, one
[00:15:51.697]of the one of the great achievements of what we're doing right now.
[00:15:54.851]And I hope that we can set an example for what what can be done by it, by humanity.
[00:15:59.448]So I feel great about all of this.
[00:16:02.098]But if you start to think about this through a different frame
[00:16:06.192]and look at it in a different way and look at it to the context of what else
[00:16:09.983]is going on in the world, you start to think about some problems.
[00:16:14.546]What's happening, of course, is global climate change.
[00:16:16.794]That's why I'm giving this talk.
[00:16:19.311]You know, we're in Nebraska, so we have to say this
[00:16:20.955]sometimes that climate change is real, there's strong evidence for it.
[00:16:24.814]We are able to fight like climate scientists.
[00:16:27.632]I don't know how to do this, but climate scientists know how to reconstruct,
[00:16:30.920]you know, surface temperatures, the earth going back 2000 years.
[00:16:34.141]And there were relatively constant for until about 1850
[00:16:37.765]when things started taking off.
[00:16:39.376]And so, you know, this is not something cyclic that is going on.
[00:16:43.134]This is something that is very different that's happening over just,
[00:16:45.851]you know, over the past few decades
[00:16:48.536]and blowing up
[00:16:49.274]here from 1850 onwards until the current day.
[00:16:52.528]You can see, you know, in greater detail the temperatures taking off.
[00:16:56.890]Not only can we observe the temperatures, we can do simulations, right?
[00:17:00.380]We can simulate what's happening.
[00:17:02.695]Just, you know, what will happen to natural
[00:17:04.071]activity, solar cycles, volcanoes and the like that impact the atmosphere.
[00:17:07.896]They would reduce those effects alone.
[00:17:10.077]You would predict that temperatures would remain relatively flat over time.
[00:17:14.405]But once you include in the simulations the effects of of human activities,
[00:17:18.800]human influence, you predict that you see this increase in temperatures.
[00:17:22.021]And that is in fact exactly what we observe.
[00:17:25.175]Why is this happening?
[00:17:26.182]Well, this is happening at the same time
[00:17:27.927]that we're putting a lot more of these greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
[00:17:32.154]So this is carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, methane, I think I'm not a chemist.
[00:17:36.416]I think that's methane.
[00:17:38.563]We're seeing increased
[00:17:39.838]concentrations of all of those and we're seeing real effects in the weather also.
[00:17:42.959]Right all over the world, we're seeing increases in hot extremes
[00:17:47.656]taking place, not so much in the US.
[00:17:49.334]Interestingly, increases in incidents
[00:17:52.756]of heavy precipitation and cases of agricultural, ecological drought.
[00:17:56.883]So all of these things are real effects that are going on.
[00:18:00.473]What does any of this have to do with particle physics?
[00:18:02.587]Well, you got to start thinking about the carbon budget, right?
[00:18:05.942]And you know, the International Panel on Climate Change said that every thousand
[00:18:10.841]gigatons of cumulative carbon dioxide emissions
[00:18:13.760]will lead to another half degree ish in in warming.
[00:18:17.417]And if we want to limit the warming to less than one and a half degrees,
[00:18:20.538]which is, you know,
[00:18:21.343]the level that we think we need to to keep from having really significant
[00:18:24.866]effects, mass extinctions, sea level rise, stuff like that.
[00:18:28.154]We really need to keep to one tonne of CO2 equivalent.
[00:18:31.040]So CO2 or equivalent amounts of other gases per capita per year
[00:18:36.039]until 2050, Right.
[00:18:37.080]For the next 25 years you get one tonne per person.
[00:18:39.797]So that's the number to keep in mind, right?
[00:18:41.207]You get one tonne of emissions per year for the next quarter century
[00:18:46.105]and that's
[00:18:46.441]a bit of a challenge because in the US right now the current per capita
[00:18:50.769]per year rate of emissions is 14 tonnes of CO2 equivalent.
[00:18:56.037]The good news is that it's come down significantly
[00:18:58.990]from 2005, which is sort of the benchmark date in Europe is more like 20.
[00:19:02.278]So we've already made a lot of progress there towards one,
[00:19:04.794]but it's still far away from one
[00:19:06.371]and for that matter it's three times the global average, right?
[00:19:08.619]So the US really stands out in this respect
[00:19:11.941]in that framework, you've got to wonder whether big science activities
[00:19:15.229]such as particle physics have the potential
[00:19:17.377]for scientists to have a carbon impact well above that of of average
[00:19:20.631]citizens, which means that we have to start paying attention to this stuff.
[00:19:23.920]You can either take the moral approach that we have a responsibility to future
[00:19:27.174]generations to make sure that we can leave behind a habitable planet.
[00:19:31.804]But also, even if you don't care about that,
[00:19:33.985]there is very practical reasons as a big scientist
[00:19:37.106]or someone doing big scientists, because, you know, we're talking about
[00:19:40.193]continuing with these big projects, putting on even bigger projects.
[00:19:44.320]They're going to be under scrutiny for their for their climate impact
[00:19:47.004]and their carbon impact.
[00:19:48.212]So you've got to think about what you're doing in this area that might
[00:19:51.769]have an impact on on the climate and what we can do to mitigate it.
[00:19:55.795]But, you know, we have these big international collaborations
[00:19:58.748]that can come together and do great things if we put our mind to it.
[00:20:02.036]So given that, can we do the same thing here
[00:20:03.915]and can we really be world leaders in how we go about addressing climate change?
[00:20:08.847]And so ultimately the question for us is how we can how can we pursue the science
[00:20:12.169]we love, sustainable?
[00:20:15.323]Some of us in particle physics are thinking about this.
[00:20:17.336]A few other people in other fields are too.
[00:20:20.020]I came across this paper, you know, I heard it on NPR about this paper
[00:20:24.885]from some astronomers
[00:20:26.261]trying to look at the carbon footprint of astronomical research infrastructures.
[00:20:29.717]Right.
[00:20:29.918]So this is what was needed to do to build the telescopes,
[00:20:32.703]to launch the satellites, stuff like that
[00:20:34.146]doesn't even include actually doing research with them.
[00:20:35.857]This is just to sort of build them and run them.
[00:20:38.575]And in their estimate, they found that there, you know, the infrastructures
[00:20:42.736]are giving you 36.6 tonnes of CO2 equivalent per year per astronomer, right.
[00:20:48.138]So far above the one that we need to get to far above the 14
[00:20:53.137]that that is per capita in the United States right now.
[00:20:56.962]So the infrastructures alone in astronomy are giving you a carbon
[00:21:00.753]footprint similar to that of, you know, some mid-sized European countries.
[00:21:03.505]That's that's, that's the level at which we're having an impact.
[00:21:06.726]So what about particle physics?
[00:21:08.336]Let's start going through some of the things I talked
[00:21:10.484]about in the intro and some of the things we do
[00:21:12.363]and think about what their carbon impacts are like
[00:21:15.248]these giant infrastructures we build like the LHC tunnel.
[00:21:18.570]So we're talking about building even bigger machines, even bigger tunnels.
[00:21:22.462]What are going to be the impacts of that?
[00:21:24.207]So here's an interesting assumption and I give you as my collaborator,
[00:21:28.032]Veronique Glover, who is pushing this idea
[00:21:30.951]and it's a good one, you know, if we are doing the things we need to do
[00:21:37.494]to address climate
[00:21:38.333]change, you know, like as special as specified in the Paris Accord.
[00:21:41.587]And so forth, you've got to decarbonize electric power, right?
[00:21:45.312]So the whole the whole grid has to go to renewables, non fossil fuels in general.
[00:21:50.647]And so the target date for that is 2040.
[00:21:53.432]The next particle accelerator
[00:21:55.042]that we're talking about are going to be on a timescale beyond 2040,
[00:21:58.230]which means that they are going to be operating on decarbonized energy.
[00:22:01.988]Right.
[00:22:02.223]That's not going to be the source of, of of carbon emissions
[00:22:06.719]for future operations of these accelerators.
[00:22:09.067]What it could be instead is construction building
[00:22:11.852]these facilities is what could eliminate your carbon impacts.
[00:22:14.906]In fact, the construction industry
[00:22:16.885]contributes about 10% of the world's total carbon emissions right now,
[00:22:21.482]and that's because just because of the carbon
[00:22:23.327]of the chemical process required to make cement.
[00:22:26.146]Right.
[00:22:26.347]That you're you're you're heating up this compound
[00:22:28.226]and it releases carbon and you generate about one tonne of carbon
[00:22:31.615]dioxide per tonne of cement that you make.
[00:22:33.326]And there's no real understood way to decarbonize this right now.
[00:22:37.118]So we're talking about building some really big tunnels, right?
[00:22:40.406]The certain imagines building the FCC, the future
[00:22:43.728]Circular Collider as it's called, about 100 kilometer tunnel.
[00:22:46.882]And I mean that's that's just the main tunnel
[00:22:48.962]and you got to build a lot of other tunnels.
[00:22:50.740]This is a diagram of the tunnel, and it's going to have access shafts.
[00:22:53.357]You can get into it and various bypasses and stuff like that.
[00:22:56.209]A big a big concrete infrastructure underground.
[00:22:59.665]This this is the LHC tunnel.
[00:23:02.048]This is the FCC tunnel, Right.
[00:23:03.692]It's that much bigger, really big.
[00:23:05.604]So what's the carbon impact of building a tunnel like that?
[00:23:09.463]Well, okay.
[00:23:10.000]You know, we looked up, we went you know, we read the design report for the FCC.
[00:23:13.825]They got a picture of that, the the tunnel, a cross section.
[00:23:16.408]I can still do enough geometry that I can calculate how much concrete
[00:23:19.529]goes into an analyst that goes 100, 100 kilometers around like that.
[00:23:24.696]Concrete is about 15% cement.
[00:23:27.078]We did the calculation comes out to about 240 million
[00:23:29.494]tons of carbon dioxide that you'll create in making the cement.
[00:23:34.426]Also, we
[00:23:34.862]found a paper by some Spanish engineers who had studied
[00:23:38.822]the total carbon footprint of traffic tunnels,
[00:23:42.177]auto tunnels that they were building in Spain, everything that goes into it.
[00:23:45.297]And they came up with a rule of thumb about five or ten thousands
[00:23:48.250]of kilograms of CO2 per kilometer of tunnel,
[00:23:51.505]and there's 100 kilometer tunnel, so you get about 500 kilotons of CO2.
[00:23:56.370]Okay.
[00:23:56.672]Two different calculation, very two different ways
[00:23:59.021]they come out within a factor, two of each other.
[00:24:01.604]If you're a physicist, you say, okay, that's close enough.
[00:24:03.517]And factor two, we got it about right.
[00:24:06.637]Okay, But how many how many physicists are going to be using this?
[00:24:09.288]5000 or so.
[00:24:10.898]Okay, So that's like 500 tons of carbon for physicists just to put up the tunnel.
[00:24:15.629]You can argue about that denominator, right?
[00:24:17.039]Hopefully we're serving all of humanity, not just a few physicists, but
[00:24:20.193]it's a lot of a lot of cement and a lot of carbon.
[00:24:23.380]You'd have to you'd have to build plants, 6 million trees to offset that.
[00:24:27.272]For comparison,
[00:24:28.983]a recent skyscraper, right, One World Trade Center in New York City,
[00:24:33.681]the carbon associated with
[00:24:34.788]that is about 200 kilotons of carbon of CO2 equivalent.
[00:24:38.949]So we're talking about building, you know, basically multiple skyscrapers
[00:24:41.935]underground and and and the concomitant carbon impact.
[00:24:46.532]Right.
[00:24:46.766]So the sort of environmental scrutiny that developing a set of sky
[00:24:51.531]skyscrapers would receive, you have to expect that we're going
[00:24:53.544]to get the same sort of scrutiny for trying to build these infrastructures.
[00:24:58.040]We run these detectors.
[00:24:59.047]I told you a bit about the detector.
[00:25:00.322]The most surprising thing I've learned from working on this is that
[00:25:03.912]the carbon emissions from CERN are dominated, in fact,
[00:25:06.999]by the gases we use inside the detectors to do these experiments.
[00:25:10.824]You might think at first it's the electric power to run the LHC.
[00:25:14.213]But no, it's not.
[00:25:16.494]So okay, a few some terminology,
[00:25:18.474]some when you're counting carbon, it comes in different scopes.
[00:25:21.628]Scope one is direct emissions from the organization, right?
[00:25:25.252]This is the carbon you're making yourself.
[00:25:27.131]Scope two are indirect emissions from things like electricity, right?
[00:25:31.426]So someone else is emitting the carbon to generate the electricity,
[00:25:34.244]you take advantage of it, that falls under scope.
[00:25:36.257]Two So the CERN environmental report here covering years 2017 through 20,
[00:25:41.525]they've divided emissions up into scope one and scope two in the different years.
[00:25:46.893]The electricity to run the LHC falls into scope two,
[00:25:50.215]and that's a small amount of emissions compared to what you're getting in scope,
[00:25:54.208]one which is dominated by the experiments itself and the gases that we're using
[00:25:58.436]both for detecting particles and for cooling the detectors.
[00:26:03.536]Yeah,
[00:26:04.106]So getting into the, you know, the hundreds of kilotons
[00:26:07.092]for the work of, you know, maybe, you know, ten or 20,000 people
[00:26:10.481]and this is per year, right?
[00:26:11.857]So again, not far above the one ton per person,
[00:26:15.145]per year, some of these chemicals.
[00:26:18.198]Yeah, right.
[00:26:18.601]It is for it's these pouring gases
[00:26:21.654]and they turn out to be to have really significant global warming potential.
[00:26:24.842]Yeah.
[00:26:24.943]Most of the emissions are coming in situ H2 F
[00:26:28.298]for that 70% of the emissions coming from the detectors.
[00:26:31.653]And you know, that's a gas that has a 13 an impact of 1300 times
[00:26:37.257]that of CO2 for the same
[00:26:38.632]the same amount of gas emitted and some of the other gases that we emit
[00:26:42.357]in smaller amounts have even greater global warming potential. So,
[00:26:46.484]you know, so we we really have to be paying attention to the gases we use.
[00:26:49.537]The gases were great for particle physics purposes, Right?
[00:26:51.986]They do what they need to in the detector,
[00:26:54.570]but you need to start looking at potential alternatives.
[00:26:57.019]And there is all sorts of issues there.
[00:26:58.529]You need something that functions just as well, but you need to have also safety.
[00:27:01.985]It turns out that the gases that have less,
[00:27:05.240]less global warming impact also turn out to be more flammable.
[00:27:07.656]So we have safety issues there
[00:27:09.031]and these are things we have to be thinking about going into the future
[00:27:13.360]computing.
[00:27:13.896]I talked about, you know, the hundreds, you know,
[00:27:15.574]the petabytes of data that we produce in these experiments per year.
[00:27:18.896]You got to compute them on all of that.
[00:27:20.741]Usually with all that data,
[00:27:22.050]we do it on this campus with with the Tier two computing center that we host
[00:27:25.204]the experiment
[00:27:26.915]overall
[00:27:28.257]data centers, computing in general contribute
[00:27:30.807]a relatively small amount of global greenhouse gas emissions at the moment,
[00:27:34.599]but we can expect this is only going to grow as we do
[00:27:36.981]more and more computing and more data intensive things.
[00:27:40.303]So you can start to think about things just like
[00:27:42.718]where do you put your computing centers
[00:27:44.295]and what is the cleanliness of the power that you that you get there.
[00:27:48.188]The biggest rabbit hole I went down putting this together,
[00:27:51.375]there's a website electricity map Thorne, that purports to show in real time
[00:27:56.307]what the what the carbon impact of electricity is region
[00:27:59.461]by region right in it.
[00:28:00.334]And of course there are different electric grids.
[00:28:03.219]Yeah we're on a river for in here somewhere.
[00:28:05.870]I think
[00:28:07.078]if you don't have the state outlines it's hard to tell where your for your city is.
[00:28:09.594]Right.
[00:28:11.138]We have a major computing center in Florida.
[00:28:12.883]It's in it's
[00:28:13.822]it's in Gainesville at the University of Florida,
[00:28:15.500]which has some of the dirtiest power in the country.
[00:28:18.217]Should we have put it there had we been thinking about the carbon impacts?
[00:28:20.935]Maybe not now, of course, here too, right?
[00:28:24.257]If you look towards the further future are the electric grid.
[00:28:28.183]This shouldn't have so much of an impact in the future.
[00:28:30.364]But once we're all driving electric cars and once we're using
[00:28:33.618]electricity for that, you start to have a supply problem with electricity.
[00:28:37.041]Right.
[00:28:37.309]And whether we can produce enough electricity through non-fossil
[00:28:41.000]fuel sources to meet all the demand that's going to be out there,
[00:28:45.261]We do our work in places.
[00:28:46.872]We do our work at labs, we do our work on campuses.
[00:28:49.556]And so what our campus is doing, what's our campus doing anyway?
[00:28:52.945]Look at this. I'll tell you a bit about it.
[00:28:54.253]I looked at it, so we recently got a gold rating for sustainability
[00:28:58.884]from this organization called the Association
[00:29:00.696]for Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education.
[00:29:03.548]Our overall score was 65.84 out of 100.
[00:29:06.265]So that looks to me like a grade, but it got it got a gold rating in it.
[00:29:11.097]65 is their threshold
[00:29:12.842]from this organization to get to go from silver to gold.
[00:29:17.271]Right.
[00:29:17.573]And this organization
[00:29:18.311]gives a scorecard that you can use to to to to evaluate your institution.
[00:29:23.545]A lot of the points in the
[00:29:24.686]score, though, go to things like teaching about
[00:29:29.182]teaching, about sustainability, doing research, about sustainability,
[00:29:32.068]all good things to do.
[00:29:33.477]But the bottom line is
[00:29:34.853]what are you actually doing in terms of your own carbon emissions?
[00:29:38.275]And here are some of the university scores on our operations,
[00:29:41.832]right on on our buildings, on our energy usage and our points
[00:29:46.797]totals, there are well below 50%.
[00:29:50.622]The university does have a sustainability master plan.
[00:29:52.871]You can find it online, you can read it, but you got to wonder if the university
[00:29:57.165]is really engaged in this and is willing to put resources behind it.
[00:30:01.527]You're in the in the introduction.
[00:30:02.936]The plan is described
[00:30:03.742]as an aspirational framework for change, which suggests, you know,
[00:30:06.862]okay, we're hoping we'll do this.
[00:30:08.607]In fact, the word the were you know, I did assert the word
[00:30:11.392]aspirational appeared 19 times in the text in the text of the report.
[00:30:15.787]You know, which which which makes it makes you wonder
[00:30:17.666]if or if we're going to be working towards those goals
[00:30:19.948]and making the necessary investments we have.
[00:30:23.270]We sometimes track our own greenhouse gas emissions in scopes one and two.
[00:30:27.195]You can find this on the web.
[00:30:28.705]The plots only go up to 2014.
[00:30:30.383]I guess we stopped ten years ago.
[00:30:32.027]I was starting to tracking this, although there's also there's not a graph,
[00:30:35.416]but there's a claim that in 2019 that we had emissions, right?
[00:30:38.905]So in 2014 we were down to 5.15
[00:30:43.703]tons per
[00:30:44.743]square foot and what, nine and a half tons per full time equivalent student.
[00:30:49.877]And by 2019 we were claiming lower numbers.
[00:30:51.957]But there's nothing on the web that says any updates since then.
[00:30:55.917]And, you know, honestly, we're not going to make any progress
[00:30:58.534]on meeting sustainability goals
[00:30:59.943]unless we actually have targets that we're trying to reach and understood
[00:31:03.802]pathways and strategies that we're going to to to to meet those.
[00:31:07.761]And then, of course, to track progress. Right.
[00:31:09.170]You know, if you're doing well, unless you're actually doing the measurements.
[00:31:11.686]So I hope that we're still actually
[00:31:13.733]tracking this and just not updating the website.
[00:31:15.344]But, you know, we should all be asking the leadership why?
[00:31:18.263]Why are we not publishing?
[00:31:19.739]You know,
[00:31:20.544]I've looked at a lot of universities and many of them are tracking
[00:31:24.168]this much more actively.
[00:31:26.416]Yeah.
[00:31:26.752]Other. Yeah.
[00:31:27.490]Why am I looking at other universities, right.
[00:31:29.134]Because it turns out,
[00:31:30.174]you know, if you tell someone that you've got a seminar to give about
[00:31:33.496]particle physics and climate change, they'll say, Can you come here next week?
[00:31:36.985]These are all the places I've gotten on an airplane to, to,
[00:31:39.569]to go give a variant of this talk.
[00:31:42.387]Yeah. So I've looked up
[00:31:44.636]all these schools out and about.
[00:31:45.776]I've sort of looked up
[00:31:46.414]what their, what they have to say about sustainability on their websites.
[00:31:50.608]Yeah.
[00:31:51.078]So I'm getting on a plane each of those times.
[00:31:53.728]I mean I could give the talk by Zoom right.
[00:31:56.413]But it would, you know, it would be a very different experience for all involved.
[00:32:00.640]Right?
[00:32:00.875]You don't get to have the same sorts of conversations
[00:32:03.325]that you have with people over Zoom than you do
[00:32:05.103]if you go to a place and you get to sit around and talk to people for a day,
[00:32:08.861]you know? Right.
[00:32:09.364]So particle physicists are famous for their travel, right?
[00:32:11.545]Because basically no one has a particle accelerator at home.
[00:32:14.397]You got to go to some remote site that often involves getting on a plane.
[00:32:17.585]You're going to meet people in various places.
[00:32:20.369]Air travel at the moment is, you know, only 2% of global emissions.
[00:32:24.396]But at least before the pandemic, when there was a big reset,
[00:32:26.946]it was rising pretty rapidly.
[00:32:28.858]And this is something that's hard to decarbonize, right, that you can
[00:32:33.891]I mean, the the electric plane
[00:32:35.636]is basically a flying battery riding about a battery with wings on it.
[00:32:40.401]And, you know, one of one feature of
[00:32:43.722]jet fuel powered planes. Right.
[00:32:44.964]Is that they they get lighter as you fly them.
[00:32:46.675]And that has impacts for for takeoff and landing.
[00:32:49.024]That wouldn't take
[00:32:49.561]that wouldn't be the case for the for the electric battery plane, except there's
[00:32:53.151]an equals empty squared sort of sense, but it's too small to make a difference.
[00:32:56.473]Okay. Okay. Tim, got that joke. Very good.
[00:32:59.627]But, you know, the pandemic, when we had to put
[00:33:02.814]a stop to travel for a while, it gave us a real opportunity to evaluate,
[00:33:07.176]evaluate the necessity of travel.
[00:33:08.719]And we got a better understanding of what
[00:33:10.699]what could be done remotely,
[00:33:11.706]but also what can't be done remotely and what it's important to be in person
[00:33:14.927]for so we can think about what we can do on these fronts, right?
[00:33:18.215]Can we optimize, experiment work?
[00:33:20.329]Can we do more remote control of experiments?
[00:33:22.778]Do you don't have to send people to turn to do things.
[00:33:26.033]Can we improve meeting technology, do something better than Zoom
[00:33:29.187]so that people don't feel like they have to be proximate to people to
[00:33:32.743]to have the interaction they need?
[00:33:34.958]Can we do more work in regional centers?
[00:33:36.669]Could we gather people
[00:33:37.843]in more local places rather than flying everyone to CERN conferences?
[00:33:41.937]Well, conferences are fun, but, you know, are they really necessary at this point?
[00:33:45.561]It used to be in academia to find out what was going on.
[00:33:48.715]You had to go to a conference and meet other people.
[00:33:51.231]Now it's on a website overnight and you can find out what's going on.
[00:33:55.459]Is it necessary for career development and to to show yourself
[00:33:58.512]for networking and stuff like that or can this be done in other ways?
[00:34:02.102]Some people have looked at this and estimated that,
[00:34:04.048]you know, it's one ton of carbon per per participants per conference.
[00:34:08.309]So, you know, remember, you only get one ton a year and you just
[00:34:10.490]you just spent it on the conference you went to for a week.
[00:34:13.644]So you know, ideas there. Right.
[00:34:15.322]More accessible venues make it easier for people to get to them,
[00:34:18.275]have more virtual conferences.
[00:34:20.120]Does an annual conference really need to be an annual conference?
[00:34:22.939]Can you do it every other year?
[00:34:24.717]Could you have a distributed conference instead of everyone
[00:34:26.898]gathering in one place?
[00:34:27.737]Could they meet in several different places, simultaneous sleep?
[00:34:30.824]We can think about all of these things,
[00:34:32.065]and hopefully some judicious choices can have an impact.
[00:34:35.924]So how do we do big science sustainably?
[00:34:38.742]How do we do big science in the climate emergency?
[00:34:41.292]The issues certainly are not going to go away.
[00:34:43.070]So we have to be prepared for this stuff.
[00:34:44.849]I think we certainly had to be expecting
[00:34:46.426]more stringent review of environmental impacts.
[00:34:49.513]We have to be prepared to answer questions about our environmental impacts.
[00:34:53.036]We have to be
[00:34:54.948]proactive about what we're
[00:34:55.921]going to do right to set concrete goals for reduction, for reduction of emissions
[00:35:00.384]and have defined pathways for meeting them,
[00:35:02.565]and also to consider the evolving context, right.
[00:35:04.645]That that if we're really going to have, for instance, a a decarbonized
[00:35:08.034]grid, we have to if we're planning future facilities, we have to think about
[00:35:11.154]what the carbon situation will be like at that future time.
[00:35:15.348]What I hope we can see and it's going to need sort of action from
[00:35:19.073]the federal funding agencies to make this happen
[00:35:21.858]is that we can invest in a zero carbon future for big science
[00:35:25.213]by letting scientists
[00:35:26.488]spend some of their research time on directly challenging the challenge,
[00:35:30.011]directly tackling challenges related to climate change
[00:35:32.427]in the specific context of their discipline.
[00:35:34.406]That is to say, you know, to do things like research on on
[00:35:39.238]low carbon building materials could be considered particle physics,
[00:35:42.291]a form of particle physics, right?
[00:35:43.466]Because you're doing that to support
[00:35:45.311]construction of future facilities and let me, as a particle physicist,
[00:35:48.935]get funded to do that kind of research in support of this global enterprise.
[00:35:53.062]And certainly,
[00:35:53.867]you know,
[00:35:54.270]from the things we've done, the things we've talked about,
[00:35:55.948]you can imagine some of the topics that that could be useful for research
[00:35:59.739]in the future.
[00:36:01.685]I don't want to
[00:36:02.255]suggest that particle physicist can do it all, to stop it,
[00:36:05.443]to stop global climate change, just a small part of the world.
[00:36:09.604]It's really going to take a societal response.
[00:36:12.456]But I still think that we can we should be able to to lead the way
[00:36:15.677]in sustainable science.
[00:36:17.489]And even though there's a tremendous number of challenges out there,
[00:36:20.978]you know, the climate scientists say that, you know, it's
[00:36:23.058]we still have time to make a difference here and make some changes
[00:36:26.313]if we get going on it now.
[00:36:27.722]So I encourage you to all think about how you can take part in this.
[00:36:30.776]Thank you.
[00:36:37.016]And I'm going to sit for be so
[00:36:39.533]focused.
[00:36:48.626]Yeah, and that was a great talk.
[00:36:53.994]Thanks for that.
[00:36:56.074]It occurs to me, though, that that if we could just
[00:36:59.799]get Fusion energy working, this would solve all our problems.
[00:37:04.194]So maybe the federal government
[00:37:05.570]ought to mandate that all physicists go into amo physics to make fusion energy
[00:37:11.173]work instead of this elitist, reductionist
[00:37:14.160]scientific research that you're doing,
[00:37:16.810]your virtual summit.
[00:37:22.917]A Yes, I mean, there's a variety of investments typically making
[00:37:27.447]in research and development to support all sorts of things,
[00:37:31.574]to help help help support climate science.
[00:37:37.982]Our country is under investigation for that
[00:37:43.116]for competitiveness and to address it.
[00:37:46.505]They'll be doing more for your country if you can find it.
[00:37:53.215]Am I my point people over the parentheses.
[00:37:58.483]I'm kind of
[00:38:00.429]cynical. It
[00:38:14.119]I think this
[00:38:15.192]this is hurt
[00:38:19.286]because it's her It's her
[00:38:23.111]in view not
[00:38:54.114]a microphone
[00:39:17.970]the energy doing your play and
[00:39:22.433]and you how how do I remain optimistic in the face of this
[00:39:26.056]and when maybe things aren't trending in the right direction.
[00:39:30.016]Yes. I mean fusion is is is a hard problem
[00:39:33.405]and know we'll see if it's as promising as Tim thinks.
[00:39:37.632]Our optimism I mean, I you know, I couldn't believe that
[00:39:40.686]I were in too optimistic. Right.
[00:39:41.927]I mean, I couldn't I couldn't be an educator if I weren't optimistic.
[00:39:44.645]Do we have to?
[00:39:45.484]We have to believe that that we can make a change in that every individual
[00:39:48.872]can can count in making a change?
[00:39:52.094]You know, it's going to again, you know, it won't all be on individuals.
[00:39:56.187]We have to as a society, we have to act as a society.
[00:40:00.448]And. Okay.
[00:40:01.153]Worried about the future?
[00:40:01.891]I mean, Yes.
[00:40:02.394]So, I mean, these future facilities that we're talking about building right.
[00:40:05.750]There aren't going to be operating until 2040.
[00:40:09.105]I mean, I'm I'm I'm going to turn 70 in 2040, Right?
[00:40:11.856]I mean, I'm going to I'm not expecting to be doing doing
[00:40:15.681]science at these at these facilities.
[00:40:19.003]But people who came before me
[00:40:21.855]invested their own effort to make the current facilities possible.
[00:40:26.083]And, you know, it's it's part of my job as as a part of this community
[00:40:29.002]to invest in making these things possible for people in the future.
[00:40:32.961]Right.
[00:40:33.297]I mean, you know, people you know, the you know, you plant the carob tree.
[00:40:37.591]It takes 100 years for it to bear fruit.
[00:40:39.370]That doesn't stop people from planting carob trees.
[00:40:41.618]They're thinking about the future.
[00:40:50.308]Really. It's like I enjoyed it.
[00:40:52.288]It feels like also in a similarly pessimistic view is right nowadays,
[00:40:57.992]what an average
[00:40:58.797]person can do to help reduce their carbon footprint is to pay money
[00:41:03.696]or to invest in their own, you know, carbon offsets.
[00:41:08.762]You can, you know, purchase plane tickets and then pay a little extra
[00:41:12.117]to offset that carbon footprint.
[00:41:13.728]So all the stresses placed on the individual
[00:41:16.714]in the similar manner for these projects as someone who's led,
[00:41:21.143]you know, large task and big organizations,
[00:41:24.767]do you see the potential of having a carbon offset
[00:41:28.357]in budget proposals for these big projects?
[00:41:32.417]I mean, that's really a possibility.
[00:41:35.001]E I mean, even now,
[00:41:37.920]I mean, you know, this is a topic I didn't choose too to include.
[00:41:41.745]You're looking at Fermilab, right?
[00:41:43.557]The main particle physics lab in the US,
[00:41:46.308]because, I mean, the Department of Energy required it requires
[00:41:48.690]all the labs to track their track their carbon emissions.
[00:41:52.146]And I mean, Fermilab is buying carbon offsets, right?
[00:41:55.065]As you know, that that's what they did that at at the lab to help offset their
[00:42:00.400]offset their emission. The
[00:42:04.259]right I mean,
[00:42:07.211]there are some interests out there that I think
[00:42:08.721]would like to see this all put on you.
[00:42:10.231]This is all, you know, you as an individual's job to do something about it.
[00:42:13.150]We're not going to solve this as individuals want to electric vehicles.
[00:42:17.244]We're going to need to develop a suitable infrastructure for that.
[00:42:20.331]And that requires the government like Cheryl Klein.
[00:42:23.652]I mean, you know, I gave a version of this talk to Cornell and your two days later,
[00:42:28.618]you know, the professors there who I know, you know, wrote to me and said, well,
[00:42:32.645]you know, after hearing your talk, I went I went and you wrote down
[00:42:35.295]I mean, I tried to figure out my own carbon footprint.
[00:42:38.349]You know, I you know, we're vegetarians.
[00:42:40.194]We drive a Tesla, you know, all all, all these things that are
[00:42:43.247]that are in our in our favor.
[00:42:44.858]And, you know, I'm already at five
[00:42:47.844]tons a year, and that would be naked living in a cave right?
[00:42:51.099]And so, yeah, I mean, just just these individual
[00:42:53.246]individual choices are not going to be enough.
[00:42:55.092]We need we need societal action.
[00:42:58.313]Okay.
[00:42:58.682]Here comes a question from June.
[00:42:59.655]Yeah, I
[00:43:18.981]microphone is cutting into that.
[00:43:19.954]Also saying that.
[00:43:22.639]Okay, so this one is from Patrick Bitterman,
[00:43:24.484]our first speaker in this series this year.
[00:43:27.135]He said, thank you. That was quite excellent.
[00:43:28.879]You've done a great job
[00:43:30.020]laying out the climate costs of big science and particle physics.
[00:43:34.114]But from the perspective of a cost benefit analysis,
[00:43:37.737]I wonder what is the potential of your type of research to lead
[00:43:40.690]to innovations that can mitigate the climate emergency?
[00:43:44.146]Are they mostly related to computational advances in materials
[00:43:47.367]science, or are there any other potential benefits?
[00:43:52.232]I mean, this is always getting back to the sort of basic research question, right?
[00:43:55.487]What is the value of basic research?
[00:43:57.366]And you can't know, right?
[00:43:58.876]I mean, there is you know, I mean, we're not doing anything,
[00:44:02.902]you know, directly in our research that is targeted towards addressing
[00:44:06.157]climate change. Right now.
[00:44:07.029]This is really elementary particle physics.
[00:44:09.445]But, you know, it's it's hard to predict the
[00:44:14.847]what technologies will
[00:44:15.988]emerge out of the science that gets done.
[00:44:19.243]You know, if you go back, you know, the postwar
[00:44:22.698]you know, when people were busy studying the magnetic moments of nuclei,
[00:44:26.456]no one was figuring at the time that this would
[00:44:29.006]lead to important advances in medical imaging.
[00:44:32.127]But that's what the MRI is
[00:44:34.744]actually that emerged from basic research.
[00:44:37.260]We're also investing in in people. Right.
[00:44:39.811]All these people were training as scientists.
[00:44:41.455]They're not all going to say in particle physicists,
[00:44:43.636]but hopefully we're setting them up to do great, interesting things
[00:44:46.857]and for them to pursue the important problems of the day.
[00:44:51.286]So, no,
[00:44:52.762]I don't have any magic bullet solutions here.
[00:44:54.909]Right. But Berber,
[00:44:57.057]you know, investing in basic research in general.
[00:44:58.802]And this, you know, there's going to apply to many areas of basic research
[00:45:02.559]will develop new things.
[00:45:04.103]We can't predict what their potential is, but maybe something will emerge.
[00:45:19.000]All right.
[00:45:20.477]So part of the problem with concrete is just that the chemical reaction
[00:45:23.497]needed to produce it.
[00:45:24.369]Yeah. Gives off CO2.
[00:45:26.281]So that means basically you're you'd have to be looking for a substitute
[00:45:30.207]rather than make it better.
[00:45:31.818]Is that right? I think so, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
[00:45:33.562]Are there substitutes that you all can use to do some of what?
[00:45:38.126]I mean, people are certainly looking at this, right.
[00:45:40.105]But I mean I'm not, I'm not an expert in this, but I mean,
[00:45:44.199]I mean it's going to be something that you can do at scale
[00:45:46.279]and then you can do it at a reasonable price.
[00:45:47.990]And I think those are going to be the challenges there.
[00:45:50.842]Yeah, but I mean,
[00:45:51.748]I mean, given that the construction industry overall is 10%
[00:45:54.466]carbon emissions, right? This is
[00:45:56.714]going to be a field of interest beyond particle physics.
[00:45:58.425]I think, you know,
[00:45:59.734]it strikes me that a lot of the uses of concrete for ordinary buildings,
[00:46:03.391]you could probably swap out some things, but it's not so clear when you're building
[00:46:06.579]underground tunnels. Right? Right. We're right.
[00:46:08.659]A hundred kilometers underground.
[00:46:10.135]You know what the geology is and what the what the requirements are on that.
[00:46:13.289]Absolutely.
[00:46:26.006]Okay.
[00:46:27.851]I've got till 630.
[00:46:31.005]Sorry for this very amateurish question, but
[00:46:35.099]there's all this tunneling under the earth.
[00:46:37.816]Does it have any geological effects?
[00:46:42.078]I mean, we're all upset about shale drilling for shale.
[00:46:45.567]Is this I'm comparable.
[00:46:49.627]I mean, I think I mean, the drilling
[00:46:51.238]for shale oil, I mean, I think the
[00:46:54.257]I think the issue there is just how, you know, the fossil fuels and the carbon
[00:46:57.747]are releasing more than
[00:47:00.062]like I said, I don't know much.
[00:47:01.874]I guess there are some concerns about about seismic effects from this
[00:47:07.477]is carefully studied is all I can say right.
[00:47:09.457]I mean, they're very attuned to just what sort of rock
[00:47:12.678]your your tunneling through and what
[00:47:15.933]you want to write.
[00:47:16.872]I mean, you want to do it in in a way that that won't have impacts.
[00:47:20.731]And I mean, let's go back to the map here.
[00:47:24.522]I mean, you know, the
[00:47:27.106]you know, it's here in this orientation for a.
[00:47:29.186]Right.
[00:47:29.454]I mean, they're looking at what the geology is in
[00:47:32.508]and where they'd be tunneling through.
[00:47:33.716]And that's that's why this proposed siting as opposed to some other way
[00:47:37.541]that you could orient a 100 kilometer ring somewhere near CERN.
[00:47:40.527]So including, you know, going under the lake. Right.
[00:47:43.043]That was considered favorable
[00:47:45.426]for the geology rather than
[00:47:46.499]to keep the whole thing under land.
[00:47:57.605]When you had this slide that showed the high carbon
[00:48:02.538]equivalent of
[00:48:06.363]the gases used were
[00:48:10.557]detectors, is that assuming
[00:48:14.785]how much is actually getting out of the detector?
[00:48:17.670]Yeah. Yeah.
[00:48:18.576]So this is leakage.
[00:48:20.019]This is a detector. Yeah, that's the leakage.
[00:48:22.133]Can could that leakage be decreased?
[00:48:24.750]Could it be recycled?
[00:48:26.226]Oh, I mean, absolutely. Absolutely. We're working on it. Right.
[00:48:28.676]I mean to I mean there is, you know, when we have,
[00:48:31.494]you know,
[00:48:31.729]long shutdowns of the accelerator and we have access to detector, there is,
[00:48:34.816]you know, big campaigns to try to to try to find leaks and repair them.
[00:48:38.809]You know, some of the stuff is pretty deep inside the detector.
[00:48:41.560]Right. And hard to get to.
[00:48:42.365]And you're going to be running this for four years more.
[00:48:45.754]But he has also efforts to recirculate the gas, recuperate the gas, which
[00:48:49.982]as I understand it, you know, basically clean it up so you can re-use it.
[00:48:54.075]Yeah, I mean, it this is this is definitely noticed.
[00:48:56.894]And there's definitely,
[00:48:57.867]you know, CERN wide efforts to try to try to address some of these issues.
[00:49:01.289]So, yeah, it's it is a known problem that it's it's being worked on, I guess.
[00:49:05.785]I mean, another
[00:49:07.496]interesting feature is I mean,
[00:49:08.637]all these fluorine gases are pretty highly regulated within the EU
[00:49:12.697]and they're ramping down production, ramping down availability.
[00:49:15.113]So looking towards the far future of these experiments,
[00:49:17.361]will we've been able to get our hands on enough gas to operate them, right?
[00:49:20.381]Maybe we'll have to think even sooner
[00:49:22.058]about how we can adjust the gas mixtures to, you know, to,
[00:49:25.078]to, to have a sufficient supply yet meet the needs of the experiment.
[00:49:28.870]Thank you.
[00:49:39.539]So there's the problem of putting a hole in the ozone,
[00:49:45.176]and we're going to run out of that with the greenhouse gases.
[00:49:48.465]But it seems like there's another kind of
[00:49:55.611]sustainability problem,
[00:49:56.853]which is sustainability of dollars and sustainability of people.
[00:50:03.127]If indeed we take the social approach and say, you know, each culture
[00:50:09.905]around the world, each government
[00:50:11.448]and each nation is going to have to be responsible for addressing climate change.
[00:50:15.139]And that is, as you say, the only way that it will change.
[00:50:19.937]That will
[00:50:20.743]mean directing more people towards this problem that are currently
[00:50:23.662]working on it, directing more dollars, research dollars that exist
[00:50:27.554]or funded by each separate government towards this problem and
[00:50:32.922]I mean, is there a risk that the cost of saving this kind of science
[00:50:36.781]is diverting the people in dollars to that kind of science,
[00:50:40.337]which then means you have nobody left to do particle physics or whatever?
[00:50:44.397]The other thing is,
[00:50:45.773]there are so few people in the world doing particle physics as it is, right?
[00:50:48.457]I mean, I that's I think it's going to be relatively small impact.
[00:50:52.517]But again, I mean, the point
[00:50:53.524]I made before more generally, I mean, I mean, we're underinvesting in
[00:50:56.778]in the sort of research that will attack these problems, right?
[00:50:59.127]I mean, we should be trying to draw more people into this,
[00:51:03.623]you know, through support for education, through support for research
[00:51:06.609]at universities and elsewhere.
[00:51:07.885]And hopefully we can, you know, I mean, it's
[00:51:10.703]I hope it's not a zero sum game, right?
[00:51:12.381]We won't be able to generate more scientists
[00:51:13.823]if we keep saying we need more scientists. Right.
[00:51:15.568]And we need them for things like this.
[00:51:17.581]But we were going to make the investments to to educate people.
[00:51:22.111]And that's you know, it takes a long time to to be a trained scientist.
[00:51:25.735]We got to invest in K-12, We've got to invest in universities,
[00:51:28.788]and we have to make, you know, good lives for scientists
[00:51:31.405]that they'll want to pursue this thing.
[00:51:35.733]And, you know, there's the federal budget is big, right?
[00:51:39.055]And there are many choices that can be made.
[00:51:40.464]And, you know, these sorts of things are a very small part of it.
[00:51:46.437]I have a certain bias.
[00:51:48.282]Fine. That
[00:52:00.093]are. Thank you very much.
[00:52:01.435]Okay. Thank you.

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How to Do Big Science in a Climate Emergency? | CAS Inquire

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