Tonight, I'd like to

tell you about one

of the big questions in science.

It's a question that

goes back at least two

and a half thousand years,

to the ancient Greeks.

And it's a question that has

been discussed in this room

many, many times over

the past 200 years,

but it's an important question.

And I think it's important

that we revisit it.

And the question is simply this.

It's, what are we made of?

What are the fundamental

building blocks of nature

that you and me and everything

else in the universe

are constructed from?

That's the story I'd

like to tell you.

So what I'd like to do is

try and give you an overview

of our current understanding.

I'd also like to

try and give you

an overview of where we hope

to go in the future, of what

progress we can we can hope

to make in the next few years

and few decades.

And we're going to cover quite

a lot of ground in this talk.

I should warn you now,

not least because I'm

going to discuss every

single thing in the universe,

quite literally.

We're going to talk,

amongst other things,

about what's happening at the

world's most powerful particle

collider.

This is a machine that's called

the Large Hadron Collider,

or the LHC for short.

It'll come up a

lot in this talk.

And it's a machine which

is based underground

in a place called CERN which

is just outside Geneva.

We'll also talk

about experiments

in the last few years that

look backwards in time

towards the Big

Bang, that give us

some understanding

about what was happening

in the first few

fractions of a second

after time itself

started to exist.

And on top of all

this, I also want

to give you some idea about

the theoretical abstract ideas,

and even a little bit of an

idea about the mathematics that

underlies our current

understanding of the universe.

Because I'm a

theoretical physicist.

What I do is study the

equations, try to understand

the equations, that govern

the world we live in.

And so, I'd just like to

give you a flavour of what

that's about.

At some point-- I

should warn you now.

At some point, I'm even going

to show you an equation.

You know, you can get

sent on training courses

for this kind of thing.

There's a number one rule.

The number one rule is never

show them any equations.

If you show them equations,

you'll just terrify them.

At some point in

this lecture, you're

all going to be terrified,

so just prepare yourselves.

OK?

OK.

You know, there's a traditional

way to start talks like this.

The traditional way

is to be very cultured

and talk about what

Democritus and Lucretius said

two and a half thousand

years ago and the ideas

that the ancient

Greeks had about atoms.

But you know, I don't

want to start like this.

We've made a lot of progress in

two and a half thousand years,

and you know, there's

just better places

to kick off a science talk.

So the first modern

picture that we

had of what the universe is made

of, everything we're made of,

is this.

So I hope this is familiar

to most people here.

This is the periodic

table of elements.

OK?

It's one of the most iconic

images in all of science.

What we have here are

120-ish different elements.

I should point out, no

less than 10 of which

were discovered in this very

building, and which constitute,

or at least in the

1800s were thought

to constitute everything

that existed in nature.

So it's certainly true

that any material you get,

you can distill it down

into its component parts,

and you'll find that all

of those component parts

are made of one of

these 120 elements.

So it's a great

moment in science.

It's really one of the

triumphs of science.

It's also, I should add,

the reason that I stopped

doing chemistry in school.

Because if you're a chemist,

this is basically as good

as it gets.

You know, if we're honest,

it's kind of a mess.

Everything in the

universe is classified

into things on the

left that go bang

if you put them in water through

things on the right which,

really if we're honest,

don't do very much at all.

You kind of organise everything

into these stupid shapes.

And it looks a little

bit like Australia.

There's a big dip in the

top, and then there's

these two strips of

elements that you

have to put along the

bottom, because there's

no room for them in the

middle where they belong.

You know, I don't

know about you,

if I was asked to come up with

a fundamental classification

of everything in

the universe, this

isn't what I would

have gone for.

Are there any chemists

in the audience?

[LAUGHING]

I'm sorry for you.

OK.

But you know, I'm

not alone in this.

It's not just me that

thinks this is a silly way

to organise nature.

Nature itself thinks this is a

silly way to organise nature.

Of course, we know this

isn't the fundamental-- this

isn't the end of the story.

This isn't the fundamental

building blocks.

And the first person to realise

there's that there's something

deeper than this was a Cambridge

physicist called JJ Thomson.

So at the end of the

1800s, JJ Thomson

discovered a particle that

was smaller than an atom

that we now call the electron.

And in 1897, he announced

this in this room-- in fact,

in this very lecture series--

to a stunned

audience, an audience

that was so stunned

at least half of them

didn't believe

what he was saying.

There was one very

distinguished scientist

who afterwards told JJ Thomson

he thought the whole thing was

a hoax, that JJ Thomson had

just been pulling their leg.

But of course, it's not a hoax.

This isn't the fundamental

elements of nature.

And within 15 years of

JJ Thomson's discovery,

his successor in Cambridge, a

man called Ernest Rutherford,

had figured out exactly what

these atoms are made of.

And this is the picture that

Rutherford came up with.

So we now know that

each of these elements

consists of a nucleus,

which is tiny.

The metaphor that Rutherford

himself used was it's like

a fly in the centre

of the cathedral.

And then orbiting this

nucleus in, I should add,

fairly blurry orbits,

are the electrons,

which sort of fill out very

sparsely the rest of the space.

So that's a picture

of these atoms.

Subsequently, we learned

that the nucleus is not

itself fundamental.

The nucleus contains

smaller particles.

They're particles that we

call protons and neutrons.

And in the 1970s, we learned

that the protons and neutrons

aren't fundamental either.

So in the 1970s, we learned that

inside each proton and neutron

are three smaller particles

that we call quarks.

There are two different

kinds of quarks.

By the 1970s, I'm

guessing physicists

didn't have a classical

Greek education,

and had kind of run

out of classy names.

So we call these quarks the

up quark and the down quark.

OK?

For no good reason.

It's not like the up quark is

higher than the down quark.

It's not like it points up.

Just no good reason at all.

The up quark and the down quark.

So the proton consists of two

up quarks and a down quark.

And the neutron consists of two

down quarks and an up quark.

This, as far as we know, are

the fundamental building blocks

of nature.

We've never discovered anything

smaller than the electron,

and we've never discovered

anything smaller

than the quarks.

So we have three particles

of which everything we know

is made.

And it's worth stressing,

that's kind of astonishing.

You know?

We sort of take it for granted.

We learn this in school.

We don't really think

about it deeply.

Everything we see in the

world, all the diversity

in the natural world, you,

me, everything around us,

just the same three

particles with slightly

different rearrangements

repeated over and over

and over again.

It's an amazing lesson

to draw about how

the world is put together.

So that's what we have.

We have an electron

and two quarks.

And you know, these aren't the

fundamental building blocks

that the Greeks

had thought about,

and they're certainly not the

fundamental building blocks

that the Victorians

had thought about.

But you know, the spirit of the

issue really hasn't changed.

The spirit is exactly

what Democritus

said 2,500 years ago, that

they're like LEGO bricks

from which everything in

the world is constructed.

These LEGO bricks are

particles, and the particles

are the electron and two quarks.

It's a very nice picture.

It's a very comforting picture.

It's the picture we

teach kids at school.

It's the picture we

even teach students

in undergraduate university.

And there's a problem with it.

The problem is it's a lie.

It's a white lie.

It's a white lie that

we tell our children

because we don't

want to expose them

to the difficult and horrible

truth too early on it.

It makes it easier to

learn if you believe

that these particles are

the fundamental building

blocks of the universe.

But it's simply not true.

The best theories that

we have of physics

do not have underlying them

the quark particle and the two

quark particle-- sorry, the

electron particle and the two

quark particles.

In fact, the very best

theories we have of physics

don't rely on particles at all.

The best theories

we have tell us

that the fundamental

building blocks of nature

are not particles, but

something much more

nebulous and abstract.

The fundamental building

blocks of nature
are fluid-like

substances which are

spread throughout

the entire universe

and ripple in strange

and interesting ways.

That's the fundamental

reality in which we live.

These fluid-like substances

we have a name for.

We call them fields.

So this is a picture of a field.

This isn't the kind of field

that physicists have in mind.

You know, this is what you think

a field is if you're a farmer

or if you're a normal person.

If you're a physicist, you

have a very different picture

in your mind when you

think about fields.

And I'll tell you the general

definition of a field,

and then we'll go

through some examples

so that you get

familiar with this.

The physicist's definition

of a field is the following.

It's something that, as I

said, is spread everywhere

throughout the universe.

It's something that

takes a particular value

at every point in space.

And what's more, that

value can change in time.

So a good picture

to have your mind

is fluid, which ripples and

sways throughout the universe.

Now, it's not a new idea.

It's not an idea that

we've just come up with.

It's an idea which dates

back almost 200 years.

And like so many other

things in science,

it's an idea which

originated in this very room.

Because as I'm sure

many of you are aware,

this is the home

of Michael Faraday.

And Michael Faraday initiated

this lecture series in 1825.

He gave over a hundred of these

Friday evening discourses,

and the vast majority of these

were on his own discoveries

on the experiments he did on

electricity and magnetism.

So he did many, many things

in electricity and magnetism

over many decades.

And in doing, so he

built up an intuition

for how electric and

magnetic phenomena work.

And the intuition

is what we now call

the electric and magnetic field.

So what he envisaged was

that threaded everywhere

throughout space were these

invisible objects called

the electric and

magnetic fields.

Now, we learned this in school.

Again, it's something

that we sort of take

for granted because we

learned it at an early age,

and we don't sort of appreciate

just how big of a radical step

this idea of Faraday's is.

I want to stress, it's one

of the most revolutionary

abstract ideas in the

history of science,

that these electric and

magnetic fields exist.

So let me just--

you're supposed to be

demonstrations in this.

I'm not just a

theoretical physicist.

I'm a very

theoretical physicist.

It's very hard for me to do

any kind of experiment that's

going to work.

But I'm just going to show you

something that you've all seen.

They're magnets.

OK?

And we all played these

games when we were kids

or when we were in school.

You take these magnets,

and you move them together.

And as they get

closer and closer,

there's this force that

you can sort of just

feel building up that pushes,

the pressure that pushes

against these two magnets.

And it doesn't matter

how often you do it,

and it doesn't matter how many

degrees you have in physics.

It's just a little bit magical.

You know?

And you all know this.

There's something just special

about this weird feeling

that you get between magnets.

And this was Faraday's genius.

It was to appreciate that even

though you can't see anything

in between, even though no

matter how closely you look,

the space between these

magnets will seem to be empty,

he said nonetheless, there's

something real there.

There's something real and

physical, which is invisible,

but he's building

up, and that's what's

responsible for the force.

So he called them

lines of force.

We now call it the

magnetic field.

So this, of course, is a
picture of Michael Faraday.

This is a picture of

Michael Faraday lecturing

behind this very table.

Here is a drawing from one

of Michael Faraday's papers.

It was pointed

out to me earlier.

When you leave, there's

a carpet just here.

The carpet has this

pattern, this picture

just repeated on it over

and over and over again.

And on the bottom here is one

of Michael Faraday's most famous

demonstrations that he did here.

So I'll just walk you

through what Faraday did.

The thing on the right, there's

a small coil with a hand on it.

This is a battery, and the

battery passes a current

around this coil.

And in doing so,

there's a magnetic field

that's induced in this.

It's what's called a solenoid.

And then Faraday did

the following thing.

He simply moved this small

coil A through this big coil B

like this.

And something

miraculous happened.

When you do that, there's

a moving magnetic field.

Faraday's great

discovery was induction.

It gives rise to a

current in B, which

then over on this

end of the table,

makes a needle

flicker like this.

So extremely simple.

You move a magnetic

field, and it gives rise

to a current, which

makes a needle flicker

on the other side of the table.

This astounded

audiences in the 1800s.

Because you were doing something

and affecting the needle

on the other end of the

table, yet you never

touched the needle.

It was amazing.
You could make something move

without ever going near it,

without ever touching it.

We're kind of jaded these days.

You can do the same experiment.

You can pick up your cell phone.

You can press a few buttons.

You can call somebody

on the other end

of the earth within seconds.

But it's the same principle.

But this was the first

time it was demonstrated

that the field is real.

You can communicate

using the field.

You can affect things

far away using the field

without ever touching it.

So this is Michael

Faraday's legacy.

There's not just

particles in the world.

There's other objects that

are slightly more subtle that

are called fields that are

spread throughout all of space.

By the way, if you ever

want to really appreciate

the genius of Michael Faraday,

he gave this lecture in 1846.

He gave many lectures in 1846.

But there was one

in particular where

he finished 20 minutes early.

He ran out of

things to say, so he

engaged in some idle

speculation for 20 minutes.

And Faraday suggested that

these invisible, electric,

and magnetic fields

that he'd postulated

were quite literally the

only thing we've ever seen.

He suggested that

it's ripples of

the electric and magnetic field,

which is what we call light.

So it took a course 50 years for

people like Maxwell and Hertz

to confirm that this is

indeed what light is made of,

but it was Faraday's genius

that appreciated this,

that there were waves in

the electric magnetic field,

and those waves are the

light that we see around us.

OK.

So this is Faraday's legacy.

But it turns out this idea of

fields was much more important

than Faraday had realised.

And it took over

150 years for us

to appreciate the

importance of these fields.

So what happened

in these 150 years

was that there was a small

revolution in science.

In the 1920s, we realised

that the world is very,

very different from the

common sense ideas that Newton

and Galileo had handed down

to us centuries before.

So in the 1920s, people like

Heisenberg and Schrodinger

realised that on

the smallest scales,

on the microscopic scales, the

world is much more mysterious

and counter-intuitive than we

ever really imagined it could

be.

This, of course, is

the theory that we now

know as quantum mechanics.

So there's a lot I could

say about quantum mechanics.

Let me tell you one of the

punch lines of quantum mechanics

one of the punch lines is

that energy isn't continuous.

Energy in the world

is always parcelled up

into some little discrete lump.

That's actually what

the word quantum means.

Quantum means

discrete or a lump.

So the real fun starts

when you try and take

the ideas of quantum

mechanics, which

say that things

should be discrete,

and you try to combine them

with Faraday's ideas of fields,

which are very much continuous,

smooth objects, which

are waving and

oscillating in space.

So the idea of trying to combine

these two theories together

is what we call
quantum field theory.

And here's the implication

of quantum field theory.

The first implication

is what happens

for the electric

and magnetic field.

So Faraday taught us,

and Maxwell later,

that waves of the

electromagnetic field

are what we call light.

But when you apply

quantum mechanics to this,

you find that these

light waves aren't

quite as smooth and

continuous as they appeared.

So if you look closely

at light waves,

you'll find that they're

made of particles.

They're little

particles of light,

and these are particles

that we call the photon.

The magic of this idea is

that that same principle

applies to every single other

particle in the universe.

So there is spread everywhere

throughout this room something

that we call the electron field.

It's like a fluid that fills

this room and, in fact,

fills the entire universe.

And the ripples of

this electron fluid,

the ripples of the

waves of this fluid,

get tied into little

bundles of energy

by the rules of

quantum mechanics,

and those bundles of energy

are what we call the particle,

the electron.

All the electrons that are in

your body are not fundamental.

All the electrons that

exist in your body

are waves of the same

underlying field.

And we're all connected

to each other.

Just like the waves

on the ocean all

belong to the same

underlying ocean,
the electrons in your body

are ripples of the same field

as the electrons in my body.

There's more than this.

There's also in this

room two quark fields.

And the ripples of

these two quark fields

give rise to what we call the

up quark and the down quark.

And the same is true

for every other kind

of particle in the universe.

There are fields that

underlie everything.

And what we think of as

particles aren't really

particles at all, they're

waves of these fields tied up

into little bundles of energy.

This is the legacy of Faraday.

This is where Faraday's

vision of fields has taken us.

There are no particles

in the world.

The basic fundamental building

blocks of our universe

are these fluid-like

substances that we call fields.

All right.
OK.

So what I want to do in

the rest of this talk

is tell you where

that vision takes us.

I want to tell you about

what it means that we're not

made of particles.

We're made of fields.

And I want to tell you

what we can do with that,

and how we can best understand

the universe around us.

OK?

So here's the first thing.

Take a box and take

every single thing

that exists out of that box.

Take all the particles

out of the box,

all the atoms out of the box.

What you're left with

is a pure vacuum.

And this is what the

vacuum looks like.

So what you're looking at

here is a computer simulation

using our best theory

of physics of something
called the standard model,

which I'll introduced later.

But it's a computer simulation

of absolutely nothing.

This is empty space.

Literally empty space

with nothing in it.

This is the simplest

thing you could possibly

imagine in the universe.

And you can see, it's an

interesting place to be,

an empty space.

It's not dull and boring.

What you're looking at

here is that even when

the particles are taken

out, the field still exists.

The field is there.

But what's more, the field

is governed by the rules

of quantum mechanics.

And there's a principle in

quantum mechanics, which

is called the Heisenberg

Uncertainty Principle, which

says you're not

allowed to sit still.

And the field has to obey this.

So even when there's

nothing else there,

the field is constantly

bubbling and fluctuating

in what's, quite honestly,

a very complicated way.

These are things that we call

quantum vacuum fluctuations.

But this is what

nothingness looks

like from the perspective of

our current theories of physics.

It's worth saying that this

is a computer simulation.

It looks a little

bit like a cartoon,

but it's actually quite a

powerful computer simulation,

and it took a long time to do.

But these aren't

just theoretical.

These quantum fluctuations that

are there in the pure vacuum

are things that we can measure.

There's something called

the Casimir force.

The Casimir force is a force

between two metal plates

that get pushed

together basically
because there's more of

this stuff on the outside

than on the inside.

And you know, these are real.

These are things

that we can measure,

and they behave just

as we would predict

they would from our theories.

So this is nothing.

And this brings me to the more

mathematical side of the talk.

Because there's a

challenge in this.

This is the simplest

thing we can

imagine in the entire

universe, and it's complicated.

It's astonishingly complicated.

It doesn't get easier than this.

You know, if you want

to now understand

not nothing but a

single particle,

well, that's much more

complicated than this.

And if you want to understand

10 to the 23 particles

all doing something

interesting, that's
really, really much more

complicated than this.

So there's a problem in--

it's my problem, not yours--

in addressing this fundamental

description of the universe,

which is that it's just hard.

The mathematics that we use

to describe quantum fields,

to describe

everything that we're

made of in terms

of quantum fields,

is substantially more

difficult than the maths

that arises in any other

area of physics or science.

It's genuinely difficult.

I can put this in

some perspective.

There's a list of six open

problems in mathematics.

They're considered

to be the six hardest

problems in mathematics.

There used to be seven,

but some crazy Russian guy

solved one of them.

So there's six left.

You win a million

bucks if you can solve

any one of these problems.

If you know a little

bit of mathematics,

they're things like the Riemann

hypothesis, or P versus MP.

They're sort of famously

difficult problems.

This is one of

those six problems.

You win a million dollars

if you can understand this.

So what does it mean?

It doesn't mean can you

build a big computer

and just demonstrate

that these are there.

It means can you understand

from first principles

by solving the equations

the patterns that

emerge within these

quantum fluctuations?

It's an extraordinarily

difficult problem.

You know, it's writing

the kind of thing I do.

I don't know a single person

in the world who's actually

working on this problem.

That's how hard it is.

We don't really even

know how to begin

to start understanding these

kind of ideas in quantum field

theory.

OK.

This theme about the

mathematics being challenging

is something which is going to

come back later in the talk.

So I'd like just to take a

little bit of a diversion

for a few minutes and give

you a sense about what

we can do

mathematically and what

we can't do mathematically,

just to sort of tell you

what the state of play is

in terms of understanding

these theories called

quantum field theories which

underlie our universe.

So there are times

where we understand

extremely well what's going

on with quantum fields.

And that happens basically

when these fluctuations

are very calm and tame, when

they're not wild and strong.

These ones are big.

But when they're

much more calmer,

when the vacuum is much

more like a mill pond

than it is like a raging

storm, in those cases,

we really think we

understand what we're doing.

And to illustrate this, I just

want to give you this example.

So this number g is

a particular property

of the electron particle.

And I'll quickly

explain what it is.

The electron is a

particle, and it turns out

the electron spins.

It orbits rather like

the earth orbits.

And it has an axis of spin.

And you can change

the axis of that spin.

And the way you change it

is you take a magnetic field

like this.

And in the presence

of a magnetic field,

the electron will spin.

The electron will stay

in one place, but spin.

And then the axis of spin

will slowly rotate like this.

It's what's called procession.

And the speed at which the

axis of that spin processes

is dictated by this number here.

OK?

So it's not the most important

thing in the big picture.

However, historically,

this has been extremely

important in the history of

physics, because it turns out,

this is a number you can

measure very, very accurately

doing experiments.

And so this number

has sort of acted

as a testing ground for us

to see how well we understand

the theories that

underlie nature,

and in particular,
quantum field theory.

So let me tell you what

you're looking at here.

The first number is the

result of many, many decades

of painstaking experiments

measuring very, very precisely

this feature of the electron.

It's called the magnetic

moment, for what it's worth.

And the second

number is the result

of many, many decades of very

torturous calculations sitting

down with a pen and

paper and trying

to predict from first principles

from quantum field theory what

the magnetic moment of

the electrons should be.

And you can see, it's

simply spectacular.

And there's nothing

like this anywhere else

in science with an

agreement between

the theoretical calculation and

the experimental measurements.

I think it's 12 or 13

significant figures.
It's really astonishing.

Any other area of

science, you'll

be jumping up and down for

joy if you get the first two

numbers right.

Economics, not even that.

[LAUGHING]

Just that this is where

we're at in particle physics

on a good day when

we really understand

what we're doing with it.

It's substantially better than

any other area of science.

12 significant figures.

But this, of course,

I've shown you

because this is our

best result. There

are many other results that

are nowhere near as good.

And the difficulty comes

when those quantum vacuum

fluctuations start getting

wilder and stronger.

So let me give you an example.

It should be possible for

us to sit down and calculate

from first principles

the mass of the proton.

We have the equations.

Everything should be there.

We just need to work

hard and figure out

what the mass of the proton

is just by doing calculations.

We've been trying to do

this for about 40 years now.

We can get it to within an

accuracy of something like 3%.

Which isn't bad.

We're 3% there.

But we should be

much, much better.

We should be sort of pushing

these levels of accuracy.

And the reason is very simple.

We've got the right equation.

We're pretty sure we're

solving the right equation.

It's simply that we're not

smart enough to solve it.

In 40 years, the world's

most powerful computers,

lots and lots of smart people.

But we haven't managed

to figure this out.

OK.
There are other

situations that I

won't tell you about where we

don't even get off the ground.

There are some situations

where for fairly subtle reasons

we're unable to use

computers to help us,

and we simply have no

idea what we're doing.

So it's a slightly

strange situation.

We have these

theories of physics.

They're the best theories

we've ever developed,

as you can see by this.

But at the same time,

they're also the theories

that we understand

the least and it's

to make progress we sort of

have this strange balancing

act between increasing our

theoretical understanding

and figuring out how to

apply that to the experiments

that we're doing.

And again, it's a

theme I'll come back to

at the end of the lecture.

All right.

So so far, I've been talking

in a little bit of generality

about what we're made of.

And this is the punch line for

the halfway point of the talk.

You're all made

of quantum fields,

and I don't understand them.

At least I don't understand them

as well as I think I should.

So what I want to do now

is go into a little bit

more specifics.

I want to tell you exactly what

quantum fields are made of.

In fact, I'll tell you

exactly what quantum fields

exist in the universe.

And the good news

is, not many of them.

So I'll simply tell

you, all of them.

So we started with

the periodic table.

This is the new periodic table.

And it's much simpler.

You know, it's much nicer.

There are the three particles

that we're all made of.

There's the electron

and the two quarks,

the up quark and the down quark.

And as I've stressed, the

particles aren't fundamental.

What's really fundamental is

the field that underlies them.

And then it turns out

there's a fourth particle

that I've not discussed so far.

It's called the neutrino.

It's not important in

what we're are made of,

but it does play another

important role elsewhere

in the universe.

These neutrinos are everywhere.

You've never noticed them,

but since I began this talk,

something like 10

to the 14 of them

have streamed through the body

of each and every one of you,

as many coming from

above from outer space

as actually coming from

below, because they

stream all the way through

the earth and then keep going.

They're not very sociable.

They don't interact.

So this is what

everything is made of.

These are the four

particles that form

the bedrock of our universe.

Except then something

rather strange happened.

For a reason that we do

not understand at all,

nature has chosen to

take these four particles

and reproduce them twice over.

So this is actually the

list of all the fields

that make up particles

in our universe.

So what are we looking at here?

This is the electron.

It turns out there are

two other particles which

behave in every way exactly

the same as the electron,

except they're heavier.

We call them the muon which

has a mass of something

like 200 times the electron,

and the tau particle,

which is 3,000 times

heavier than the electron.

Why are they there?

We have no idea at all.

It's one of the mysteries

of the universe.

There's also two more neutrinos.

So there are three

neutrinos in total.

And the two quarks that we

first knew about are now

are joined by four others

that we call the strange quark

and the charmed quark.

And then by the

time we got here,

we really ran out of any kind

of inspiration for naming them.

We called them the bottom

quark and the top quark.

So I should stress.

We understand things very,

very well going this way.

We understand why they

come in a group of four.

We understand why they have

the properties that they do.

We don't understand it
at all going this way.

We don't know why

there's three of these

rather than two of

them or 17 of them.

That's a mystery.

But this is everything.

This is everything

in the universe.

Everything you're made of is

these three at the top there.

And it's only when you go

to more exotic situations,

like particle colliders, that we

need the others on the bottom.

But every single

thing we've ever seen

can be made out of these

12 particles, 12 fields.

These 12 fields interact

with each other,

and they interact through

four different forces.

Two of these are

extremely familiar.

They're the force of gravity and

the force of electromagnetism.

But there's also two other

forces which operate only

on small scales of a nucleus.

So there's something called

the strong nuclear force,

which holds the quarks together

inside protons and neutrons.

And there's something called

the weak nuclear force, which

is responsible for radioactive

decay and among other things,

for making the sun shine.

Again, each of these forces

is associated to a field.

So Faraday taught us about

the electromagnetic field,

but there's a field

associated to this,

which is called the gluon

field and a field associated

to this which is called

the W and Z boson field.

There's also a field

associated to gravity.

And this was really Einstein's

great insight into the world.

The field associated

to gravity turns out

to be space and time itself.

So if you've never

heard that before,

that was the world's

shortest introduction

to general relativity.

And I'm not going to say

anything else about it.

I'll just let you figure

that one out for yourself.

OK.

So this is the

universe we live in.

There are 12 fields

that give matter,

I'll call the matter field,

and four other fields

that are the forces.

And the world we live

in is these combination

of the 16 fields all interacting

together in interesting ways.

So this is what you should

think the universe is like.

It's filled with these

fields, fluid-like substances.

12 matter, four forces.

One of the matter fields

starts to oscillate and ripple.

Say the electron field

starts to wave up and down,

because there's electrons there.

That will kick off one

of the other fields.

It'll kickoff, say, the

electromagnetic field,

which, in turn, will also

oscillate and ripple.

There'll be light

which is emitted.

So that will oscillate a little.

At some point, it

will start interacting

with the quark field, which in

turn will oscillate and ripple.

And the picture we end up

with is this harmonious dance

between all these fields,

interlocking each other,

swaying, moving this

way and that way.

That's the picture that we

have of the fundamental laws

of physics.

We have a theory which

underlies all this.

It is, to put it simply,

the pinnacle of science.

It's the greatest theory

we've ever come up with.

We've given it the most

astonishingly rubbish name

you've ever heard of.

We call it the standard model.

When you hear the name

the standard model,

it sounds tedious and mundane.

It should really be replaced

by The Greatest Theory

in the History of

Human Civilisation.

OK?

That's what we're looking at.

OK.

So this is everything,

except it's not quite.

I've actually just

missed that one field.

There's one extra

thing we know about,

which became quite

famous in recent years.

It was a field that was

first suggested in the 1960s

by a Scottish physicist

called Peter Higgs.

And by the 1970s, it had become

an integral part of the way

we thought about the universe.

But for the longest

time, we didn't

have direct

experimental evidence
that this existed, where direct

experimental evidence means

we make this Higgs Field ripple

so we see a particle that's

associated to it.

And this changed.

This changed famously

four years ago at the LHC.

These are the two experiments

of the LHC that discovered it.

They're sort of the

size of cathedrals,

and just packed

full of electronics.

They're astonishing things.

This is called Atlas.

This is called CMS.

That Higgs particle

doesn't last for long.

The Higgs particle lasts about

10 to the minus 22 seconds.

So it's not like you see it and

you get to take a picture of it

and put it on Instagram.

It's a little more subtle.

So this is the data, and

this little bump here

is how we know that this

Higgs particle existed.

This is a picture of

Peter Higgs being found.

So this was the

final building block.

You know, it was important.

It was a really big deal.

And it was important

for two reasons.

The first is that this is

what's responsible for what

we call mass in the universe.

So the properties of

all the particles,

things like electric

charge and mass,

are really a statement about

how their fields interact

with other fields.

So the property that we call

electric charge of an electron

is a statement about how

the electron field interacts

with the electromagnetic field.

And the property of its

mass is the statement

about how it interacts

with the Higgs field.

So understanding this

was really needed

so that we understand
the meaning of mass

in the universe.

So it was a big deal.

The other reason that

it was a big deal

is, this was the final

piece of our jigsaws.

We had this theory that we

called the standard model.

We've had it since the 1970s.

This was the final

thing that we needed

to discover to be sure that

this theory is correct.

And the astonishing

thing is this particle

was predicted in the 1960s.

50 years we've been waiting.

We finally created it in CERN.

It behaves in exactly the

way that we thought it would.

Absolutely perfectly

behaves as we

predicted using these theories.

OK.

This is going to be the

scary part of the talk.

I've been telling you

about this theory.

And I've been waving my hands

pretending that I'm a field.

Let me tell you what

the theory really is.

Let me just show you what we do.

This is the equation for the

standard model of physics.

I don't expect you to

understand it, not least

because there are parts of

this equation that no one

on the planet understands.

But nonetheless, I

want to show it to you

for the following reason.

This equation correctly

predicts the result

of every single experiment

we've ever done in science.

Everything is contained

in this equation.

This is really the pinnacle

of the reductionist approach

to science.

It's all in here.

So I'll admit.

It's not the simplest

equation in the world.

But it's not the most

complicated either.
You can put it on a

t-shirt if you want.

In fact, if you go to

CERN, you can buy a t-shirt

with this equation on it.

Let me just give you a sense

of what we're looking at.

The first term here was

written down by Albert Einstein

and describes gravity.

What that means is

that if you could solve

this tiny little part of

the equation, just this R,

you can, for example, predict

how fast an apple falls

from a tree, or the fact

that the orbits of the planet

around the sun form ellipses.

Or you can predict what happens

when two enormous black holes

collide into each other

and form a new black hole,

sending out gravitational

waves across the universe.

Or in fact, you can predict

how the entire universe itself

expands .

All of this comes from

solving this little part

of the equation.

The next term in the

equation was written down

by James Clerk Maxwell,

and it tells you everything

about electromagnetism.

So all the experiments that

Faraday spent a lifetime doing

in this building-- in fact,

all the experiments over many

centuries, from

Coulomb to Faraday,

to Hertz to modern developments

of lasers, everything--

in this tiny little

part of the equation.

So there's some power

in these equations.

This is the equation

that governs

the strong nuclear force,

the weak nuclear force.

This is an equation

that was first

written down by a British

physicist called Paul Dirac.

It describes the matter.

It describes those 12 particles

that make up the matter.

Astonishingly,

each of them obeys

exactly the same equation.

These are the equations

of Peter Higgs.

And this is an

equation that tells you

how the matter interacts

with the Higgs particle.

So everything is in here.

It's really an

astonishing achievement

this is our current

limit of knowledge.

We've never done an experiment

that cannot be explained

by this equation.

And we've never

found a way in which

this equation stops working.

So this is the best thing

that we currently have.

OK.

It's the best thing

that we currently have.

However, we want to

do better, because we

know for sure that

there's stuff out there

that is not explained by this.

And the reason we know is

that although this explains

every single experiment we've

ever done here on Earth, if we

look out into the sky,

there's extra stuff which

is still a mystery.

So if we look out into space,

there are, for example,

invisible particles out there.

In fact, there's many

more invisible particles

than there are

visible particles.

We call them dark matter.

We can't see them, obviously,

because they're invisible.

But we can see their effects.

We can see their effects

in the way galaxies

rotate, or the way they

bend light around galaxies.

They're out there.

We don't know what they are.

There's even more

mysterious things.

There's something called

dark energy, which is

spread throughout all of space.

It's also some kind of field,

although not one we understand,

that's causing everything

in the universe

to repel everything else.

Other things.

We know that early in

the first few seconds,

earlier than that, the

first few fractions

of a second after the

Big Bang, the universe

underwent a very rapid

phase of expansion

that we call inflation.

We know it happened, but it's

not explained by that equation

that I just showed you.

So these are the kind

of things that we're

going to have to

understand if we're

going to move forward and decide

what the next laws of physics

are that go beyond

the standard model.

I could spend hours

talking about any of these.

I'm going to focus

just on the last one.

I'm going to tell you a

little bit about inflation.

So the universe is

13.8 billion years old.

And we understand

fairly well-- well,

we don't understand

at all how it started.

We don't understand what kicked

it all off at time t equals 0.

But we understand fairly well

what happened after it started.

And we know in particular

that for the first 380,000

years of the universe, it

was filled with a fireball.

And we know this for

sure because we've

seen the fireball.

In fact, we've seen it, and

we've taken a photograph of it.

This is called the cosmic

microwave background radiation,

but a much better name

for it is the Fireball

That Filled the Universe

When It Was Much Younger.

The fireball cools down.

It's light has been streaming

through the universe

for 13.8 billion years.

But we can see it.

We can take this

photograph of it.

And we can understand

very well what

was happening in these first

few moments of the universe.

And you can see, it looks

literally like a fireball.

There's red bits

that are hotter.

There's blue bits

that are colder.

And by studying this

flickering that you

can see in this picture,

we get a lot of information

about what was going on back

13.8 billion years ago when

the universe was a baby.

One of the main

questions we want to ask

is what caused the

flickering in the fireball?

And we have an answer to this.

We have an answer,

which I think is
one of the most astonishing

things in all of science.

It turns out that

although the fireball

lasted for 380,000

years, whatever

caused this flickering

could not have taken place

during the vast

majority of that time.

Whatever caused the

flickering in this fireball

actually took place in the first

few very fractions of a second

after the Big Bang.

And what it was

was the following.

So when the universe

was very, very young,

soon after the Big Bang,

there were no particles,

but there were quantum

fields, because the quantum

fields were everywhere.

And there were these

quantum vacuum fluctuations.

And what happened was the

universe expanded very,

very quickly, and it caught

these quantum fluctuations

in the act.

So the quantum

fluctuations were stretched

across the entire sky,

where they became frozen.

And it's these vacuum

fluctuations here

which are the ripples that

you see in the fireball.

So it's an astonishing story,

that the quantum vacuum

fluctuations were taking place

10 to the minus 30 seconds

after the Big Bang.

They were absolutely

microscopic.

And now we see them stretched

across the entire universe,

stretched 20 billion

lightyears across the sky.

That's what you're seeing here.

And yet, you do the

calculations for this,

and it matches perfectly

what you see here.

So this is another of the

great triumphs of quantum field

theory.

But it leaves lots of questions.

The most important one is,

which field are we seeing here?

Which field is this that's

imprinted on the background

radiation?

And the answer is we don't know.

The only one of

the standard model

fields it has a hope

of being is the Higgs.

But most of us think

it's not the Higgs,

but probably something new.

But what we'd like to do

moving forward into the future

is get a much better

picture of this fireball,

in particular get the

polarisation of the light.

And by getting a

picture of this,

we can understand much

better the properties

of this field that

was fluctuating

in the early universe.

OK.

This looking forward is

one of the best hopes

that we have for going

beyond the standard model

and understanding new physics.

In the last 10

minutes, though, I'd

like to bring you back

down to Earth, sort of.

We've got lots of

experiments here on Earth

where we're also

trying to do better,

where we're also trying to

go beyond the standard model

of physics beyond that equation

to understand what's new.

And there's many of them,

but the most prominent

is the one I've

already mentioned.

It's the LHC.

So what happened was the LHC

discovered the Higgs boson

in 2012.

And soon afterwards, it

closed down for two years.

It had an upgrade.

And last year in 2015,

the LHC turned on again

with twice the

energy that it had

when it discovered the Higgs.

And the goal was twofold.

The goal was firstly to

understand the Higgs better,

which it has done fantastically,

and secondly, to discover

new physics that lies beyond

the Higgs, new physics

beyond the standard model.

So before I tell

you what it's seen,

let me tell you some

of the ideas we've had,

some of our expectations

and hopes for what

would happen moving forward.

So this is our favourite

equation again.

The idea has always

been the following.

You know, if you were

a Victorian scientist,

and you go back, and you look at

the periodic table of elements,

then it's true that there's

patterns in there that

give a hint of the structure

that lies underneath.

Those numbers that

repeat themselves.
Where if you're very smart, you

might start to realise that,

yes, there is something deeper

than just these elements.

So our hope as theorists

is to look at this equation

and see if maybe we

can just find patterns

in this equation that suggest

there might be something

deeper that lies underneath.

And they're there.

So let me give you an example.

This is the equation

that describes the force

of electricity and magnetism.

And it's almost the same

as the equations which

describe the forces

for the strong force

and the weak nuclear force.

You can see.

I've just changed letters.

It's a little more

complicated than that,

but it's not much more

complicated than that.

The three forces

really look similar.

So you might wonder,

well, maybe there's not

three forces in the universe.

Maybe those three forces

are actually just one force.

And when we think

there's three forces,

it's because we're

looking at that one force

just from slightly

different perspectives.

Maybe.

Here's something else,

which is amazing.

These are the equations

for the 12 matter

fields in the universe-- the

neutrinos, the electrons,

and the quarks.

Each of them obeys

exactly the same equation.

Each of them obeys

the Dirac equation.

So again, you

might wonder, well,

maybe there aren't

12 different fields.

Maybe they're all the same

field and the same particle,

and the fact they look

different is, again,

maybe just because

at them from slightly

different perspectives.

Maybe.

So these ideas that

I've been suggesting

go by the name of unification.

The idea that the three forces

are actually combined into one

is what's called

grand unification.

And it's very easy.

It's very easy to write down

a mathematical theory in which

all of these are just one

force, which appears to be

three from our perspective.

There are other

possibilities here.

You might say, well

this is the matter,

and these are the forces.

And the equations are different,

but they're not that different.

Because ultimately,

they're both just fields.

So you might wonder

if maybe there's
some way in which the

matter and the forces

are related to each other.

Well, we have a theory

for that as well.

It's a theory that's

called supersymmetry.

And it's a beautiful theory.

It's very deep conceptually.

And it sort of, you know,

smells like it might be right.

Finally, you might be

really, really bold.

You might say, well, can

I just combine the lot?

Can I just get rid

of all of these terms

and just write down

one single term

from which everything

else emerges?

Gravity, the forces, the

particles, the Higgs,

everything.

I've got something for you

if you want that as well.

It's called string theory.

So we have a possibility for

a theory which contains all

of this in one simple concept.

And the question going forward,

of course, is are these right?

You know, it's very easy for us

theorists to have these ideas.

And I should say

these ideas are what's

driven theoretical physics for

30 years, but we want to know,

are they right?

And we've got a way of

telling they're right.

We do experiments.

So I should say, if you want to

know if string theory's right,

we don't have any way to

test it at the moment.

But if you want to know if some

of these other ideas are right,

then that's what the

LHC should be doing.

The reason that we built the LHC

was firstly to find the Higgs.

OK, it worked, and secondly,

to test these kind of ideas

that we've been having

to see what lies beyond.

So the LHC has been running.

It's been running for two years.

It's been running like

an absolute dream.

It's a perfect machine.

Two years.

This is what it's seen.

Absolutely nothing.

All of these fantastic

beautiful ideas that we've had,

none of them are

showing up at all.

And the question going

forward is, what are we

going to do about it?

How are we going

to make progress

in understanding the

next layer of physics

when the LHC isn't

seeing anything,

and our ideas just don't appear

to be the way that nature

works?

I should tell you, often I don't

have a good answer to this.

My impression is that

most of my community

is a little bit shell-shocked

by what happened.

There's certainly no

consensus in the community

to move forward.
But I think there's

three responses

that sort of various

people have had that I'd

like to share with you.

And I think all three

of these responses

are reasonable up to a point.

The first response to the

LHC not seeing anything

is the following.

You young kids,

you're so pessimistic.

It's all doom and

gloom with you.

You need a little

bit more patience.

You know, I didn't see

anything last year,

and I didn't see

anything this year.

But next year, it's

going to see something.

And if not next year,

it's the year after that

that it's going

to see something.

It's usually my very

illustrious senior colleagues

that have this--

and you know what?

They could easily be right.

It could easily be that

next year, the LHC discovers

something astonishing,

and it sets us

on the path to understanding

the next layer of reality.

But it's also true

that these same people

were predicting that it would

have seen something by now.

And it's also true

that this can't

keep going for much longer.

If the LHC doesn't see something

within, say, a two-year time

scale, it seems

very, very unlikely

that it's going to see

something moving forward.

It's possible.

It just seems unlikely.

So I hope with all my heart

that the LHC discover something

next year or the year after.

But I think we have to

prepare for the worst,

that maybe it won't.

OK.

Response number two.

Response number two, which is

sort of also by similar people,

well, all our theories

are so beautiful.

They absolutely

have to be correct,

and what we really need

is a bigger machine.

10 times bigger will do it.

Again, they might be right.

I don't have a good

argument against it.

The obvious rebuttal,

however, is that a new machine

cost $10 billion.

There's not too many

governments in the world

that have $10 billion to spare

for us to explore these ideas.

There's one.

The one is China.

And so if this machine is

going to be built at all,

it's going to be built by

the Chinese government.

I think the Chinese government

would see it as extremely

attractive if the whole

community of particle

physicists and engineers

that are currently

based in CERN and Geneva

move to a town that's

slightly north of Beijing.

I think they'd view that as

political and economic gain,

and there's a real

chance they may

decide to build this machine.

If they do, it's about 20

years for it to be built.

So we're waiting

slightly longer.

There's a third response.

And I should say

the third response

is kind of the camp I'm in.

I should mention upfront,

it's speculative ,

and it's probably not

endorsed by most of my peers.

So this is really just my

personal opinion at this point.

This is my take on this.

This is the equation

that we know is right.

This is sort of the bedrock

of our understanding.

But although we know

it's right, there's

an awful lot in this equation

that we haven't understood.

There's an awful lot

to me that's still

mysterious in this equation.

So although this equation

looked like there

were suggestions of

unification, maybe they're

just red herrings.

And maybe if we just

work harder in trying

to understand this

equation more,

we'll find that there are

other patterns that emerge.

So my response is, I think

that maybe we should just

go back to the drawing

board and start

to challenge some of the

assumptions and paradigms

that we've been holding

for the past 30 years.

So I feel quite

energised, actually,
by the lack of

results for the LHC.

You know?

Sort of it feels good to

me that everyone was wrong.

You know, it's when we're wrong

that we start to make progress.

So I sort of feel

quite happy about this,

and think that there's a very

real chance that we could just

start thinking about

different ideas.

I should say that there

are hints in here.

There are hints to me

about mathematical patterns

that we haven't explored.

There's hints in this

about connections

to other areas of science.

Things like condensed

matter physics,

which is the science

of how materials work,

or quantum information

science, which is the attempt

to build a quantum computer.

All these fantastic

subjects have new ideas,

which sort of feed in

to the kind of questions

that we're asking here.

So I'm quite optimistic

that moving forward,

we can make progress,

maybe not the progress

that we thought we'd make a few

years ago, but just something

new.

So that's the

punchline of my talk.

The punchline is that this is

the single greatest equation

that we've ever written down.

But I hope that someday, we

can give you something better.

Thank you for your attention.

[APPLAUSE]

There's nothing discrete about

the Schrodinger equation.

The Schrodinger

equation is something

to do with a smooth

field-like wave function.

The discreteness

is something which

emerges when you solve

the Schrodinger equation.

So it's not built into

the heart of nature.