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Following David Britton's talk at the Turing Festival, sat down with the particle physicist to talk about about the difficulty of what he calls "looking for a bit of hay in a haystack," and what he sees as the future for large projects such as those at CERN.

Britton is the project leader of the GridPP project, a global network of computer labs dedicated to analysing the vast quantities of data produced at CERN. It also handles computing for many other projects around the world. Britton discussed the difficulties of finding the Higgs boson, the future of particle accelerators, and how data needs to be integrated into education. So, this project has been alive since the 80s, and has been on, and running, for nearly three years. When will you know if you've found the Higgs?
David Britton: They used to say that finding the Higgs was like looking for a needle in a haystack, but it's not -- it's like looking for a bit of hay in a haystack. The difference being that if you look for a needle in a haystack you know the needle when you find it, it's different from all the hay.

Well, it's like someone got a bunch of hay and they cut it all to [the same] length, and they've spread it around all the haystack, and then they said "find it." And, the only way to do it is to take every bit of hay in that haystack, line them all up, and suddenly you'll find there's a whole bunch at one particular length, and this is exactly what we're doing.

We're trying to take all these events, and we're trying to see if we get a whole bunch of them at one mass. Any one of them [and] you can't tell it's a Higgs, but you get enough of them at a certain mass then that's [it]. We will say we've not found it when this solid line drops down to 1. We will say with a 95% confidence we've not found it.

What if we don't find it?
Of course, theorists already have lots of different theories, it's just that this [one] over many years has become the most popular, it makes the most sense. Talking about theorists, it'll be much more exciting if they don't discover it, [then] they get a carte blanche. They need us not to discover the Higgs for their crazy ideas to seem more sensible.

Personally, I hope it's true, Peter Higgs will get his Nobel prize, I'm sure, if they discover the Higgs Bosson.

So, what's the next big project?
In terms of particle physics, the LHC will run for many years, [until] 2030 probably. You're limited when it comes to the LHC because of this problem of bending things in a circle, so in the end you have to give up and go back to the idea of a linear colliders, where you either have a fixed target, and they talk of 30km - 50km, long accelerators in a straight line, or you have two of them and you collide them.

There are a couple of quite advanced design studies, there's one called the International Linear Collider (ILC), basically they're only going to build one of these machines in the world, could be the US, could be Japan, could be somewhere in Europe. They're looking more at the time frame of 2030.

[It] would be more to do with using electrons, because [we have] a much cleaner signal looking at the details of the Higgs, or whatever comes out of the LHC, this would be looking at the fine structure of it, and sample all the subtle details of it in a much cleaner environment. But it means building a machine which is 30 to 50 kilometres in length.

More general than our field of particle physics, one which I'm pretty much certain is going ahead is the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), Basically you make an array of little detectors, which are points on a grid which is a kilometre by a kilometre, and you use that to sample the radio rays coming from space. It acts as a big radio telescope.

They have enormous potential data requirements and it's also an enormous experiment, not as big as the whole LHC infrastructure, but data-wise they'll be producing comparable amounts of data. They did announce the managerial headquarters is going to be in the UK, [so], regardless of where it's built there's a strong UK connection.

I think that finances in the end will [be the] limit, because there's a change in emphasis in the 21st century away from particle physics. The interest is all in the medical and biological. I think it reflects that increasingly politicians want a quicker return on their investment. The problem with the LHC is that it's a very slow return on investment.

We saw that, there was something called the SSC (Superconducting Super Collider) in the States that was supposed to be the competitor to the LHC. They got funding, they even started digging holes, kilometres of underground tunnels somewhere and then it was shut off. I think they use the tunnels to grow mushrooms. We need more mushrooms, it's an immediate return on your investment.

You can't interest the politicians in the physics, what they're interested in is that we do things that really push back the boundaries of engineering, these magnets have spun off and produced the best MMR machines, and medical imaging machines, because we know how to build fantastic magnets.

It's all the spin-offs that attract the politicians, not really the physics involved. So I guess it comes down to whether you can justify the amount of money you need to build one of these things with what the politicians can understand in the spin-offs. Some day we're going to run into some wall where it's just too expensive for the return.

Another spin-off you hinted at in your talk was education, could you expand on that?
We still have traditional subjects in schools, and they're all viewed from a traditional way. We don't focus on the fact that we're a data-enabled society. Data is the fourth paradigm, it enables a new mode of scientific investigation.

Data allows you to do things we've never done before. I was talking to a government somebody at one of these dos and he said: "We've already got sensors under the roads in the UK. We use them for traffic management, but the amount of data we have is fantastic. We just don't know what to do with it."

There's a big push on government to make all the data we take [at the LHC] available, how do we do that? It's incredibly complex, how would anyone understand it? You have to know the temperature of every component, the meta-data is enormous. We've got all this data, there are things that we can do with it, but what's more interesting are the things that [other] people can do with it.

You can find more on the GriddPP project at


  1. There are interesting events taking place at a very obscure place in the world. It is not only about how gravity works but involves how space behaves, also, how it can be used for possible imaging. You can see my site for some details. Rest of the details shall be published soon in the form of a book. Thanks.  

    Anadish Kumar Pal
    Sep 8th 2011
    1. In reply to Anadish Kumar Pal

      Mr Anadish can you guide me to your site? If CERN couldn't find the Higgs, it doesn't mean that no body else is capable of find it.Sir Peter Higgs did a good hypothesis of the existence of His boson and I did it's experiment. The discovery of Higgs is already there available to everybody at spaceandhistorydotblogspotdotcom. I know I didn't spend billions to prove it's existance but I did it. The four forces, the four rays, Higgs electromagnetic field and the the Higgs mechanism all are in a convincing explication. In anyway comments are open to all. Just in case you have a contraventional hypothesis please say it.  

      Tarek Merouani
      Sep 9th 2011

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