Quantum fields and missing quotes

I'm so used to finding everything somewhere on the internet, it was a shock when I couldn't find the quote I needed. What if someone actually said it to me at a party?

A couple of weeks ago I was preparing a seminar to give at CERN, talking about ATLAS measurements of jets. These measurements tell us a lot about the strong nuclear force, which holds the atomic nucleus together and is one of the four known fundamental forces.

We talk a lot about how the LHC may find "new physics", by which we often mean new particles (such as the Higgs boson) or new forces, or even wilder stuff like extra dimensions of space-time. However we also have a lot of new physics to learn about the forces we already know of, especially the strong force.

Strong forces in general are tricky, by which I mean they can lead to consequences which are impossible to predict with current techniques. Even something as well-known as the mass of the proton cannot yet be predicted properly from a "first principles" knowledge of the strong force, even though we have every reason to believe it is largely responsible.

Anyway, I remembered a quote I used in a talk nearly ten years ago, from Martinus Veltman, who won the Nobel prize in 1999 with Gerardus T'Hooft for work on fundamental forces. The quote was something like:

If the Large Hadron Collider finds a Higgs boson and Supersymmetry, nature will have missed a golden opportunity to force us to understand strongly-interacting quantum field theories

(Nobel Prize winner Martinus Veltman, possibly)

What he meant was, if there is a Higgs boson and supersymmetry within reach of the LHC, our current techniques for solving quantum field theories will be "good enough" to understand them. But if there is no Higgs, a very likely outcome is that even the weak and electromagnetic forces become strong, and therefore badly understood, at LHC energies. In this scenario, if we want to understand anything, improving our understanding of strong forces in general would be essential.

Of course, my point was we should do this anyway, since we know one of the fundamental forces is strong.

I wanted to use the quote again, so I went searching for the source on the internet like you do. I knew the words might not be exact, so I tried the usual tricks of different combinations of words in google and so on. No joy.

In desperation, I went searching for my own talk, in which I knew I had used the quote. I had to dig out an old password to get into the site (the ZEUS experiment in Hamburg), but in the end I tracked my slides down. Only to find in there the approximate quote, with the words:

(paraphrased... couldn't find the exact quote this morning)

(Jon Butterworth, being sloppy ten years ago.)


I met Veltman at Nikhef, the Dutch national subatomic physics lab in Amsterdam. He was associated with the lab so they were celebrating his Nobel, and by coincidence I was giving a seminar there and got invited to the party. I drank quite a bit of champagne, and, a bit star-struck, got the great man to sign my Rough Guide to Amsterdam:

rough guide

I suppose it is remotely possible that I actually got the quote direct from him at this party. If so, I hope the paraphrase is accurate.

For completeness, the video of the CERN seminar is here, but it's really aimed at particle physicists so I'm not recommending it for relaxed Sunday afternoon viewing. And I didn't use the quote in the end, since I couldn't attribute it properly. If anyone reading this can give me a source for it or something like it, I will be very grateful (and will probably use it again in the future).