Lisa Randall: China’s Ambition In Building Particle Collider Can Be "Ground-Breaking"
As moviegoers were mesmerized by the futuristic stories in Christopher Nolan's science fiction film Interstellar, Harvard University's theoretical physicist Lisa Randall says the high-grossing movie - even though "technically accurate" - failed to illustrate the type of extra dimensions she tries to picture in her own mind. "They have to make it [the fifth dimension] visible to people looking at the screen, which means that some of the subtle effects - that are on scales that you'd never be able to see with your naked eyes, won't be shown in the movie," Randall explains in a recent interview with China Money Network in Hong Kong during her trip in Asia. But as the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University with research interests in elementary particles, fundamental forces and extra dimensions of space, Randall appreciated how the movie inspired people's interests in science. That inspiration is critical in pushing scientific research forward, she believes. Outside of sci-fi movies, what China has done in practical measures is "inspirational" too, and could be "ground-breaking", Randall says. For example, China's ambitious plan in building the world's most powerful particle collider will produce something twice the size and seven times as powerful as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). The planned particle collider, namely China Electron Positron Collider (CEPC), is a long-term project first proposed by the Chinese high energy physics community in 2012. It is a facility used to measure the precise properties of the Higgs boson, or the so-called "God particle", which is regarded as a crucial link that could explain why other elementary particles have mass. Scientists in China have released details for the collider, saying it will produce over one million Higgs bosons in a seven-year period. The project is expected to start construction in 2021 and be completed in 2027, and then put into operation one year after. "Just the idea that it might exist [in China in the future] already has been an incentive for many people to come here," said Randall. "The prospect of having this collider has brought a lot of American physicist who I know – I mean, maybe other countries as well – to China." Concerning the overall research environment in China, Randall says her main concern lays in the "hierarchical system" that she has observed. "It seems like it's an environment where there's one person who gets a lot of resources and people have to accommodate that," she says. Instead of focusing funding a few great scientists and let them have the right to determine everything, Randall believes that China should spread resources more widely, so that the young generation can be more independent and have a chance to lead new innovations. Lisa Randall is an American theoretical physicist working in particle physics and cosmology at Harvard University. Her research connects theoretical insights to puzzles in the current understanding of the properties and interactions of matter. She has developed and studied a wide variety of models to address these questions, most prominently involving extra dimensions of space. Read an interview Q&A below. Also subscribe to China Money Podcast for free in the iTunes store, or subscribe to our weekly newsletter. Below is an edited version of the interview. Q: If you look at the global top 20 best universities to study physics, twelve are American universities and only one university is from China, which is Tsinghua University. Why American universities are so strong in providing good physics research environment? And what should China do to improve this? A: Well, (American universities) have a longer history of doing this. I think it's only recently that China has had these very big modernization. One thing China is doing is promoting experiments and observations. There are dark matter experiments,
