logo
episode-header-image
Nov 2014
10m 16s

Hunting for the Higgs

Ben Jaffe And Katie Malone
About this episode
Machine learning and particle physics go together like peanut butter and jelly--but this is a relatively new development. For many decades, physicists looked through their fairly large datasets using the laws of physics to guide their exploration; that tradition continues today, but as ever-larger datasets get made, machine learning becomes a more tractab ... Show More
Up next
Apr 27
ReAct and Tool Usage (The Agents Season, Episode 2)
Before 2022, there was a wall between AI and the real world — models could reason impressively, but couldn't look anything up, run code, or check whether anything they said was actually true. This episode traces the moment that wall came down, through two landmark papers: ReAct, ... Show More
23m 41s
Apr 20
What's an AI Agent? And Why's That Hard to Define? (The Agents Season, Episode 1)
AI agents are having a moment — and unpacking them properly takes more than a single conversation. This episode kicks off a dedicated multi-part season exploring AI agents from every angle, building up a complete picture piece by piece rather than skimming the surface. Think of i ... Show More
19m 3s
Apr 13
Unfaithful Chain of Thought
What's actually happening when an LLM "thinks out loud"? Research on human decision-making suggests that much of the reasoning we believe drives our choices is actually post hoc rationalization — we decide first, explain later. Katie and Ben get curious about whether the same mig ... Show More
24m 32s
Recommended Episodes
Jul 2022
The mysterious particles of physics, part 1
The machine that discovered the Higgs Boson 10 years ago is about to restart after a massive upgrade, to dig deeper into the heart of matter and the nature of the Universe.Roland Pease returns to CERN’s 27-kilometre Large Hadron Collider (LHC) dug deeper under the Swiss-French bo ... Show More
30m 11s
Apr 2019
Will we ever know what the universe is made of?
We are all made of particles – but what are particles made of? It’s a question that’s been perplexing scientists for centuries - for so long, in fact, that listener Doug in Canada wants to know if there’s a limit to how much they can ever discover. CrowdScience heads out to CERN, ... Show More
35m 25s
Jul 2022
The mysterious particles of physics, part 3
The smaller the thing you look at, the bigger the microscope you need to use. That’s why the circular Large Hadron Collider at CERN, where they discovered the Higgs boson is 27 kilometres long, and its detectors tens of metres across. But to dig deeper still into the secrets of t ... Show More
27m 36s
Jul 2022
The Higgs Boson: A scientific discovery that explains how the universe works
It is 10 years since scientists in Geneva said they believed they had found the Higgs boson - known by some as the God particle. In July 2012 after more than 40 years of searching, two teams on different experiments at the Large Hadron Collider confirmed the existence of the part ... Show More
10m 14s
Jul 2022
The mysterious particles of physics, part 2
Episode 2: Lost in the DarkPhysics is getting a good understanding of atoms, but embarrassingly they’re only a minor part of the Universe. Far more of it is made of something heavy and dark, so-called dark matter. The scientists who discovered the Higgs boson ten years ago though ... Show More
33m 23s
Jun 2022
Body scan reveals HIV's hideouts
Researchers have developed a medical imaging technique which reveals where in the body HIV lies hidden, even when people have their infection well controlled by antiviral drugs. The team at the University of California, San Francisco hope this will lead to better treatments and e ... Show More
1 h
Nov 2020
The end of everything
Everyone knows about the Big Bang being the beginning of the universe and time - but when and how is it going to end? ask brothers Raffie and Xe from Rome. For this series, with lockdown learning in mind, Drs Rutherford and Fry are investigating scientific mysteries for students ... Show More
27m 19s