Along Guardian Science correspondent Hannah Devlin, I discussed the flavour anomalies from LHCb with Madeleine Finlay for the Guardian Science Weekly podcast.

It is titled “Will the Large Hadron Collider find a new fifth force of nature?“. Hannah gives a nice introduction to the Standard Model and its limitations, and then we go into how the evidence for new physical phenomena are actually probed at the LHC.

The discussion moves to the more general topic of exploration at the LHC with all the experiments and with direct studies, although it may sound a bit as though I’m working on LHCb, which I am not, I’m sticking with ATLAS and these kind of differential cross section measurements, which will throw some light on possible explanations for the lepton flavour physics, of course.

One of the things I like about discussing particle physics in the media and with the public is the way we can talk about uncertainty and progress in science. Like anyone, we have our hopes and dreams about what might be discovered, but in the end the data will decide, assuming we actually make the experiments work. A related aspect is that in any scientific framework of understanding (be it of subatomic forces, or a pandemic or a climate system for example) we rarely, if ever, know everything. But what we do know is an awful lot more than nothing.

As I mentioned in the previous post, I finally went back to CERN last week. After that I went to Grenoble.