full transcript

From the Ted Talk by James Beacham: How we explore unanswered questions in physics

Unscramble the Blue Letters

Particle physicists are eoerlrpxs. And very much of what we do is cartography. Let me put it this way: forget about the LHC for a second. imganie you are a space explorer arriving at a distant planet, snaerhcig for aliens. What is your first task? To immediately orbit the planet, land, take a quick look around for any big, obvious sgins of life, and rpeort back to home base. That's the stage we're at now. We took a first look at the LHC for any new, big, obvious-to-spot pleitcars, and we can report that there are none. We saw a weird-looking alien bump on a distant mountain, but once we got closer, we saw it was a rock.

Open Cloze

Particle physicists are _________. And very much of what we do is cartography. Let me put it this way: forget about the LHC for a second. _______ you are a space explorer arriving at a distant planet, _________ for aliens. What is your first task? To immediately orbit the planet, land, take a quick look around for any big, obvious _____ of life, and ______ back to home base. That's the stage we're at now. We took a first look at the LHC for any new, big, obvious-to-spot _________, and we can report that there are none. We saw a weird-looking alien bump on a distant mountain, but once we got closer, we saw it was a rock.

Solution

  1. searching
  2. report
  3. imagine
  4. explorers
  5. signs
  6. particles

Original Text

Particle physicists are explorers. And very much of what we do is cartography. Let me put it this way: forget about the LHC for a second. Imagine you are a space explorer arriving at a distant planet, searching for aliens. What is your first task? To immediately orbit the planet, land, take a quick look around for any big, obvious signs of life, and report back to home base. That's the stage we're at now. We took a first look at the LHC for any new, big, obvious-to-spot particles, and we can report that there are none. We saw a weird-looking alien bump on a distant mountain, but once we got closer, we saw it was a rock.

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations

ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
highest energy 3
smooth line 3
higgs boson 3
theorist colleagues 3
large hadron 2
higher energy 2
nobel prize 2
special quantum 2
quantum properties 2
give birth 2
standard model 2
extra dimensions 2
hyperdimensional graviton 2
higher energies 2
artificial intelligence 2

ngrams of length 3

collocation frequency
special quantum properties 2

Important Words

  1. alien
  2. aliens
  3. arriving
  4. base
  5. big
  6. bump
  7. cartography
  8. closer
  9. distant
  10. explorer
  11. explorers
  12. forget
  13. home
  14. imagine
  15. immediately
  16. land
  17. lhc
  18. life
  19. mountain
  20. obvious
  21. orbit
  22. particle
  23. particles
  24. physicists
  25. planet
  26. put
  27. quick
  28. report
  29. rock
  30. searching
  31. signs
  32. space
  33. stage
  34. task