Is the top quark a threat to the universe? | with Kate Shaw
Could a tiny quantum fluctuation one day destroy the universe as we know it? Physicist Kate Shaw takes us inside CERN's Large Hadron Collider (home to the ATLAS experiment) to explain how the heaviest known fundamental particle, the top quark, and the Higgs boson together hold the answer to whether we live in a stable universe... or a fragile one.From the first periodic table to Rutherford's gold foil experiment, from the discovery of quarks to the hunt for the Higgs, Kate traces how physicists built the Standard Model of particle physics, and why measuring the mass of the top quark as precisely as possible could tell us whether the universe is sitting safely at the bottom of its "energy valley," or perched on the edge of a much deeper one.
This talk was filmed at the Royal Institution on Saturday 20 June 2026.
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Kate Shaw is an experimental particle physicist with nearly 20 years on the ATLAS experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider, leading precision studies of the top quark alongside research on Higgs physics and luminosity calibration. She founded the ATLAS Open Data project and co-directs the ICTP Physics Without Frontiers programme, and her outreach work has earned the European Physical Society Outreach Prize and the Royal Society Research Culture Award.
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Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
00:18 Inside the ATLAS Experiment at CERN
02:44 Why Smash Protons Together?
05:31 From Atoms to Quarks: Building the Standard Model
15:10 Quarks, Gluons and the Strong Force
20:17 Colliding Protons and Hadronic Jets
25:05 Discovering the Top Quark
29:53 What Is the Higgs Field?
31:13 Is the Universe Stable, Metastable, or Unstable?
41:07 The Future Circular Collider
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#Physics #ParticlePhysics #CERN #HiggsBoson #Quarks #Cosmology #ATLAS #LHC #Science
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