Nima Arkani-Hamed



Nima Arkani-Hamed (نیما ارکانی حامد — born April 5, 1972) is an Iranian-American-Canadian physicist, specializing in high-energy physics and string theory. Arkani-Hamed is now on the faculty at the Institute for Advanced Study and won the 2012 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.

Quotes

 * Two of the major questions left unanswered by the Standard Model of particle physics have to do with hierarchies of mass scales. The first is the flavor problem: what determines the masses of the quarks and leptons, and why do they span such a large range, e.g. why is the top quark 3 × 105 times heavier than the electron? The second is the gauge hierarchy problem: why is the weak scale seventeen orders of magnitude smaller than the Planck scale?


 * There are still many open questions that need answering: Why does gravity defy the notion of space-time in short distances? Why are there humongous quantum fluctuations in shorter distances? How is a larger Universe possible? These questions relate to the hierarchy problem and fine tuning and are divided into two stages. First, one should ask: “Why is there a macroscopic Universe that is not broken in the Planck scale,” and second: “Why are there large scale structures in the large Universe and they are not broken into Planck scale black holes?”
 * Interview with Nima Arkani Hamed by Panos Charitos, Newsletter of the EP department, CERN (30 August 2015)


 * The stakes are higher than the past. We aren’t asking about this or that particle, but something much more deeply structural about physical reality. … By far the best way to settle this question is to lead a charge to the highest possible energies and build a 100-TeV collider.
 * "Visions of Future Physics", an interview with Nima Arkani-Hamed by Béatrice de Géa, Quanta Magazine (22 September 2015)


 * The hierarchy problem is the elephant in the room. ... And it originally showed up in the context of doublet–triplet splitting problem.
 * (12:36 of 1:40:31)


 * This is the best few tens of billions years in the history of the universe to do cosmology.
 * (45:46 of 2:07:09)


 * Whether in physics and mathematics or in the humanities, when something really finally works, it has a certain perfection to it, a feeling of inevitability, like it was so completely obvious all along, and it couldn't be any other way.
 * (9:05 AM)


 * ... like most physicists, I really enjoy talking about physics.
 * (quote at 2:47 of 57:39)


 * ... nature has very few good ideas — it recycles them in subtle and interesting ways, over and over again — and it's our job to understand how that works.
 * (quote at 51:12 of 52:41)