EXTRAORDINARY ALUM
Sogee Spinner, PhD ( BS ‘00) Particle physicist
The big bang • Born in Israel, Sogee Spinner moved to Chicago’s south suburbs when he was seven years old. He read The God Particle, by Leon Lederman, in high school and was thus inspired to study physics at Loyola.
It’s not rocket science. Technically. • After earning his BS in three years, Spinner earned a PhD in particle physics at the University of Maryland. He now works as a researcher in the physics department of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and recently returned from Geneva, Switzerland, site of the Large Hadron Collider, where he gave a presentation on “The Fate of R-Parity.”
Think about it • “In physics, there are theorists and experimentalists. I prefer theoretical physics because while experiments are inherently limited, theorists are only limited by their imaginations.”
Inspiring minds want to know • “The best thing about being a physicist—apart from all the women, of course—is postulating a theory and then working out the mathematics to see how it works in the real world. It’s very satisfying when you have an ‘aha!’ moment. I think you can compare it to when an artist gets inspiration for a piece of art. It’s a great feeling when you get an idea for a new model or project.”
Define “simple” • “I focus on building models that can be tested
Sogee Spinner, PhD (BS ‘00)
at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. We hypothesize something called a symmetry, which is a powerful mathematical tool for doing particle physics. Once you have this symmetry, it’s realtively straightforward to create an equation predicting how certain particles will interact. At the LHC, they ram together particles and release the data from the results of that crash. We analyze the results and, hopefully, they can tell us whether our theory has been ruled out.”
A light vacation read • “The title of my PhD thesis was ‘The Upside of Minimal Left-Right Supersymmetric Seesaw in
Deflected Anomaly Mediation.’ I like to tell people that it was better than studying the downside.”
Beyond our experience • “There are a lot of effects in quantum physics—the study of the atomic and subatomic world—that are beyond our day- to-day understanding because we live at a macroscopic level. For example, the vacuum of space isn’t a vacuum. It’s very active with particles that get created out of the vacuum and then annihilated back into the vacuum. That concept is pretty far outside our understanding of the world. The only way I can grasp an idea like that is to work through the math
to get an intuitive sense of what’s going on.”
Apocalypse now? • “There have been a lot of rumors about the Large Hadron Collider—that it’s going to create black holes and destroy the world. It’s not going to happen. Cosmic rays are constantly hitting our atmosphere at higher rates of energy than the LHC produces. If black holes could be made this way, it would have happened already.”
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SUMMER 2010 41
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