Linear Digressions

This week, we’re dusting off the ol’ particle physics PhD to bring you an episode about ambitious new model-agnostic searches for new particles happening at CERN. Traditionally, new particles have been discovered by “targeted searches,” where scientists have a hypothesis about the particle they’re looking for and where it might be found. However, with the huge amounts of data coming out of CERN, a new type of broader search algorithm is starting to be deployed. It’s a strategy that casts a very wide net, looking in many different places at the same time, which also introduces all kinds of interesting questions—even a one-in-a-thousand occurrence happens when you’re looking in many thousands of places.