Savas Dimopoulos is an influential particle physicist based at Stanford University, who also holds the Coril Holdings Archimedes Visiting Chair in Theoretical Physics at Perimeter Institute. He worked at CERN during the 1990s, and was featured in Particle Fever, a 2013 documentary about the hunt for the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider. In this episode, he talks with Lauren and Colin about how he approaches the grand, open questions that keep him up at night – including two particularly fundamental questions about the universe that he feels still need explaining. Dimopoulos also discusses how particle physics and collider experiments have evolved throughout his career, what motivated him to become a physicist, and why he has never looked back. View the episode transcript here.

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Conversations at the Perimeter is co-hosted by Perimeter Teaching Faculty member Lauren Hayward and journalist-turned-science communicator Colin Hunter. In each episode, they chat with a guest scientist about their research, the challenges they encounter, and the drive that keeps them searching for answers.

The podcast is produced by the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, a not-for-profit, charitable organization supported by a unique public-private model, including the Governments of Ontario and Canada. Perimeter Institute acknowledges that it is situated on the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, and Neutral peoples. Perimeter’s educational outreach initiatives, including Conversations at the Perimeter, are made possible in part by the support of donors like you. Be part of the equation: perimeterinstitute.ca/donate