The Big Bang Theorist

A Nepalese ninth grader’s fascination with what came before the Big Bang leads him to study in America, participate in the international particle physics project that found proof of “the God particle,” and teach at Washington College.

Suyog Shrestha, assistant professor of physics, was a contributing member of the ATLAS Collaboration at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. In 2012, the project found evidence for the Higgs boson, also known as the “God particle,” confirming important elements of the Standard Model of Particle Physics. This discovery would lead to the Nobel Prize for the theorists who predicted the particle's existence and recognition for Shrestha and the thousands of others who contributed to the groundbreaking discovery.

Today, Shrestha continues his association with CERN, searching for new subatomic particles through collaborative projects. He and his Washington College students conduct original research on the fundamental nature of matter and the universe at his lab on campus and at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.

Thanks to Shrestha’s ongoing research at CERN and funding from a National Science Foundation grant, Washington College is one of only three liberal arts colleges in the U.S. that are members of the ATLAS Collaboration. In other words, our students have the same privileges and access to research as those typically reserved for large research universities, and they are at the cutting edge of particle physics and the understanding of the nature of the universe.

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Before the Big Bang?

Shrestha’s interest in “the big questions,” as he describes them, began as a child in his home country, Nepal. When he was in eighth grade, he happened to read an article about the Big Bang. He found the theory fascinating, but kept asking himself, what happened before the Big Bang? In school a year later, he learned about atoms and their constituent parts—protons, neutrons, and electrons. He assumed these were the building blocks of everything in nature. However, a friend of his had an older brother, and as is the case with older siblings, “he knew more than us.” He told Shrestha that protons and neutrons were made up of quarks!

“That was not in the textbook, and that just intrigued me!” he said. “What are quarks made up of then? I read books like A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking and The Ascent of Science by Brian Silver. And their big ideas really attracted me, such as what fundamental particles are, what time is, what happened before the Big Bang, what space is, and the ideas of quantum mechanics and relativity. These were not in our textbooks or taught in class, but they were fascinating to me.”

He has been on a quest to answer these questions ever since. Although he has not discovered what happened before the Big Bang and is “agnostic” as to whether that question can even be answered, his curiosity about the nature of matter and the origins of the universe has remained intact. Searching for answers has led him across continents and down to the smallest known and theorized particles.

A Very Young Teacher

If curiosity about the fundamental questions of the universe is a defining feature of Shrestha’s personality, an equally defining aspect is his desire to share this curiosity and knowledge with others.

“I like finding things out and sharing them with people,” he said. “I also encourage people to follow their own curiosity.”

Shrestha’s need to share information with others also began in childhood. He spent his youth between Kathmandu, where his grandparents lived and where there were better schools and modern facilities, and his parents’ hometown, which was remote and didn’t have electricity. The journey to the hometown was arduous.

“You'd have to take a very circuitous route, a 10- to 12-hour bus ride, and then, depending on the season, you would either walk some 40 kilometers over mountains,” he said, “or if the rivers were dry, then you could hitch rides on cottonwood trucks [that used the dry riverbeds as roads].”

Because the town was so isolated (roads connecting it to Kathmandu were not built until recently), the locals had no electricity until he was around 10, and there was limited access to information.

“There were no books other than government-issued textbooks,” he said. “So whenever I went to my hometown, I brought books. I would tell my cousins and anyone who was interested about everything I had learned. I would tell them about the solar system and the galaxies and even my understanding of relativity.” He laughed. “I was grateful that they listened. I think I had a need to share like a teacher from the age of 10. I even brought cricket to my hometown and shared my handheld video games.”

Under the Nepalese education system at the time, students took a national exam at the end of 10th grade to determine whether they could continue to 11th grade. The results took up to six months to come out, so students had an imposed gap in their education. Shrestha returned to his hometown to await his results. For reasons he can’t remember, the local community school had lost its science teacher. Shrestha volunteered to teach the ninth graders even though he had just completed 10th grade himself!

“I didn‘t take a salary or anything and taught classes for two semesters. I gave them exams and everything,” he said. “I enjoyed the time teaching.”

"I really wanted to study physics, but I don't think I could even verbalize that to myself ..."

Choosing a Path in a Time of War

When Shrestha was 12 or 13, a civil war broke out between Maoist guerrillas and the monarchist government in his country. It would last 10 years and cause at least 17,000 deaths. It ended in 2006 with the monarchy being replaced by a democratic republic. So, for much of his school years, and even during the period when he was teaching ninth graders, the country was embroiled in war.

“There were bombings in the streets, mostly at police stations or army camps,” he said. “Kathmandu was not as badly hit as many of the other towns and villages, but the fear was there.”

His father was arrested for reasons that were never made clear and imprisoned for six months. For equally unclear reasons, he was released and returned to his job as a civil servant. “A lot of people were arrested at the time just based on suspicion,” he said.

The war, which mostly took place in the countryside, didn’t disrupt his schooling at a Jesuit school in Kathmandu. In the upper grades, the subjects were taught through English, and he became fluent in written English. It wouldn’t be until he came to the U.S. that he became conversationally fluent.

He joked that, at the time, all Nepalese parents wanted their children to be doctors, and if they couldn’t get into medical school, engineering was the best alternative. His parents were no different. Because he was so good at science, especially physics, he was on the engineering track, and upon graduation, he applied to and was accepted into Nepal’s top engineering school with a government scholarship to cover the cost.

“I really wanted to study physics, but I don’t think I could even verbalize that to myself at the time,” he said. “I think I had a natural tendency for the liberal arts, too, because I liked the arts, literature, Italian, English, and so forth. But I didn’t know the liberal arts were an option.”

Shrestha, listening to his heart even if he couldn’t articulate what he wanted, did something radical a week after he had enrolled in the prestigious engineering school. He cancelled his enrollment and used the money to register for the SATs and TOEFL (the English proficiency exam for non-English speakers who want to go to college in the U.S.).

This was a huge risk. Not only had he not been accepted into any schools and did not know if he would be accepted, but he also didn’t know if he could get a visa to the U.S. His parents, although surprised, were not angry with his unusual decision.

“They must have read something in my determination that they were okay with,” he said.

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Experiencing the Liberal Arts

Shrestha applied to many schools in the U.S., but one small liberal arts college stood out: Grinnell College in Iowa. It was the only school he’d heard of that offered a scholarship specifically for students from Nepal, including free tuition and board, and free flights home. He applied and was accepted into the college, but did not receive the scholarship covering flights home. He did receive a substantial scholarship and enrolled.

“I knew it was a very good school, and I was attracted to the liberal arts there, too,” he said. “Coming from a different background, I wanted a smaller college so I could be closer to the faculty and community. And the most crucial point is that it offered a 3-2 engineering program, so I could still tell my parents I would become an engineer.” He laughed.

A 3-2 program means you can spend three years at one institution and two at another and earn a degree from both institutions. Washington College, for example, partners with other institutions to offer dual degrees in engineering, nursing, pharmacy, and environmental science.

Grinnell was very supportive and friendly, although the food took some getting used to. Shrestha had become a vegetarian at a young age and found the dining hall food less than appealing. Eventually, he would master the grilled cheese sandwich with tomato soup and even learned to make a sort of stir-fry in the microwave from the ingredients in the salad bar.

“I was very young and very hyper,” he said. “I was very enthusiastic about everything and took every opportunity to learn, not just in the classroom. I talked to everybody on campus without realizing that I was learning something from them. I was like a sponge absorbing everything.”

Still, he could not admit to himself that he wasn’t going to be an engineer. He even convinced his advisor that he was going to be one, and they regularly discussed his pathway. But he was taking more and more physics classes, and while there was a natural overlap between physics and engineering, there came a point where he had to choose between the two. He bit the bullet and chose physics, graduating from Grinnell with a Bachelor of Arts in physics (Grinnell does not offer Bachelor of Science degrees). What his parents thought of this move, he didn’t share. He did say that they are proud of his accomplishments since.

Finding Particle Physics

Having committed to physics, which he finally admitted to himself had been his heart’s desire since eighth grade, he applied to graduate schools in physics. After a year teaching math at a high school to earn some money, he joined the physics program at Iowa State University. The physics program there is associated with a National Laboratory focused on condensed matter physics and was one of the sites that purified uranium for the Manhattan Project. He had studied condensed matter at Grinnell and continued on that path at Iowa State.

Once again, Shrestha’s eighth-grade self would put a wrench in the works. Condensed matter physics was interesting and had lots of applications, but it wasn’t getting him any closer to the Big Bang.

“[At Iowa] I went to a talk by a professor about particle physics that covered quarks, and leptons, and quantum black holes, and all these extra dimensions,” he said. “I realized this was what I’d been looking for all along!”

He went straight to the professor’s next available office hours and asked to sign up to pursue particle physics with him. The professor was not totally convinced. He gave Shrestha some projects to work on over the summer. If he finished them and was still interested in particle physics, they could talk again.

It wasn’t easy. First, Shrestha had to prepare for his qualifying exams—tests he had to pass to continue as a doctoral student. Second, in order to do a project at the doctoral level, you have to acquire the tools in that field, and there are a lot of tools required for particle physics.

“It’s like learning to play guitar. For the first six months, all you do is develop calluses on your finger, and it’s very hard,” he said. “That experience was not pleasant. But I had my guiding star from when I was a kid and the big ideas I was interested in, so I kept on and kept on.”

Having satisfied his professor’s trial of commitment, Shrestha was accepted into the particle physics program and began to study the foundations of matter and the universe in earnest. He now faced a new problem—the program worked with the ATLAS Collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN and had funding for several doctoral candidates there. Unfortunately, all these slots were filled, and none of the doctoral students were in a rush to leave what was the most advanced, prestigious, and exciting particle physics collaboration in the world. It took three years of research and teaching at Iowa before one of the places opened up for him, and he set out for CERN.

"...quarks, and leptons, and quantum black holes, and all these extra dimensions ... this was what I'd been looking for all along!"

Honeymoon in Switzerland

He describes his time in Switzerland as “a sort of honeymoon.” And it was a literal honeymoon as well as a metaphorical one. While there, he married Abha Eli, and they spent the first several years of their marriage together in Switzerland. He worked at the LHC on the ATLAS Collaboration, and she eventually worked in CERN's communications department.

“It was like a Disneyland for physicists,” he said. “I was suddenly one of the thousands of people working there, lots of bigwigs, lots of professors from all over the world, many with Nobel Prizes already. There was a lot of excitement about the potential discovery of the Higgs boson. We didn’t know how close we were then.”

Shrestha continued working on his thesis, which involved a search for a seventh type of quark that the Standard Model predicted would exist. He also worked on the ATLAS Collaboration’s search for the Higgs boson, developing software to interpret the data resulting from collisions between particles. The LHC, the largest collider in the world with a 17-mile circumference, can accelerate particles up to close to the speed of light. When these particles collide, they can split into constituent particles. The software helped identify these smaller particles. The ATLAS Collaboration was looking for the Higgs boson, which the Standard Model predicted should exist if the Higgs field exerted the forces it was theorized to exert.

The God Particle

The Higgs boson had already been popularized and captured the public’s imagination as the “God particle.” Shrestha explained how it got its name. The Standard Model of Particle Physics (SM) predicted a field whose force could create mass under certain conditions. This was known as the Higgs field. If the field existed, we should be able to detect it through the appearance of a particle that was called the Higgs boson. For decades, scientists searched for this particle without finding it.

Yet the SM’s theoretical framework worked in real life. Its applications include medical imagery and cancer therapies, ever smaller computer chips, and many of the advanced technologies we take for granted. It also explains the Big Bang and the origins of the universe. Therefore, it is important to either prove the theory’s basic predictions or learn why they don’t work. Hence, particle physicists across the world kept searching for evidence of the Higgs boson. One Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Leon M. Lederman, wrote a book about particle physics and the frustrating search for the elusive boson. He titled his book The God-Damned Particle. His publishers removed the word “damned” and published it as The God Particle. The media loved the concept of a mysterious almost divine particle that was the missing key to the SM and popularized it. Many, if not most, particle physicists are not pleased with the “God particle,” but the name stuck.

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"I enjoy reaching out to younger students and giving them the opportunities I didn’t get."

Giving Back

Even as the decades-long search for the boson was about to be rewarded with its discovery, and Shrestha was busy with family, thesis, and CERN research, he still found time to share his curiosity with others and bring new people into the particle physics world. When he graduated from Grinnell, he appreciated the opportunities he had been given in the U.S. and how access to the sorts of resources readily available in America could change lives in Nepal. He and a couple of friends founded the nonprofit Youth for Nepal. Over the next 10 years, the organization did a lot of fundraising and invested in a lot of health care and educational projects in Nepal

At CERN, Shrestha continued his outreach efforts. “CERN is an international organization with a mandate to reach out globally,” he said. “Abha and I began lobbying their international relations office and connecting with the Nepal mission in Geneva.”

The first tangible result of their lobbying was a student from Nepal who was hired for a summer position on the ATLAS Collaboration in 2013. In 2014, the Shresthas were doing outreach events in Nepal, introducing teachers, high school students, and university students to particle physics and the work going on at CERN. With each event, they built momentum, and as international physics organizations saw proof of the interest and potential in Nepal, their efforts received more and more grants. And with more money, more students and teachers from Nepal have had the opportunities to visit CERN and work on projects there.

“It’s an example of what you can do when people take the initiative,” he said. “I’m not unique, and it was also somewhat selfish of me because I enjoy doing this. I enjoy reaching out to younger students and giving them the opportunities I didn’t get. The other thing is that their interest, their curiosity, their ‘wow’ faces reenergize me.”

Shrestha’s desire to teach and bring particle physics to young people would determine his next career move. After the discovery of the Higgs boson, he defended his thesis and received his doctorate. He didn’t find the seventh quark he had been searching for, but that is a normal part of the scientific process. If the seventh quark wasn’t where he was looking for it—at certain wavelengths—the next researcher could look elsewhere. In this way knowledge is accumulated and shared.

An Older Wiser Teacher

With doctorate in hand, Shrestha returned to CERN as a post-doctoral researcher. The discovery of the Higgs boson had opened up new fields of research, and he was eager to participate. He remained there from 2014 to 2021. But being a post-doc researcher is a grant-based position and not a sustainable career. He decided to look for a job that would fulfill three criteria: 1. he could continue his research. 2. he wanted to educate others and encourage curiosity. 3. he wanted a place where his family would be comfortable.

It’s no surprise that Washington College ticked all the boxes for him.

“The best balance for me between continuing research and being an educator was a liberal arts college,” he said. “At a big research university, you don’t have the time to invest in becoming a good teacher. At a high school, you don’t have the time or resources to do research. Because of Grinnell, I think, I had deep in me a desire to be a professor at a liberal arts college where I could collaborate with professors across disciplines and have direct connections with students.”

Shrestha was offered a position at Washington and hit the ground running in 2022. He continues to work with doctoral students and researchers at other institutions across the country and world, publishes papers, and oversees undergraduate students who get to work on original research with the doctoral students and other researchers, and even get to work at CERN on the ATLAS Collaboration. Thanks to Toll and Cater Society fellowships, he can hire students to work on these projects.

“In order to make a significant contribution to these particle physics projects, you have to put in a lot of hours for a long period of time,” he explained. “Undergraduates have a lot of courses and not a lot of time. If they can make a little bit of money for working 10 hours a week, in addition to their academic curiosity, they have the motivation to work on a research project.”

If doing original research, overseeing research projects and students, publishing, acting as a referee and peer-reviewer sounds like a lot, that isn’t all that Shrestha does. He continues his outreach efforts in Nepal and locally in Maryland. Recently, he hosted high school students from Kent and Queen Anne’s counties at Washington, where they got to do physics workshops and attend lectures by him and fellow scientists. He has also visited other high schools in Maryland and given talks at public libraries.

Back to the Big Bang

And what about the questions that set him on his quest? Does he still wonder about the big questions and what happened before the Big Bang?

“The Standard Model of Particle Physics is a very beautiful theory that explains many, many phenomena. But it has some sickness built into the theory itself,” he said. “For example, why is there more matter than antimatter in the universe? According to our theories of the Big Bang, there should be equal amounts. But all we see in nature is matter. That’s just one of the open questions built into the Standard Model. Then there are external problems, such as dark matter. Twenty-five percent of the matter content of the universe seems to be dark matter, and we don’t have a good understanding of what this is.”

Clearly, Shrestha is still pursuing the big questions and opening up new generations of students to the wonders of the universe and its origins. Maybe one day we will have all the answers, or maybe we will always be searching, getting ever closer to the Big Bang and our origins.