Maria Spiropulu

"My best memories are memories of physics questions — not even the answers. It's very bizarre."

"I grew up, indeed, in West Macedonia. This is in Greece. And I was a terror of a child because I was taking apart everything, just like all engineers and physicists and inventors. I come from a family that they're more artists, designers, and military people rather than scientists. So that was a surprise to my parents, that I was very determined to follow a scientific path in any way, form, or shape, or an engineering path. Initially, I really wanted to be an astronaut, like if you are in West Macedonia, what else would you want to be? An astronaut."

"The curveball is that we don’t understand the mass of the Higgs, which is about 125 times the mass of a . When we discovered the Higgs, the first thing we expected was to find these other new supersymmetric particles, because the mass we measured was unstable without their presence, but we haven’t found them yet. (If the Higgs field collapsed, we could bubble out into a different universe — and of course that hasn’t happened yet.) That has been a little bit crushing; for 20 years I’ve been chasing the supersymmetrical particles. So we’re like deer in the headlights: We didn’t find supersymmetry, we didn’t find as a particle."