Simon Seth Roffe MARLBORO — For Marlboro resident Simon Seth Roffe, this summer resembled something like a Hollywood blockbuster movie, where a super-smart teenager is recruited by the government and plucked from his everyday life in order to save the planet.
Although Roffe was not chosen to save the world, he was plucked by the government to work on a project — one that is pretty impressive for someone who is only 19 years old. Roffe recently returned from a trip to Japan, where he was the youngest worker assigned on the Belle II experiment, a project designed to search for CP violations.
In the world of particle physics, CP violations relate to the dominance of matter over antimatter, and the Belle II experiment is designed to figure out the reason for why that dominance exists.
“Particle physics, in general, is literally the study of why the universe is the way it is and what makes it up. … It is really interesting to learn about the very fundamentals of why things are the way they are,” Roffe said.
Roffe, a sophomore at the University of Pittsburgh, was chosen to work on the project by his professor, Vladimir Savinov, who Roffe worked with throughout his freshman year.
“He emailed me and said, ‘They might need you in Japan, so what days are good for you?’ ” Roffe said.
The Belle II experiment is an international project, and the federal government paid for Roffe’s trip to Japan. The young man’s assignment while he was overseas was to work on data collection electronics and help sort the collected data for the project.
“My favorite memory, to be honest, was when stuff broke,” Roffe said. “That was when it got fun … so when stuff broke, it was kind of fun to figure out and solve what the issue was and how to fix it without completely screwing things up.”
When he wasn’t working, Roffe enjoyed the “amazing” food Japan had to offer. Roffe also met some of the biggest names in the world of particle physics, such as Milind Purohit, a professor at the University of South Carolina who contributed to the discovery of the Higgs boson.
Roffe said he will likely return to Japan sometime in the future to continue working on the experiment. He hopes that he might be lucky enough to meet the emperor of Japan, as many previous workers involved in the Belle experiment were able to receive the privilege.
In addition to particle physics, Roffe is very interested in music.
“On my iPod, I have literally everything from Bach to Beyonce,” he said.
At school, Roffe plays trombone in the University of Pittsburgh Marching Band.
“Math and music have a very similar mindset … all music is math,” he said. “You have the different timing signatures, the beats, you have to keep time and have the different rhythms based off of that. It’s a lot of math thinking.”