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Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Yesterday was

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Speaker 1: a holiday, so we didn't have time to put together

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Speaker 1: a brand new episode for today, so we're going into

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Speaker 1: the vault. This is going to be The Matter of

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Speaker 1: Everything with Susie she This is an interview that Joe

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Speaker 1: conducted with the author of the Matter of Everything, How Curiosity,

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Speaker 1: Physics and Improbable Experiments Changed the World. This was originally

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Speaker 1: published eight eight, twenty twenty three. Let's dive right in.

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Speaker 2: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.

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Speaker 3: Hello, and welcome to the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast.

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Speaker 3: My name is Joe McCormick. My regular co host Robert

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Speaker 3: Lamb is not with me today, but he'll be joining

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Speaker 3: me again the next time. Today's episode is going to

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Speaker 3: be an interview. This is a conversation I had with

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Speaker 3: the accelerator physicist and author Suzie Sheehy about her recent

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Speaker 3: book The Matter of Everything, How Curiosity, Physics and Improbable

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Speaker 3: Experiments Changed the World. Susie's publisher sent us a copy

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Speaker 3: of this book for review, and I really loved it.

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Speaker 3: So it's a history of modern physics experiments from Runken's

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Speaker 3: cathode ray tube and the discovery of X rays all

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Speaker 3: the way up to the Large Hadron Collider and beyond.

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Speaker 3: And what makes this book really special in my opinion,

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Speaker 3: is that it focuses not just on theoretical advancements, but

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Speaker 3: on the labor of designing and building experiments to test

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Speaker 3: those new ideas. And because it illuminates so much about

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Speaker 3: the experimental apparatus behind the progress of science, I think

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Speaker 3: this book has a lot of interesting things to say,

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Speaker 3: not just about the history of our quest to understand

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Speaker 3: matter and energy, but about epistemology and critical thinking and

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Speaker 3: work to read from her author bio. Susie Shehe is

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Speaker 3: a physicist, science communicator and academic who divides her time

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Speaker 3: between her research groups at the University of Oxford and

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Speaker 3: the University of Melbourne. Her research addresses both curiosity driven

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Speaker 3: and applied areas, and is currently focused on developing new

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Speaker 3: particle accelerators for applications in medicine. Again, the book is

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Speaker 3: called The Matter of Everything, and I guess that does

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Speaker 3: it for the introduction. Here is my interview with Susie Shehe.

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Speaker 3: Susie Shehey, welcome to the podcast.

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Speaker 4: Thanks Joan, nice to be here.

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Speaker 3: So I wanted to start off talking about how I

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Speaker 3: think a lot of the histories of physics that I've

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Speaker 3: read focused more on the theoretical side, like what led

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Speaker 3: to the insights theoretical physicists had, how they dreamed up

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Speaker 3: their models, and things like that. I really loved that

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Speaker 3: this book was intensely focused on the experimental component of physics,

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Speaker 3: and there was a lot of focus on the details

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Speaker 3: of the experiments, how they did it, and understanding experiments

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Speaker 3: as human projects operating under constraints. What kind of insights

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Speaker 3: do you think are revealed by looking at the history

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Speaker 3: of particle physics through the experimental lens, in particular, especially

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Speaker 3: things that you might miss if you only talk about

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Speaker 3: physics as a sort of history of ideas.

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Speaker 4: Yeah, you phrased that so beautifully in there by the way,

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Speaker 4: the importance of experiments. So I'm an experimental physicist, right.

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Speaker 4: So one of the things that I observed when I

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Speaker 4: sort of started on the journey of writing this book

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Speaker 4: was that almost every other comparable book was written by

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Speaker 4: theoretical physicist, and so you'd get these stories where you

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Speaker 4: get this wonderful insight of say Einstein or one of

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Speaker 4: the key theoretical physicists of the age, and it was

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Speaker 4: like it was almost like they came to these insights

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Speaker 4: purely from their own personal genius, right, And this was

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Speaker 4: the story of physics that I was taught pretty much

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Speaker 4: when I did at university as well, but it was

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Speaker 4: also the story that comes across in these books. And

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Speaker 4: I don't know whether this is just like an egotistical

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Speaker 4: aggrandizing thing that people do. Certainly these people are very

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Speaker 4: very smart, right, but they're not islands. And I think

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Speaker 4: that's one of the key insights that you get from

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Speaker 4: taking a different approach to looking at the history and

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Speaker 4: looking more at the experiments and more at the wider

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Speaker 4: view of how physics progresses. And I think any theoretical

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Speaker 4: physicist today would all and hopefully also though is historically

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Speaker 4: would admit that, you know, their work is nothing without

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Speaker 4: the work of the experimentalists, because at the end of

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Speaker 4: the day, physics is a subject which is trying to

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Speaker 4: describe the universe, our actual universe, not just some theoretical,

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Speaker 4: mathematical universe that doesn't really exist. And so the only

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Speaker 4: way to meet those two things in the middle is

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Speaker 4: through experiment. You have to actually get out there and

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Speaker 4: and test nature. But that's where a lot of people,

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Speaker 4: I think, naively think that we just we know what

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Speaker 4: we're doing with that that we just we can go

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Speaker 4: out there and build an experiment and test or find

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Speaker 4: this thing, and that once the theorist predicts it, that

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Speaker 4: it's a straightforward journey. So that's I think the next

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Speaker 4: sort of key insight there is that it is not

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Speaker 4: a straightforward journey to discover and uncover the nature of

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Speaker 4: our universe, especially on these tiny scales that we're looking

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Speaker 4: at that are so much smaller than what we can

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Speaker 4: see with our own eyes. And so when you delve

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Speaker 4: into that, then as you say, there's this detailed development

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Speaker 4: of how experiments actually work, whether that's electronically, whether that's

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Speaker 4: because they require two thousand people with different expertise to

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Speaker 4: actually put them together, and also just that co development

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Speaker 4: of technology and instrumentation along with the development of ideas

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Speaker 4: and insights about the universe, and it really is sort

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Speaker 4: of a logistic development. So there's I think a few

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Speaker 4: things there about throwing out the long genius stereotype, managing

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Speaker 4: to recognize how important it is that we actually interact

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Speaker 4: in the real world and do experiments, and then just

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Speaker 4: the unpredictable nature of doing those experiments at all.

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Speaker 3: You mentioned in the book that some people think that

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Speaker 3: Derac's equation is the most beautiful equation in all of physics.

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Speaker 3: I'm sure that people who have a lot of math

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Speaker 3: and physics knowledge would consider that subjective. But it made

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Speaker 3: me curious about the different ways that instruments within science

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Speaker 3: can be perceived not only as useful or accurate, but

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Speaker 3: sometimes esthetically beautiful. So I was wondering about the other

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Speaker 3: side of that. As an experimentalist, Do you have an

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Speaker 3: opinion on what is the most beautiful experiment in all

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Speaker 3: of physics? Or do you have at least a few candidates?

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Speaker 4: Oh that's nice. Yeah, I think I definitely appreciate the

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Speaker 4: beauty of a well designed experiment that can sort of

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Speaker 4: cut through all the background noise and find the thing

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Speaker 4: that they're looking for. But I'd say I appreciate the

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Speaker 4: beauty of an experiment in multiple dimensions though, right, so

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Speaker 4: you can. I can appreciate the beauty of an experiment

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Speaker 4: which serendipitously found something that it didn't expect, as well

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Speaker 4: as appreciating, you know, the sort of really well designed,

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Speaker 4: very specific experiment. But now you're putting me on the

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Speaker 4: spot if you asked me what my favorite experiment was,

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Speaker 4: I mean, in the book, I really focus on twelve

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Speaker 4: key experiments that I chose from what could have been

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Speaker 4: thousands honestly, and focused on how those had contributed to

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Speaker 4: our knowledge of particle physics over about the last one

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Speaker 4: hundred and twenty years. And I think it's easier probably

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Speaker 4: for me to choose a favorite from the earlier ones

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Speaker 4: of those because they're smaller, it's easier to understand all

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Speaker 4: the different parts of the experiment. And so in that sense,

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Speaker 4: in a beauty and esthetic appreciation sense, I think I'm

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Speaker 4: going to say the cloud chamber. And this was developed

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Speaker 4: in the early nineteen hundreds by a physicist named CITR.

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Speaker 4: Wilson Charles Wilson, whose first love was actually meteorology, but

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Speaker 4: he was working in the Cavendis Lab in Cambridge in

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Speaker 4: the UK, alongside all the people doing all the early

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Speaker 4: work in radioactivity, so he was very well versed in

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Speaker 4: radioactivity and those ideas. But he invented this chamber originally

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Speaker 4: to try and study clouds and the interaction of light

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Speaker 4: and electricity in the atmosphere, and then he later realized

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Speaker 4: when someone held an X ray tube, or he and

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Speaker 4: a colleague held next ray tube to the side of

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Speaker 4: it that he could see the passage of radiation through

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Speaker 4: this chamber, which had a sort of in his case

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Speaker 4: water vapor and nowadays we use alcohol vapors, and these

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Speaker 4: little trails would form, like little tracks of cloud as

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Speaker 4: the radiation went through and left a little bit of

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Speaker 4: energy inside the chamber. And I find this beautiful because

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Speaker 4: it's really the first time as a species that we

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Speaker 4: get to visualize radiation. We get to visualize this thing

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Speaker 4: which is otherwise extremely uh you know, abstract and difficult

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Speaker 4: to understand, and now we're seeing its effects almost in

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Speaker 4: real time, so you can photograph as particles pass through,

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Speaker 4: and then we get and I think the beauty comes

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Speaker 4: in because it's this lovely interaction between our own capacities

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Speaker 4: as humans and the development of a new instrumentation. Because

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Speaker 4: then you can take you can leave these chambers up

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Speaker 4: on mountains, you can take photographs of the interactions there,

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Speaker 4: and from that we discover lots of new things, including

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Speaker 4: we discover antimatter for the first time. So the positron

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Speaker 4: is the opposite version of the electron, and when they

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Speaker 4: come together, they annihilate, but they can also be produced

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Speaker 4: in pairs electron positron pairs, And there were positrons detected

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Speaker 4: by a guy called Karl Anderson in the US, and

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Speaker 4: he discovered them in his experiments before he'd read about

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Speaker 4: Direct's beautiful equation. I'm coming back to the equation again now.

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Speaker 4: He actually wasn't aware of Dirac's work, which was published

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Speaker 4: in nineteen twenty nine, but in nineteen thirty two he'd

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Speaker 4: built this enormous chamber with this huge magnet around it

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Speaker 4: and legged it up a mountain and discovered this type

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Speaker 4: of anti matter. And I find that really beautiful because

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Speaker 4: then he's literally able to use our internal sort of

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Speaker 4: track recognition, you know, our patent finding system, our brain

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Speaker 4: to look at the photographs and actually see that there's

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Speaker 4: something new there. And there were other particles discovered later

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Speaker 4: as well, the new one being a key one, which

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Speaker 4: is a heavy version of an electron, and it was

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Speaker 4: really the instrument of choice for many many years in

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Speaker 4: the field, and it came from a meteorologist. So I

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Speaker 4: don't know, there's something in that story for me which

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Speaker 4: is just beautiful about how we can use our creativity

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Speaker 4: sort of reuse of ideas in adjacent fields to really

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Speaker 4: make amazing discoveries.

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Speaker 3: Yeah. I love that example too, And there's a kind

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Speaker 3: of beauty and a kind of lightness and elegance to

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Speaker 3: it that in a way seems contrasted by other experiments

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Speaker 3: you described that are also incredibly important and wonderful stories

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Speaker 3: to understand, Like one that stands sort of opposite it

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Speaker 3: in my mind is the story of Ernest Lawrence's team

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Speaker 3: and their cyclotron. And this chapter struck me as interesting

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Speaker 3: in part because I think this is the one where

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Speaker 3: you illuminate a history of what struck me as interesting

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Speaker 3: mistakes like you mentioned a faulty reading from an accelerator

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Speaker 3: experiment due to I think it was like deuteron coding

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Speaker 3: on target elements. Please correct me if I'm getting this wrong.

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Speaker 3: And also an incident where they accidentally made the whole

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Speaker 3: lab radioactive without realizing it, which interfered with their measurements

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Speaker 3: on a Geiger counter like device. So what is the

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Speaker 3: role of error and making a mess in scientific experiments?

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Speaker 4: Do you know? I've been thinking about this more since

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Speaker 4: writing the book, and I think we don't. I think

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Speaker 4: we don't acknowledge the role of error and failure enough

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Speaker 4: in science, in fact, we try and cover it up.

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Speaker 4: It's a huge there's a huge issue in fact with

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Speaker 4: failed experiments not being published, and in some fields like medicine,

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Speaker 4: that's that's a huge issue. Actually in physics it's less

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Speaker 4: of an issue, but it still happens. But Ernest Lawrence's

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Speaker 4: example of the cycloton is a fantastic example where by

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Speaker 4: sort of realizing their mistakes and their errors, they really

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Speaker 4: made progress in their understanding. So, as you say, they

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Speaker 4: developed this particle accelerator of this circular machine, and then

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Speaker 4: over time they realize that they're not seeing the results

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Speaker 4: that they think they should be seeing because, for example,

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Speaker 4: in one in one situation, basically everything could become radioactive,

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Speaker 4: and so all of their measurement devices were just picking

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Speaker 4: up the background radiation and not the radiation they were

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Speaker 4: trying to look for. But that helped them understand what

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Speaker 4: was happening in the machine as it was accelerating, and

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Speaker 4: they missed a number of key discoveries that were made

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Speaker 4: by other research groups around the world, but they didn't

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Speaker 4: mind too much. And Lawrence sort of had this mindset

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Speaker 4: which is relevant to the question of errors and failures,

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Speaker 4: which is. You know, he sort of would like to

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Speaker 4: say there's research enough for everyone, or there's discovery enough

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Speaker 4: for everyone, and so he was this big believer that

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Speaker 4: he was quite quite a futurist, I guess because at

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Speaker 4: the start of his career he was I think late

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Speaker 4: twenties early thirties when he first invented the cyclotron, and

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Speaker 4: he invented it because he couldn't see a path of

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Speaker 4: the existing technology to the end of his career even

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Speaker 4: you know, he was sort of looking thirty years in

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Speaker 4: the future, going, well, these technologies are just they're going

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Speaker 4: to be outdated by the time I get to that point,

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Speaker 4: So I'm going to have to invent something new to

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Speaker 4: give myself, you know, a path of growth through my career.

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Speaker 4: And boy did he get it, you know, he really

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Speaker 4: The cycloton was an incredible invention and they're still built

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Speaker 4: today in hospitals to generate radioisotopes for medical procedures, which

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Speaker 4: is very, very useful. But obviously along the way he

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Speaker 4: could be perceived at having failed to make key discoveries

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Speaker 4: in physics. So I think induced radioactivity was one of

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Speaker 4: the ones that he missed actually, and was found by

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Speaker 4: Julio and Curri in France. That's Marie Carey's daughter, Irene Kiri.

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Speaker 4: So I've been thinking about this since writing the book,

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Speaker 4: and I think I'd like to make the analogy with

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Speaker 4: in the arts. Right, So if you if you have

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Speaker 4: a creative practice in the arts, failure is an error.

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Speaker 4: It's just an inherent part of it. And it's also

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Speaker 4: very much acknowledged that by failing or making an error,

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Speaker 4: you may just stumble upon something new, a new way

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Speaker 4: of doing something, a new invention. I'm even thinking in

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Speaker 4: the culinary world, you know. I know of a chef

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Speaker 4: who who now runs a three Michelin starred restaurant in

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Speaker 4: the UK, and one day he accidentally dropped hot coal

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Speaker 4: into a vat of cooking oil and so they later,

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Speaker 4: you know, decided to taste it and see how it tasted,

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Speaker 4: and it tasted amazing, and he uses it in his

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Speaker 4: signature dishes in a three Michelin starred restaurant now. And

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Speaker 4: I love those stories of where errors lead you to

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Speaker 4: new things and new ideas. And I do think in

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Speaker 4: science we shy away a little bit from that, or

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Speaker 4: we like to sort of cover it up and then

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Speaker 4: we publish a paper that says, the story was a

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Speaker 4: very linear one, and you know, we made all these discoveries,

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Speaker 4: and in digging into the history of these experiments, which

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Speaker 4: were so critical in understanding particle physics, I did discover

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Speaker 4: that there was probably more failure than even I expected.

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Speaker 4: And as an experimentalist myself, I've just come to accept

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Speaker 4: that I often don't fully know what I'm doing because

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Speaker 4: no one has ever tried to do it before. And

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Speaker 4: sometimes I'm going to try things and they're going to fail.

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Speaker 4: And there's a constant process in my lab with my

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Speaker 4: students and staff of sort of openly talking about this

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Speaker 4: right in it, you know, being candid about it and

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Speaker 4: sort of being like that's all right, you know, like

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Speaker 4: it's okay that it failed. You didn't know what you

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Speaker 4: were doing because nobody knew what they were doing. But

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Speaker 4: for example, you know, you might consider an earlier experiment

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Speaker 4: in the book by William Rodkin, who discovered X rays,

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Speaker 4: and he discovered them because a sort of painted fluorescent

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Speaker 4: screen across his lab was glowing when he had a tube,

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Speaker 4: a cathoedray tube on in his lab, and he noticed

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Speaker 4: the glow and he decided to investigate it. Now we

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Speaker 4: often refer to that as serendipitous, but depending on your perspective,

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Speaker 4: you might consider it to be an error. You know,

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Speaker 4: you probably shouldn't have had the wrong detector, you know,

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Speaker 4: sort of out in the lab at the time. The

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Speaker 4: other person that comes to mind is Robert Milliken, who

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Speaker 4: did twelve years worth of experiments trying to measure what's

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Speaker 4: called the photoelectric effect, which is the electrical current that

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Speaker 4: flows when you shine light on particular metals. And this

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Speaker 4: is an interesting one where along the way, the early

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Speaker 4: phases of quantum mechanics had come around, and Einstein in

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Speaker 4: particular had come out with this equation which predicted what

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Speaker 4: should happen when you shine this light onto different metals.

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Speaker 4: And the upshot of Einstein's theory was really abhorrent to

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Speaker 4: the experimentalist. To Robert Milliken, he called it the reckless hypothesis,

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Speaker 4: and that's because this hypothesis implied that light would be

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Speaker 4: acting more like a particle than like a wave in

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Speaker 4: this experiment. And so he set out to prove Einstein wrong,

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Speaker 4: spent twelve years in the lab trying to do it,

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Speaker 4: and all he did was pre Einstein right to a

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Speaker 4: better precision than anyone had before. So again you might think,

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Speaker 4: and he even thought that he was failing, right, He

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Speaker 4: thought he was failing as an experimentalist. He was really

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Speaker 4: struggling whether he had to build all his own equipment

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Speaker 4: from scratch. And then at the end of twelve years

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Speaker 4: he sort of comes out with this result, which I

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Speaker 4: think even when he published it he still didn't fully believe,

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Speaker 4: but he was able to sort of say, well, it

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Speaker 4: is consistent with Einstein's prediction. And then later on about

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Speaker 4: another ten years later, he was awarded the Nobel Prize

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Speaker 4: for that and another famous experiment that he did about

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Speaker 4: the charge on the electron, and he changes his tune.

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Speaker 4: And I found this fascinating that, you know, this very

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Speaker 4: fallible nature of the experimentalist, of sort of thinking one

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Speaker 4: thing is going to happen and holding this bias that

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Speaker 4: you know, no, nature can't possibly work that way. It's ridiculous.

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Speaker 4: It's preposterous that a particle could be a wave. You know, sorry,

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Speaker 4: a light could be a wave and a particle. And

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Speaker 4: then he gets through his Nobel Prize speech or lecture

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Speaker 4: and then he's saying, you know, however, many years ago,

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Speaker 4: when I set out to demonstrate Einstein's photoelectric theory. So's

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Speaker 4: he's making out like him meant to do it all along,

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Speaker 4: and I was I was shocked. I was like, did

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Speaker 4: someone transcribe that incorrectly? I don't think so. And so

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Speaker 4: so it turns out that, you know, I think his

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Speaker 4: bias against it was what it gave him this force,

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Speaker 4: this will power to persist at his experiment for twelve

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Speaker 4: years because he was just like, emotionally, he was just like,

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Speaker 4: this cannot be right, this cannot be right. And you know,

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Speaker 4: you would you would say that he failed in that

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Speaker 4: enterprise because he was wrong, and I Stein was right.

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Speaker 4: But this is I think this is how science progresses,

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Speaker 4: and it's an important part of how science progresses is that, yes,

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Speaker 4: we're all human, we're all you know, we're coming with

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Speaker 4: our biases, we're very fallible. But isn't it amazing that

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Speaker 4: we can then, you know, use the scientific process and

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Speaker 4: apply you know, a sort of apply things to that

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Speaker 4: that process to try and UnBias ourselves from the results

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Speaker 4: and come out with the knowledge that is, you know,

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Speaker 4: sort of accurate, regardless of the fact that you didn't

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Speaker 4: believe it going into doing the experiment. I think that's

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Speaker 4: actually a pretty amazing thing that we can do.

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Speaker 3: And like the culture of experiment is the constraint on that. Yes, yeah, well,

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Speaker 3: regarding ideas that are wrong but persistent. One of my

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Speaker 3: favorite characters in the book is Ernest Rutherford, and there's

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Speaker 3: a part where you quote Ernest Rutherford saying that he

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Speaker 3: was originally brought up to think of the adam as.

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Speaker 3: I think the quote is a nice hard fellow red

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Speaker 3: or gray in color, according to your taste, and that

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Speaker 3: struck me as very funny. But then you also mentioned

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Speaker 3: in a footnote that even many physicists still, despite knowing better,

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Speaker 3: thing of sub atomic particles and atoms as little balls.

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Speaker 3: How do you visualize sub atomic particles or do you

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Speaker 3: at all? And is there a better way we should

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Speaker 3: try to picture this scale of matter in the mind's

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Speaker 3: eye or is it pointless to even try?

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Speaker 4: So I'm going to sheepishly admit that like all the

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Speaker 4: other physicists I've asked, we don't want to admit it.

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Speaker 4: But because the first time we were ever introduced to

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Speaker 4: the concept of atoms and particles, they were little hard spheres.

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Speaker 4: When you say protons and neutrons and electrons and the atom,

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Speaker 4: I have. I have a terrible picture in my head

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Speaker 4: that's I know is completely wrong, and yet it persists.

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Speaker 4: You know, I have this this, Yeah, I have little

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Speaker 4: hard spheres in my mind, just like Rutherford did. And

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Speaker 4: I mean this is a This is a huge disservice

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Speaker 4: that we do ourselves, I think, by persisting to describe

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Speaker 4: in this way. But here's here's I think a key

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Speaker 4: point about the models that we have in our heads,

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Speaker 4: and I will answer the question about how better to

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Speaker 4: visualize it in a moment. Physics and all the natural

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Speaker 4: sciences really are sciences of different scales, and all the

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Speaker 4: models that we have and all the theories that we

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Speaker 4: have apply on different scales. So if you're a chemist

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Speaker 4: or a biologist, it's well, other than some realms of chemistry,

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Speaker 4: it's probably okay for you to visualize atoms and particles

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Speaker 4: as little heart spheres. Because the models that predict the

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Speaker 4: behavior which you're interested in on the scale that you're

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Speaker 4: interested in, which is now much more macroscopic than microscopic.

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Speaker 4: You know, it works perfectly fine, it can sort of

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Speaker 4: approximate it. And quantum mechanics, though, is obviously the science

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Speaker 4: when we get down to that very very small level,

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Speaker 4: and we've realized that it no longer works in the

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Speaker 4: same analogous way to say, billiard balls on a billiard table,

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Speaker 4: and it works in a very different way. Everything is

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Speaker 4: much more probabilistic. Nothing is as certain. We can't know

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Speaker 4: things like the position and the momentum at the same

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Speaker 4: time precisely, so everything becomes a little fuzzier. If I

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Speaker 4: were to try and encourage you to properly visualize an atom,

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Speaker 4: first of all, you know, the central nucleus of an

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Speaker 4: atom is extremely dense and extremely small compared to the

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Speaker 4: outer side of the atom. And Rutherford had another beautiful

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Speaker 4: analogy for this, which is that if the electrons, which

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Speaker 4: now you're considering in your head, the electrons to be

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Speaker 4: kind of a wave or a sphere or a sort

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Speaker 4: of much more, you know, much less like a little

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Speaker 4: hard dot and much more like a probability cloud, that

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Speaker 4: cloud would be at the walls of a cathedral. And

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Speaker 4: if that was the size of a cathedral, then the

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Speaker 4: nucleus in the center would be the size of a

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Speaker 4: fly or a pee in the middle of the cathedral. So,

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Speaker 4: first of all, the scales inside the atom are very

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Speaker 4: different to the pictures that we look at when we're

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Speaker 4: taught this kind of science, because you just can't fit

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Speaker 4: those scales on a page and have them be sensible, right,

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Speaker 4: so we condense everything down. So first of all, for

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Speaker 4: most of us, the scales of what things look like

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Speaker 4: inside the atom are kind of wrong. And this was

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Speaker 4: also something that really blew the minds of even people

412
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Speaker 4: like artists like Vasily Kandinski was really affected by this

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Speaker 4: idea that the atom is mostly empty space. It really

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Speaker 4: shifted his perception on what nature was made of, because

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Speaker 4: suddenly everything around us that seemed solid is made of

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Speaker 4: almost nothing, and it's purely the forces between these sort

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Speaker 4: of ephemeral objects which are creating our experience of everything

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Speaker 4: around us. Which back in twenty eighteen, I give a

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Speaker 4: Tetec city talk and people have reflected back to me

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Speaker 4: that the moment when they got shivers was when I

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Speaker 4: said that you're not even touching the chair beneath you,

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Speaker 4: you ever so slightly above it, And it's just the

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Speaker 4: forces between the electrons in the chair and the electrons

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Speaker 4: in your body opposing each other that makes you feel

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Speaker 4: like you're in contact with the chair, but you're never

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Speaker 4: The particles are never actually physically in contact with each other.

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Speaker 4: It's just the electromagnetic force and gravity. First of all,

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Speaker 4: that is a different way to view it. The scale

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Speaker 4: is a different way to view it. And then not

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Speaker 4: just the not just the electrons a wave like, but

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Speaker 4: also those fundamental particles at the center, the protons and

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Speaker 4: neutrons have constituent quarks. And even then, you know, we

433
00:25:36,440 --> 00:25:39,240
Speaker 4: say that there's two types of quarks up and down

434
00:25:39,320 --> 00:25:42,040
Speaker 4: quarks inside the protons and neutrons, but there's really a

435
00:25:42,080 --> 00:25:45,520
Speaker 4: whole lot more so. It's kind of like that Nora's box.

436
00:25:45,600 --> 00:25:47,879
Speaker 4: It's like if you go down further, you open it

437
00:25:47,960 --> 00:25:49,640
Speaker 4: up and you're like, oh, there's all this other mess

438
00:25:49,680 --> 00:25:52,080
Speaker 4: in there as well. And it depends how had I

439
00:25:52,119 --> 00:25:55,000
Speaker 4: look at, what energy scale I look at, And it's

440
00:25:55,080 --> 00:25:57,720
Speaker 4: just you know, so I like to imagine the nucleus

441
00:25:57,720 --> 00:26:03,200
Speaker 4: as sort of as a you know, a group of

442
00:26:03,480 --> 00:26:06,000
Speaker 4: protons and neutrons. But then if I try and visualize

443
00:26:06,000 --> 00:26:08,439
Speaker 4: opening up those protons and neutrons, that's where even my

444
00:26:08,560 --> 00:26:12,959
Speaker 4: brain goes, Nope, nope, I cannot do that. That's too comfixt.

445
00:26:14,760 --> 00:26:17,000
Speaker 3: So you give a bunch of examples in the Book

446
00:26:17,119 --> 00:26:21,040
Speaker 3: of Discoveries in the history of particle physics that were

447
00:26:21,200 --> 00:26:25,399
Speaker 3: thought by some to be pure intellectual curiosities with no

448
00:26:25,560 --> 00:26:30,399
Speaker 3: practical use, only to later become very important in broader civilization.

449
00:26:30,560 --> 00:26:34,000
Speaker 3: Maybe they become the backbone of whole new genres of technology,

450
00:26:34,560 --> 00:26:37,920
Speaker 3: or unlock new discoveries, sort of unlock new wings in

451
00:26:37,960 --> 00:26:40,159
Speaker 3: the mansion of physics. Do you want to tell the

452
00:26:40,160 --> 00:26:41,800
Speaker 3: story of one or two examples like this?

453
00:26:42,720 --> 00:26:45,080
Speaker 4: Sure? I think let's start right at the start the

454
00:26:45,119 --> 00:26:48,359
Speaker 4: discovery of the first subatomic particle of the electron, and

455
00:26:48,400 --> 00:26:51,320
Speaker 4: this was done using the same experimental equipment basically as

456
00:26:51,400 --> 00:26:55,439
Speaker 4: the X ray discovery. So A Catherine Retube and JJ

457
00:26:55,480 --> 00:26:58,560
Speaker 4: Thompson in England in eighteen ninety seven sort of picked

458
00:26:58,640 --> 00:27:01,199
Speaker 4: up where others had left off and realized that he

459
00:27:01,240 --> 00:27:04,800
Speaker 4: could do a series of experiments bending around the beam

460
00:27:04,840 --> 00:27:09,240
Speaker 4: of so called cathode rays. So that's a glowing, glowing

461
00:27:09,280 --> 00:27:11,280
Speaker 4: green ray down the center of this tube that they

462
00:27:11,280 --> 00:27:13,240
Speaker 4: didn't and they didn't know how it worked at that

463
00:27:13,320 --> 00:27:15,680
Speaker 4: time or what it was made of. So he set

464
00:27:15,680 --> 00:27:19,480
Speaker 4: out to investigate the nature of these cathode rays by

465
00:27:19,720 --> 00:27:23,400
Speaker 4: deflecting them with electric fields and magnetic fields and catching

466
00:27:23,480 --> 00:27:26,480
Speaker 4: the charge and seeing how it moved around, and as

467
00:27:26,480 --> 00:27:29,040
Speaker 4: a result of all of those experiments, which I should

468
00:27:29,040 --> 00:27:32,480
Speaker 4: say he definitely needed help with, even though I say

469
00:27:32,480 --> 00:27:35,800
Speaker 4: it was him, he had to have his expert glass blower,

470
00:27:35,880 --> 00:27:39,359
Speaker 4: Ebenezer Everett create all the experimental apparatus for him, because

471
00:27:39,440 --> 00:27:42,920
Speaker 4: JJ Thompson, despite being like the leading physicist in England

472
00:27:42,960 --> 00:27:46,399
Speaker 4: at the time, was I think I can't remember the

473
00:27:46,400 --> 00:27:49,439
Speaker 4: exact phrase, but it was like exceptionally helpless with his

474
00:27:49,600 --> 00:27:54,919
Speaker 4: hands is the phrase that comes to mind. So that's

475
00:27:54,960 --> 00:27:59,000
Speaker 4: a quote of someone describing his experimental skills. So somebody

476
00:27:59,000 --> 00:28:01,040
Speaker 4: else had to create all of his paradus. But anyway,

477
00:28:01,560 --> 00:28:07,400
Speaker 4: he was able to use Ebenezer's apparatus to bend the electrons,

478
00:28:07,840 --> 00:28:09,879
Speaker 4: to bend the beam around, and from that he managed

479
00:28:09,920 --> 00:28:15,600
Speaker 4: to establish that not only is the beam made of particles,

480
00:28:15,600 --> 00:28:19,159
Speaker 4: but that those particles were lighter than any atom that

481
00:28:19,200 --> 00:28:22,040
Speaker 4: had ever been observed before, and so he was able

482
00:28:22,080 --> 00:28:24,280
Speaker 4: to establish that this must be some kind of new

483
00:28:24,359 --> 00:28:28,240
Speaker 4: fundamental particle which we now call the electron, which is

484
00:28:28,240 --> 00:28:31,240
Speaker 4: about two thousand times lighter than the heaviest atom that

485
00:28:31,280 --> 00:28:33,720
Speaker 4: had been seen before, and he was able to tell

486
00:28:33,760 --> 00:28:38,920
Speaker 4: that that was really a fundamental component of matter. Because

487
00:28:38,960 --> 00:28:41,800
Speaker 4: it didn't matter which cathoide he used. So the cathode

488
00:28:41,880 --> 00:28:44,120
Speaker 4: is the part that the rays jump out of, and

489
00:28:44,720 --> 00:28:47,480
Speaker 4: if it was just an atom, then you would expect

490
00:28:47,520 --> 00:28:50,040
Speaker 4: if you change the cathoid or have you changed the

491
00:28:50,080 --> 00:28:53,120
Speaker 4: gas inside the tube, that the results would vary, and

492
00:28:53,160 --> 00:28:56,600
Speaker 4: they didn't. So that told him that this electron was

493
00:28:56,600 --> 00:28:59,880
Speaker 4: somehow inside every single type of atom that he was working,

494
00:29:01,160 --> 00:29:04,640
Speaker 4: so that that was an amazing discovery. And they used

495
00:29:04,680 --> 00:29:07,720
Speaker 4: to be a toast in the Cavendish Lab in Cambridge

496
00:29:07,720 --> 00:29:10,600
Speaker 4: where he made this discovery, and they have this annual

497
00:29:10,920 --> 00:29:14,320
Speaker 4: party where you know, they sort of I don't know sings,

498
00:29:14,400 --> 00:29:16,720
Speaker 4: they make up songs and they make up poems and

499
00:29:16,760 --> 00:29:19,320
Speaker 4: they have a fancy dinner and you know, having spent

500
00:29:19,760 --> 00:29:22,360
Speaker 4: over a decade myself in the UK at Oxford, I'm

501
00:29:22,440 --> 00:29:24,760
Speaker 4: kind of imagining this in a wood paneled room, you know,

502
00:29:24,920 --> 00:29:29,200
Speaker 4: with candlesticks and fancy, fancy food and everyone's wearing black tie.

503
00:29:29,800 --> 00:29:32,080
Speaker 4: And there used to be a toast at this annual

504
00:29:32,120 --> 00:29:34,760
Speaker 4: event where they would toast to the electron and they

505
00:29:34,760 --> 00:29:36,640
Speaker 4: would say, to the electron, may it never be of

506
00:29:36,720 --> 00:29:42,280
Speaker 4: use to anyone, because when he discovered it, it really was

507
00:29:42,400 --> 00:29:45,240
Speaker 4: just him trying to figure out the fundamental nature of

508
00:29:45,280 --> 00:29:48,280
Speaker 4: how these rays happened in this in this tube that

509
00:29:48,760 --> 00:29:51,880
Speaker 4: numerous scientists had in their labs around the world. And

510
00:29:52,200 --> 00:29:54,400
Speaker 4: in the few years after he discovered the electron, he

511
00:29:54,440 --> 00:29:58,600
Speaker 4: also discovered the process called thermionic emission, which is the

512
00:29:58,640 --> 00:30:01,600
Speaker 4: process by which the electron actually jump out of materials

513
00:30:01,600 --> 00:30:05,479
Speaker 4: when you heat them up. And this then became an

514
00:30:05,480 --> 00:30:09,640
Speaker 4: incredibly important piece of knowledge, which he obviously published and

515
00:30:09,920 --> 00:30:14,560
Speaker 4: wrote all many things about, because a few years a

516
00:30:14,560 --> 00:30:18,760
Speaker 4: few years later, an electrical engineer would sort of pick

517
00:30:18,880 --> 00:30:22,120
Speaker 4: up this information and a previous discovery that had been

518
00:30:22,160 --> 00:30:26,440
Speaker 4: made by Thomas Edison when he was trying to manufacture

519
00:30:26,560 --> 00:30:30,440
Speaker 4: reliable light bulbs, and they'd put those two ideas together

520
00:30:31,240 --> 00:30:34,680
Speaker 4: and come up with the first electric valve. So that

521
00:30:34,840 --> 00:30:38,080
Speaker 4: is a device which can control the flow of electricity.

522
00:30:38,880 --> 00:30:41,880
Speaker 4: You apply a small voltage and it either lets the

523
00:30:41,920 --> 00:30:45,000
Speaker 4: current pass or it stops the current. And then more

524
00:30:45,040 --> 00:30:49,880
Speaker 4: and more electronic devices then were invented after this, and

525
00:30:49,920 --> 00:30:52,040
Speaker 4: in order to make those devices, they were one hundred

526
00:30:52,040 --> 00:30:57,360
Speaker 4: percent reliant on JJ. Thompson's materials, on his theories, and

527
00:30:57,440 --> 00:30:59,200
Speaker 4: on the things that he had developed as a result

528
00:30:59,240 --> 00:31:03,120
Speaker 4: of his experiment, and those early tubes were very similar

529
00:31:03,520 --> 00:31:07,400
Speaker 4: in their makeup to the tubes that Thompson was working with. Anyway,

530
00:31:07,440 --> 00:31:11,520
Speaker 4: it's all very similar technology. But one thing I find

531
00:31:11,600 --> 00:31:14,680
Speaker 4: quite interesting is that Thomas Edison just you know, he

532
00:31:14,760 --> 00:31:17,280
Speaker 4: sort of made this discovery which was called the Edison effect,

533
00:31:18,280 --> 00:31:20,880
Speaker 4: which was kind of about the flow of electricity, but

534
00:31:20,920 --> 00:31:23,520
Speaker 4: he hadn't fully understood it. He just if he put

535
00:31:23,520 --> 00:31:25,760
Speaker 4: an extra electrode inside a light bulb, he noticed that

536
00:31:25,800 --> 00:31:28,680
Speaker 4: it affected the flow of electricity, and he patented it,

537
00:31:28,680 --> 00:31:30,440
Speaker 4: but he couldn't think of any good ideas for it,

538
00:31:30,520 --> 00:31:33,760
Speaker 4: so he just set it aside and ignored it. And

539
00:31:34,160 --> 00:31:36,280
Speaker 4: if that had been the history, then nothing, you know,

540
00:31:36,360 --> 00:31:39,480
Speaker 4: nothing would have been done about it at all. And

541
00:31:40,200 --> 00:31:42,840
Speaker 4: I'm always amazed that people sort of look at Edison

542
00:31:42,880 --> 00:31:46,040
Speaker 4: and his trial and error approach and they hold it

543
00:31:46,120 --> 00:31:49,600
Speaker 4: up as this example of amazing innovation, and I'm like, well, okay,

544
00:31:49,640 --> 00:31:52,640
Speaker 4: but he ignored possibly the most important thing he ever discovered.

545
00:31:55,040 --> 00:31:57,040
Speaker 4: And it was only because other people picked up the

546
00:31:57,080 --> 00:32:00,560
Speaker 4: ideas and understood it through JJ Thompson's investigations and his

547
00:32:00,720 --> 00:32:04,600
Speaker 4: theories that then it led to the first electronic devices,

548
00:32:04,640 --> 00:32:09,240
Speaker 4: the first and our ability through vacuum tubes to create

549
00:32:09,320 --> 00:32:13,360
Speaker 4: things like the telecommunications industry to you know, and long

550
00:32:13,400 --> 00:32:17,560
Speaker 4: distance communications. The first computers, all of the early electronics

551
00:32:17,560 --> 00:32:20,840
Speaker 4: were based on these vacuum tubes, and of course that's

552
00:32:20,920 --> 00:32:23,840
Speaker 4: changed a bit now everything's based in silicon and in

553
00:32:23,880 --> 00:32:26,080
Speaker 4: the future, who knows what it will be based on.

554
00:32:26,920 --> 00:32:30,800
Speaker 4: But if that fundamental investigation hadn't happened at the right time,

555
00:32:31,040 --> 00:32:34,000
Speaker 4: and that knowledge wasn't there for the electrical engineers to

556
00:32:34,040 --> 00:32:37,600
Speaker 4: build off, I sort of questioned, perhaps we'd have got

557
00:32:37,640 --> 00:32:41,160
Speaker 4: there eventually with the electronics industry, but the story would

558
00:32:41,160 --> 00:32:45,640
Speaker 4: have looked very, very different. So that's I find that

559
00:32:45,640 --> 00:32:48,080
Speaker 4: an interesting example of the ways in which this sort

560
00:32:48,080 --> 00:32:51,280
Speaker 4: of curiosity driven research, you know, trying to uncover the

561
00:32:51,320 --> 00:32:56,200
Speaker 4: nature of the universe, and our innovation stories and our

562
00:32:56,520 --> 00:33:00,560
Speaker 4: entrepreneurial stories kind of merge all into one and you

563
00:33:00,640 --> 00:33:02,840
Speaker 4: start to see it not as one is superior to

564
00:33:02,880 --> 00:33:06,120
Speaker 4: the other, but that they are essential to each other,

565
00:33:07,120 --> 00:33:09,840
Speaker 4: and that we need both approaches and we can't just

566
00:33:10,080 --> 00:33:15,120
Speaker 4: always sort of seed fund some entrepreneurial project or support

567
00:33:15,200 --> 00:33:18,760
Speaker 4: some you know, innovator who's full of energy. You actually

568
00:33:18,800 --> 00:33:21,320
Speaker 4: do need the people in the background doing that curiosity

569
00:33:21,400 --> 00:33:23,760
Speaker 4: driven research in order to have new knowledge for those

570
00:33:23,800 --> 00:33:24,560
Speaker 4: people to build on.

571
00:33:25,080 --> 00:33:29,520
Speaker 3: Well, speaking of the people in the background, another interesting

572
00:33:29,560 --> 00:33:31,480
Speaker 3: thing to me about a lot of the stories you

573
00:33:31,520 --> 00:33:35,240
Speaker 3: tell are that some physics experiments that are very important

574
00:33:35,240 --> 00:33:38,960
Speaker 3: in history are surprisingly laborious. Like I think of the

575
00:33:39,080 --> 00:33:43,719
Speaker 3: example of particle counting, these experiments that involve just staring

576
00:33:43,760 --> 00:33:46,520
Speaker 3: at a screen for hours and counting flashes of light

577
00:33:46,600 --> 00:33:49,880
Speaker 3: by hand. Yeah, what are some of the ways that

578
00:33:49,960 --> 00:33:54,360
Speaker 3: crucial physics discoveries depended on types of work that people

579
00:33:54,440 --> 00:33:57,360
Speaker 3: might not think of when they try to imagine what

580
00:33:57,440 --> 00:33:58,560
Speaker 3: scientists are doing.

581
00:34:00,480 --> 00:34:03,360
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think there's a We love them, we love

582
00:34:03,440 --> 00:34:07,160
Speaker 4: the moment of discovery, right, but we're often unwilling to

583
00:34:07,280 --> 00:34:10,080
Speaker 4: figure out exactly what went into that discovery. And I

584
00:34:10,160 --> 00:34:13,319
Speaker 4: have to say it's often it often comes as a

585
00:34:13,320 --> 00:34:16,040
Speaker 4: surprise to people as you say how laborious it was.

586
00:34:16,080 --> 00:34:18,680
Speaker 4: So that example you're talking about is in those early

587
00:34:18,800 --> 00:34:22,200
Speaker 4: days of nuclear physics, where the only detectors we had

588
00:34:22,239 --> 00:34:25,440
Speaker 4: were these fluorescent screens that lit up when high energy

589
00:34:25,480 --> 00:34:30,880
Speaker 4: particles hit them. And so in Cambridge in the UK especially,

590
00:34:31,320 --> 00:34:34,600
Speaker 4: they trained all their students and all their staff of

591
00:34:34,840 --> 00:34:37,520
Speaker 4: how to sit in a dark room and look through

592
00:34:37,520 --> 00:34:40,960
Speaker 4: a microscope at these plates when they were radioactive sources

593
00:34:41,000 --> 00:34:45,760
Speaker 4: present and count each flash of light. But of course

594
00:34:46,000 --> 00:34:49,320
Speaker 4: every human eye and brain is different, and so everyone

595
00:34:49,480 --> 00:34:53,520
Speaker 4: was everyone was trained up and kind of measured to

596
00:34:53,560 --> 00:34:56,839
Speaker 4: see how good they were at this particle counting. Right,

597
00:34:56,880 --> 00:35:00,000
Speaker 4: So there's all these I mean. To get reliable scientific results,

598
00:35:00,200 --> 00:35:03,600
Speaker 4: you need things like calibration. You know, these boring things,

599
00:35:03,600 --> 00:35:05,920
Speaker 4: you know, the things that are not sexy or exciting

600
00:35:05,960 --> 00:35:09,799
Speaker 4: about science. Good calibration. You need to know your instruments very,

601
00:35:09,920 --> 00:35:13,439
Speaker 4: very very well. And I think any physicist today would

602
00:35:13,480 --> 00:35:17,040
Speaker 4: tell you that until you know your experiment inside out,

603
00:35:17,239 --> 00:35:19,480
Speaker 4: you will not get reliable results from it. And it's

604
00:35:19,480 --> 00:35:23,560
Speaker 4: something that frustrates the heck out of undergraduate students in

605
00:35:24,080 --> 00:35:26,160
Speaker 4: the lab when they're learning physics and they're trying to

606
00:35:26,200 --> 00:35:29,200
Speaker 4: recreate experiments that were done in the past, and even

607
00:35:29,200 --> 00:35:32,319
Speaker 4: though they've got apparatus that someone has prepared for them

608
00:35:32,360 --> 00:35:35,319
Speaker 4: that should be working, they're still driven mad by the

609
00:35:35,360 --> 00:35:41,480
Speaker 4: intricacies of it. And this is the reality. I mean, unfortunately,

610
00:35:41,680 --> 00:35:44,399
Speaker 4: but you know, it's the reality of experimental life, which

611
00:35:44,440 --> 00:35:46,200
Speaker 4: is that this stuff is not easy. And if it

612
00:35:46,239 --> 00:35:48,680
Speaker 4: was easy, we would have done it hundreds of years ago, right,

613
00:35:50,360 --> 00:35:54,000
Speaker 4: But it's difficult, it's often laborious, and often what we're

614
00:35:54,040 --> 00:35:56,560
Speaker 4: trying to do in inventing new technologies and pushing at

615
00:35:56,560 --> 00:36:00,800
Speaker 4: the cutting edge of technologies in experimental science is sometimes

616
00:36:00,840 --> 00:36:03,800
Speaker 4: to get around the laboriousness, or even just to create

617
00:36:04,000 --> 00:36:07,200
Speaker 4: a method to collect enough data that we can actually

618
00:36:07,800 --> 00:36:10,359
Speaker 4: that we can actually use. So obviously, nowadays we don't

619
00:36:10,440 --> 00:36:14,200
Speaker 4: use people sitting in a room particle counting. But there

620
00:36:14,280 --> 00:36:18,239
Speaker 4: was a whole phase of experimental physics where after the

621
00:36:18,280 --> 00:36:21,280
Speaker 4: technologies were invented that allowed you to photograph the tracks

622
00:36:21,280 --> 00:36:25,759
Speaker 4: of particles. Well, then who processes the photographic data? Right?

623
00:36:25,840 --> 00:36:31,319
Speaker 4: Who maps out those tracks and who turns all of

624
00:36:31,320 --> 00:36:36,160
Speaker 4: that into tables that can be analyzed and searched for

625
00:36:36,280 --> 00:36:39,680
Speaker 4: new physics. And the answer that most people probably don't

626
00:36:39,719 --> 00:36:44,000
Speaker 4: realize is women did it. And in the early days

627
00:36:44,160 --> 00:36:47,200
Speaker 4: these women were called there was the computers, So the

628
00:36:47,280 --> 00:36:51,120
Speaker 4: women who did calculations by hand before the computer meant

629
00:36:51,120 --> 00:36:54,560
Speaker 4: something very different to us. And in particle physics even

630
00:36:54,560 --> 00:36:57,560
Speaker 4: into the forties, fifties, and sixties, you had the so

631
00:36:57,640 --> 00:37:02,359
Speaker 4: called scanning girls and women who almost all women. There

632
00:37:02,360 --> 00:37:04,160
Speaker 4: were some men who did it should I should say,

633
00:37:04,760 --> 00:37:07,680
Speaker 4: who would sit at these enormous light tables with the

634
00:37:08,160 --> 00:37:11,520
Speaker 4: with the copies of the photographic images, and they would

635
00:37:11,520 --> 00:37:16,080
Speaker 4: follow a very precise sort of protocol in mapping out

636
00:37:16,200 --> 00:37:20,279
Speaker 4: where the interesting things were in those photographs. And there

637
00:37:20,320 --> 00:37:23,719
Speaker 4: were many, many discoveries made this way, something I do

638
00:37:23,760 --> 00:37:26,560
Speaker 4: find interesting in the history. And I'm sure we'll get

639
00:37:26,640 --> 00:37:29,480
Speaker 4: to the discussion of women in physics in a moment.

640
00:37:29,640 --> 00:37:33,560
Speaker 4: But while some of these women were so called scanning girls,

641
00:37:33,960 --> 00:37:37,799
Speaker 4: it was also considered to be a task that all

642
00:37:37,840 --> 00:37:41,160
Speaker 4: the physicists should also know how to do. And this

643
00:37:41,320 --> 00:37:43,600
Speaker 4: continues to this day. Even when you get these big

644
00:37:44,040 --> 00:37:47,839
Speaker 4: collaborations like the large hadron collider, there's a sort of

645
00:37:47,920 --> 00:37:50,840
Speaker 4: commitment to the experiment that you do some of this

646
00:37:50,960 --> 00:37:53,120
Speaker 4: grunt work, you do some of this laborious work, and

647
00:37:53,120 --> 00:37:55,839
Speaker 4: today that means sitting in a control room and overseeing

648
00:37:57,000 --> 00:38:00,719
Speaker 4: the running of enormous colliders and detectors. But back then

649
00:38:00,880 --> 00:38:03,480
Speaker 4: it would mean that you would do your share of

650
00:38:03,520 --> 00:38:09,279
Speaker 4: analyzing these images. So this in a way is inseparable work.

651
00:38:09,520 --> 00:38:14,000
Speaker 4: It specialized work, but it's work where the physicists did

652
00:38:14,000 --> 00:38:17,880
Speaker 4: as well, and there were female physicists at that time

653
00:38:18,080 --> 00:38:22,759
Speaker 4: who were also doing these kinds of analyses. And I

654
00:38:22,840 --> 00:38:25,680
Speaker 4: almost wonder in this time, and this is just a

655
00:38:25,920 --> 00:38:27,880
Speaker 4: it's just an idea that has come to me a

656
00:38:27,960 --> 00:38:31,439
Speaker 4: number of times, I almost wonder if the women who

657
00:38:31,440 --> 00:38:35,120
Speaker 4: were working as physicists in those laboratories were somewhat overlooked

658
00:38:35,160 --> 00:38:40,400
Speaker 4: because the women's work at the time was as the

659
00:38:40,440 --> 00:38:43,200
Speaker 4: scanning girls mostly, you know, and so there was this

660
00:38:43,360 --> 00:38:48,879
Speaker 4: gender divide in roles. And even though the women were contributing,

661
00:38:49,239 --> 00:38:51,600
Speaker 4: and some of them were physicists not you know, they

662
00:38:51,600 --> 00:38:55,400
Speaker 4: weren't just hired as scanning girls, and yet their contributions

663
00:38:55,400 --> 00:38:58,839
Speaker 4: were overlooked far more often than the contributions of their

664
00:38:58,880 --> 00:39:02,560
Speaker 4: male colleagues. And I do wonder how this gender divide

665
00:39:02,640 --> 00:39:06,040
Speaker 4: in the roles of this grunt work actually played into

666
00:39:06,120 --> 00:39:09,960
Speaker 4: that overlooking at the time. But that's just one It's

667
00:39:10,000 --> 00:39:13,160
Speaker 4: just one aspect of the sort of gendered nature of

668
00:39:13,200 --> 00:39:15,480
Speaker 4: physics as we as we now know it, I think.

669
00:39:16,400 --> 00:39:18,279
Speaker 4: But yeah, the I think a lot of people would

670
00:39:18,320 --> 00:39:21,239
Speaker 4: be really surprised by how laborius a lot of the

671
00:39:21,280 --> 00:39:24,960
Speaker 4: work is. And of course that's where automation nowadays and

672
00:39:25,000 --> 00:39:29,000
Speaker 4: even AI tools are just changing the game. So dramatically

673
00:39:29,120 --> 00:39:32,839
Speaker 4: because now that you can automate all of these processes

674
00:39:32,880 --> 00:39:35,440
Speaker 4: and all of our detectors are you know, full of

675
00:39:35,480 --> 00:39:39,320
Speaker 4: electronics instead of photographs. You know, the process of actually

676
00:39:39,360 --> 00:39:42,960
Speaker 4: gathering the data is now much much easier, and so

677
00:39:43,920 --> 00:39:47,040
Speaker 4: people and people can access the data around the world,

678
00:39:47,400 --> 00:39:49,600
Speaker 4: including via the World Wide Web, which was invented at

679
00:39:49,640 --> 00:39:54,000
Speaker 4: SNE just for that purpose. And so now we can

680
00:39:54,040 --> 00:39:56,920
Speaker 4: focus on the analysis and we can focus on the physics,

681
00:39:57,440 --> 00:40:01,920
Speaker 4: and the contributions to the hardware software become the grunt

682
00:40:01,920 --> 00:40:05,520
Speaker 4: work and that part of the project as the experimentalist.

683
00:40:05,600 --> 00:40:08,319
Speaker 4: So yeah, it's an interesting shift through time.

684
00:40:18,520 --> 00:40:20,920
Speaker 3: Coming back to the issue of women in the history

685
00:40:20,920 --> 00:40:23,319
Speaker 3: of physics, you mentioned in the book this idea of

686
00:40:23,400 --> 00:40:27,040
Speaker 3: the Matilda effect in physics, and it strikes me that

687
00:40:27,080 --> 00:40:32,120
Speaker 3: there are at least two different ways that the historical

688
00:40:32,160 --> 00:40:38,080
Speaker 3: discrimination against women in physics manifests. There's one where there's

689
00:40:38,239 --> 00:40:43,040
Speaker 3: just direct limitations on their participation, like some researchers having

690
00:40:43,040 --> 00:40:45,840
Speaker 3: projects they considered not suitable for women to work on,

691
00:40:46,480 --> 00:40:49,120
Speaker 3: or the marriage bar where women who had previously been

692
00:40:49,160 --> 00:40:52,120
Speaker 3: involved in research were disallowed from doing so after marriage.

693
00:40:52,880 --> 00:40:56,759
Speaker 3: But there are also cases where women researchers made significant

694
00:40:56,760 --> 00:41:01,200
Speaker 3: contributions to physics discoveries, and their role in this work

695
00:41:01,320 --> 00:41:05,160
Speaker 3: was sometimes deliberately censored from public records and recognition. Could

696
00:41:05,200 --> 00:41:07,160
Speaker 3: you talk about a couple of these examples.

697
00:41:07,520 --> 00:41:11,239
Speaker 4: Yeah, sure, I think that's really insightful that there are

698
00:41:11,280 --> 00:41:15,440
Speaker 4: these different ways in which women's involvement in physics was

699
00:41:16,040 --> 00:41:19,320
Speaker 4: a stopped, as you say, you know, sort of prevented,

700
00:41:19,719 --> 00:41:22,480
Speaker 4: but then also that their contributions were diminished. And that

701
00:41:22,600 --> 00:41:25,399
Speaker 4: second one is really where the Matilda effect comes in.

702
00:41:26,200 --> 00:41:29,400
Speaker 4: So one person I'm thinking of here, her name is

703
00:41:29,440 --> 00:41:33,440
Speaker 4: Marietta Blau, and she was a researcher in Austria, and

704
00:41:33,480 --> 00:41:37,160
Speaker 4: she invented a new type of particle detector. So I

705
00:41:37,280 --> 00:41:39,799
Speaker 4: talked before about how beautiful I thought the cloud chamber was.

706
00:41:40,040 --> 00:41:42,239
Speaker 4: That's a very active detector. Things have to happen in

707
00:41:42,280 --> 00:41:44,439
Speaker 4: real time. You have to photograph things in real time.

708
00:41:45,280 --> 00:41:49,280
Speaker 4: It's very laborious to look after. And what she invented

709
00:41:49,320 --> 00:41:51,360
Speaker 4: in staid, because she had a background both in physics

710
00:41:51,400 --> 00:41:56,640
Speaker 4: and photography, was a photographic plate method of detecting particles.

711
00:41:56,880 --> 00:42:00,719
Speaker 4: So she had this very thick so called emulsions, and

712
00:42:00,800 --> 00:42:04,880
Speaker 4: they would create stacks of these emulsions for high energy

713
00:42:04,960 --> 00:42:07,920
Speaker 4: charge particles to go through. And this now, instead of

714
00:42:07,960 --> 00:42:10,880
Speaker 4: being looked after and photographed it every minute, could just

715
00:42:10,920 --> 00:42:13,160
Speaker 4: be left at the top of a mountain for a month,

716
00:42:13,239 --> 00:42:16,640
Speaker 4: two months, and it would just collect data over time

717
00:42:16,880 --> 00:42:19,960
Speaker 4: and then it would be pulled apart and analyzed. And

718
00:42:20,400 --> 00:42:23,759
Speaker 4: blouse invention led to a whole load of discoveries, and

719
00:42:23,800 --> 00:42:27,440
Speaker 4: she herself was actually nominated for the Nobel Prize but

720
00:42:27,800 --> 00:42:34,360
Speaker 4: never won it, and her invention led to I think

721
00:42:34,800 --> 00:42:37,359
Speaker 4: at least I can think of at least two other

722
00:42:37,400 --> 00:42:41,440
Speaker 4: Nobel Prizes that relied on her invention of this photographic

723
00:42:41,440 --> 00:42:46,239
Speaker 4: emulsion method. But she also actually made amazing discoveries with

724
00:42:46,320 --> 00:42:50,480
Speaker 4: it herself, one of which she called a star of disintegration,

725
00:42:50,560 --> 00:42:53,319
Speaker 4: which was when a high energy cosmic ray coming from

726
00:42:53,440 --> 00:42:57,160
Speaker 4: space came in and was sort of a direct hit

727
00:42:57,200 --> 00:42:59,640
Speaker 4: on a heavy nucleus and then that nucleus itself sort

728
00:42:59,640 --> 00:43:04,000
Speaker 4: of loaded and it left this amazing shower like a

729
00:43:04,160 --> 00:43:08,520
Speaker 4: super and nova on the on the photographic emulsions. And

730
00:43:08,560 --> 00:43:10,600
Speaker 4: this was a you know, she published, I'm pretty sure

731
00:43:10,600 --> 00:43:14,799
Speaker 4: that one was published in Nature and her her sort

732
00:43:14,840 --> 00:43:17,640
Speaker 4: of contemporary or not long after she was working there

733
00:43:17,680 --> 00:43:21,000
Speaker 4: was an Indian physicist named Bieber Chowdery working in India,

734
00:43:21,040 --> 00:43:24,000
Speaker 4: and she was one who was told that her professor

735
00:43:24,040 --> 00:43:26,680
Speaker 4: didn't have any suitable projects for her as a woman,

736
00:43:26,760 --> 00:43:29,919
Speaker 4: but she persisted anyway, and eventually sort of I guess,

737
00:43:30,000 --> 00:43:32,600
Speaker 4: won him over because she ended up working with him.

738
00:43:33,000 --> 00:43:37,680
Speaker 4: And she used similar photographic plates, but not of such

739
00:43:37,719 --> 00:43:40,440
Speaker 4: great quality because she didn't have them available to her.

740
00:43:40,520 --> 00:43:43,200
Speaker 4: It was during World War two and she was in India,

741
00:43:43,280 --> 00:43:47,320
Speaker 4: so the supply chain wasn't great. But she actually uses

742
00:43:47,360 --> 00:43:51,920
Speaker 4: photographic plates up mountains in India. And then she managed

743
00:43:51,960 --> 00:43:55,120
Speaker 4: to discover the two different types of particles, which we

744
00:43:55,160 --> 00:43:58,480
Speaker 4: would now call the muon and the pion, and those

745
00:43:58,560 --> 00:44:03,440
Speaker 4: were those were some of the first observations of those particles,

746
00:44:03,480 --> 00:44:05,319
Speaker 4: and as far as I can tell, it was the

747
00:44:05,360 --> 00:44:09,399
Speaker 4: first time when it had been really recognized that there

748
00:44:09,400 --> 00:44:13,440
Speaker 4: were two different particles. But I think she couldn't quite

749
00:44:13,480 --> 00:44:16,240
Speaker 4: because of the quality of her equipment. She couldn't quite

750
00:44:16,280 --> 00:44:18,600
Speaker 4: sort of say what was what or you know, the

751
00:44:18,640 --> 00:44:21,239
Speaker 4: difference in masses between the two or something like that

752
00:44:21,320 --> 00:44:25,080
Speaker 4: was missing. But this is the first authored paper in nature,

753
00:44:25,160 --> 00:44:27,240
Speaker 4: and this time I know it was definitely in nature.

754
00:44:27,280 --> 00:44:30,560
Speaker 4: You know, the top top journal in the world, and

755
00:44:30,600 --> 00:44:33,720
Speaker 4: then in the nineteen fifties, so not long after Cecil

756
00:44:33,760 --> 00:44:38,600
Speaker 4: Powell working in England. Sorry, his Nobel Prize was nineteen fifty.

757
00:44:38,640 --> 00:44:42,000
Speaker 4: I think his work would have been late forties. He

758
00:44:42,080 --> 00:44:46,720
Speaker 4: used exactly the same technique with superior emulsions to discover

759
00:44:46,880 --> 00:44:51,719
Speaker 4: the pion. And in his earlier writing, in his It's

760
00:44:51,719 --> 00:44:54,640
Speaker 4: definitely at least one textbook that he writes about, he

761
00:44:54,680 --> 00:44:58,200
Speaker 4: acknowledges biber Chowdery's earlier work and references her Nature paper.

762
00:44:58,840 --> 00:45:01,960
Speaker 4: And then when he wins the Well Prize in nineteen fifty,

763
00:45:02,080 --> 00:45:05,440
Speaker 4: every reference of his that referenced her work and not

764
00:45:05,640 --> 00:45:08,640
Speaker 4: used in the citation for the Nobel Prize. So all

765
00:45:08,640 --> 00:45:11,920
Speaker 4: the papers that are cited of his for the Nobel

766
00:45:12,000 --> 00:45:15,200
Speaker 4: Prize were the ones that didn't recognize the earlier work

767
00:45:15,200 --> 00:45:19,839
Speaker 4: of this woman working in India. And I had never

768
00:45:19,840 --> 00:45:21,879
Speaker 4: heard of her before I wrote this book. I'd never

769
00:45:21,920 --> 00:45:25,320
Speaker 4: come across her story. But I thought that was phenomenal

770
00:45:25,360 --> 00:45:27,560
Speaker 4: because Powell himself was not you know, he wasn't a

771
00:45:27,600 --> 00:45:30,960
Speaker 4: rephensible human. He was a very left leaning liberal person.

772
00:45:31,040 --> 00:45:33,640
Speaker 4: He had an unusually high number of female physicists in

773
00:45:33,680 --> 00:45:37,239
Speaker 4: his lab in Bristol in the UK, and I think

774
00:45:37,280 --> 00:45:42,080
Speaker 4: he himself was I haven't looked into his sort of

775
00:45:42,200 --> 00:45:44,600
Speaker 4: journals and things, whether they exist. I would love to

776
00:45:44,640 --> 00:45:47,080
Speaker 4: know how he felt about the fact that he had

777
00:45:47,120 --> 00:45:51,040
Speaker 4: recognized the precedent and the Nobel Prize committee had not.

778
00:45:52,520 --> 00:45:55,400
Speaker 4: And so Biber Chowdery is someone that even my particle

779
00:45:55,440 --> 00:45:57,600
Speaker 4: physics colleagues have never heard of, even though she made

780
00:45:57,640 --> 00:46:03,120
Speaker 4: this amazing discovery. And so these kinds of behaviors of

781
00:46:03,320 --> 00:46:07,000
Speaker 4: sort of the ignoring of the women's contribution, like people

782
00:46:07,040 --> 00:46:10,719
Speaker 4: will use their contributions but won't acknowledge them properly. And

783
00:46:10,760 --> 00:46:14,759
Speaker 4: so we get this historical track record of you know,

784
00:46:14,800 --> 00:46:17,680
Speaker 4: the Nobel Prize winners who are almost always men other

785
00:46:17,719 --> 00:46:21,239
Speaker 4: than Marie Currey because she was so damn good no

786
00:46:21,280 --> 00:46:26,080
Speaker 4: one could deny it. And you get these contributions of

787
00:46:26,080 --> 00:46:28,879
Speaker 4: these women sort of falling by the wayside. And it's

788
00:46:28,920 --> 00:46:32,759
Speaker 4: called the Matilda effect after Matilda Gage, who was a

789
00:46:32,760 --> 00:46:37,120
Speaker 4: suffragist who first recognized that the contributions of women, and

790
00:46:37,200 --> 00:46:39,839
Speaker 4: back then she was talking about the contributions to technology,

791
00:46:40,560 --> 00:46:43,759
Speaker 4: but she first recognized that these contributions were being overlooked

792
00:46:44,160 --> 00:46:47,920
Speaker 4: or attributed to their male counterparts or peers or even

793
00:46:47,960 --> 00:46:52,719
Speaker 4: their husbands, and not properly attributed to the women who

794
00:46:52,760 --> 00:46:56,799
Speaker 4: made them because of the biases that existed in our society.

795
00:46:56,920 --> 00:47:01,279
Speaker 4: And a historian named Margaret Rossiter sort of coined this

796
00:47:01,360 --> 00:47:05,400
Speaker 4: term the Matilda effect, named after michielda Gauge, and really

797
00:47:05,520 --> 00:47:09,719
Speaker 4: encouraged all of us to look for those stories when

798
00:47:09,719 --> 00:47:14,400
Speaker 4: we're looking at the history of especially technological fields and

799
00:47:14,600 --> 00:47:16,879
Speaker 4: highly technical fields like physics, where there is a lack

800
00:47:17,280 --> 00:47:20,799
Speaker 4: of women today. First of all, because and even I

801
00:47:20,840 --> 00:47:23,640
Speaker 4: wasn't aware of this, that you know, you will probably

802
00:47:23,640 --> 00:47:25,440
Speaker 4: find women that you weren't aware of, and this was

803
00:47:25,480 --> 00:47:29,160
Speaker 4: absolutely my experience in writing this story. But secondly, she

804
00:47:29,239 --> 00:47:33,480
Speaker 4: then encouraged us to write their stories back in because

805
00:47:33,520 --> 00:47:35,880
Speaker 4: you know, there's sort of no other way to correct

806
00:47:36,000 --> 00:47:40,680
Speaker 4: the record, and they have simply been overlooked. And so

807
00:47:41,320 --> 00:47:43,480
Speaker 4: I mean, what could I do other than you know,

808
00:47:43,520 --> 00:47:45,120
Speaker 4: it was sort of a call to arms as far

809
00:47:45,160 --> 00:47:48,080
Speaker 4: as I was concerned, because here was I, you know,

810
00:47:48,160 --> 00:47:52,160
Speaker 4: a female physicist today, having never heard of these women

811
00:47:52,200 --> 00:47:54,120
Speaker 4: who made these amazing discoveries. And I thought, well, if

812
00:47:54,120 --> 00:47:55,719
Speaker 4: I've never heard of them, and I'm writing a book

813
00:47:55,760 --> 00:47:59,160
Speaker 4: about the history of these experiments then probably no one

814
00:47:59,200 --> 00:48:01,400
Speaker 4: else has ever heard of, and that turned out to

815
00:48:01,400 --> 00:48:04,120
Speaker 4: be true, and so it was just such a wonderful

816
00:48:04,160 --> 00:48:07,319
Speaker 4: privilege actually to take up Margaret Rossiter's you know, sort

817
00:48:07,360 --> 00:48:10,600
Speaker 4: of call to arms and write their stories back into

818
00:48:10,600 --> 00:48:13,520
Speaker 4: the main stories of the history of these experiments, because

819
00:48:13,640 --> 00:48:17,280
Speaker 4: they're so so important and to me as a female

820
00:48:17,360 --> 00:48:21,520
Speaker 4: physicist working today, it made me realize, you know, all

821
00:48:22,440 --> 00:48:25,920
Speaker 4: of the people who laid the foundations of my field,

822
00:48:26,440 --> 00:48:29,160
Speaker 4: whom I sort of grew up in the field thinking

823
00:48:29,160 --> 00:48:31,680
Speaker 4: that they were pretty much all men other than Marie Curriy,

824
00:48:33,400 --> 00:48:36,480
Speaker 4: that that was false, and it created for me this

825
00:48:36,640 --> 00:48:40,319
Speaker 4: sense of sort of belonging that I didn't expect to get.

826
00:48:40,360 --> 00:48:42,239
Speaker 4: Out of the process of writing this book, I sort

827
00:48:42,239 --> 00:48:45,200
Speaker 4: of thought, Wow, women like me have always been that,

828
00:48:45,320 --> 00:48:48,160
Speaker 4: Women who've been curious about the universe, women who've wanted

829
00:48:48,200 --> 00:48:51,000
Speaker 4: to be in the lab and using their technical skills

830
00:48:51,040 --> 00:48:54,360
Speaker 4: and making these contributions to society and to our knowledge,

831
00:48:54,719 --> 00:48:57,279
Speaker 4: have always been there. This isn't a weird thing that

832
00:48:57,320 --> 00:49:00,719
Speaker 4: I'm doing. I'm not unusual to want to do this.

833
00:49:01,960 --> 00:49:05,280
Speaker 4: And yeah, I've since had that sentiment reflected back by

834
00:49:06,160 --> 00:49:08,239
Speaker 4: women young and old. Actually, you know, sort of young

835
00:49:08,280 --> 00:49:10,640
Speaker 4: women starting out thinking of whether physics is for them.

836
00:49:11,040 --> 00:49:14,319
Speaker 4: I've had some lovely feedback that they, you know, sort

837
00:49:14,360 --> 00:49:17,160
Speaker 4: of read the book. They read about these women who fought,

838
00:49:17,320 --> 00:49:19,360
Speaker 4: you know, I mean it was so hard to achieve

839
00:49:19,400 --> 00:49:21,600
Speaker 4: them as well, because often these women were denied formal

840
00:49:21,760 --> 00:49:24,560
Speaker 4: education in physics and weren't even allowed in the lecture theaters.

841
00:49:24,680 --> 00:49:26,560
Speaker 4: So to realize that they were there and the things

842
00:49:26,560 --> 00:49:30,120
Speaker 4: that they achieved, just you know, it was a very

843
00:49:30,239 --> 00:49:33,560
Speaker 4: very encouraging and positive thing for me, even though in

844
00:49:33,600 --> 00:49:36,960
Speaker 4: their own lives it was obviously a very negative experience sometimes.

845
00:49:36,960 --> 00:49:40,399
Speaker 4: But to me today these stories, writing them back in

846
00:49:41,000 --> 00:49:44,560
Speaker 4: brings I think, a new perspective on who gets to

847
00:49:44,560 --> 00:49:45,240
Speaker 4: do physics.

848
00:49:45,880 --> 00:49:50,000
Speaker 3: It's definitely a powerful thing learning these stories. So I

849
00:49:50,040 --> 00:49:51,399
Speaker 3: want to come to the part of the book where

850
00:49:51,440 --> 00:49:56,879
Speaker 3: you talk about particle accelerators. Clearly you have a love

851
00:49:56,960 --> 00:50:01,640
Speaker 3: for accelerators. That's your field. Imagine somebody who is generally

852
00:50:01,680 --> 00:50:06,440
Speaker 3: positive about science, but views particle accelerators, especially the big projects,

853
00:50:06,440 --> 00:50:10,799
Speaker 3: the big colliders, as maybe too big and complicated to

854
00:50:10,880 --> 00:50:15,120
Speaker 3: be charismatic, as like objects of the imagination, and maybe

855
00:50:15,200 --> 00:50:18,399
Speaker 3: views their findings as too abstract to digest. What would

856
00:50:18,480 --> 00:50:22,000
Speaker 3: you tell this person to give them particle accelerator fever, like,

857
00:50:22,160 --> 00:50:23,520
Speaker 3: how would you make them fall in love?

858
00:50:24,160 --> 00:50:26,759
Speaker 4: Oh? That's really that's really interesting. So I think we

859
00:50:26,840 --> 00:50:30,279
Speaker 4: live in an interesting time in terms of particle accelerators

860
00:50:30,800 --> 00:50:33,719
Speaker 4: because you know, obviously they're very well developed now, and

861
00:50:33,760 --> 00:50:37,440
Speaker 4: we have these enormous machines. So the Larde hydron collider

862
00:50:37,480 --> 00:50:41,120
Speaker 4: in Switzerland is twenty seven kilometers in circumference one hundred

863
00:50:41,160 --> 00:50:45,160
Speaker 4: meters underground. Right, it's fricking enormous and it's very difficult

864
00:50:45,160 --> 00:50:47,600
Speaker 4: to wrap your head around. First of all, I would

865
00:50:47,600 --> 00:50:50,840
Speaker 4: say to anybody who doesn't find that kind of experiment

866
00:50:50,960 --> 00:50:54,560
Speaker 4: charismatic on paper, I implore you to go and visit.

867
00:50:55,280 --> 00:50:59,360
Speaker 4: It will blow your mind. Honestly. It is just such

868
00:50:59,440 --> 00:51:04,200
Speaker 4: an enormous feet of human ingenuity. And today, in order

869
00:51:04,200 --> 00:51:08,399
Speaker 4: to achieve these enormous experiments, we all have to work

870
00:51:08,400 --> 00:51:11,719
Speaker 4: together and collaborate, and CERN is an amazing example of that,

871
00:51:11,840 --> 00:51:15,160
Speaker 4: and the big national labs in the US have also

872
00:51:15,880 --> 00:51:19,000
Speaker 4: been great examples of that, where you're bringing together experts

873
00:51:19,000 --> 00:51:22,719
Speaker 4: from so many different areas because these projects are things

874
00:51:22,719 --> 00:51:26,320
Speaker 4: that we cannot achieve alone. Now, CERN is a wonderful example,

875
00:51:26,360 --> 00:51:29,160
Speaker 4: because it was created post World War two somewhat as

876
00:51:29,160 --> 00:51:32,719
Speaker 4: a peace building project. So in its remit or in

877
00:51:32,760 --> 00:51:35,840
Speaker 4: its constitution is science for peace. So they are not

878
00:51:35,920 --> 00:51:38,440
Speaker 4: allowed to work on any defense related projects, are not

879
00:51:38,480 --> 00:51:42,040
Speaker 4: allowed to work on anything with weapon ability. It's probably

880
00:51:42,080 --> 00:51:44,800
Speaker 4: the word that I should use. They're not even allowed

881
00:51:44,800 --> 00:51:46,600
Speaker 4: to turn a profit, not even in the gift shop,

882
00:51:47,160 --> 00:51:50,160
Speaker 4: which took some people by surprise. And I've had a

883
00:51:50,160 --> 00:51:52,040
Speaker 4: few people comment on that, but I noted that in

884
00:51:52,080 --> 00:51:54,520
Speaker 4: the book. But to me it was obvious because it's CERN,

885
00:51:55,440 --> 00:51:58,200
Speaker 4: and they exist, you know, to seek new knowledge in physics,

886
00:51:58,239 --> 00:52:01,799
Speaker 4: and they exist sort of for the best of humanity

887
00:52:02,160 --> 00:52:05,600
Speaker 4: in a sort of grand sense. And so after nineteen

888
00:52:05,760 --> 00:52:10,320
Speaker 4: fifty six, you've got people working at cerne across borders

889
00:52:10,600 --> 00:52:13,760
Speaker 4: from countries who were at war just a few years earlier.

890
00:52:14,320 --> 00:52:16,400
Speaker 4: And this continues today. You know, there are both Russian

891
00:52:16,400 --> 00:52:21,640
Speaker 4: and Ukrainian scientists working at CERN alongside each other. And

892
00:52:23,800 --> 00:52:28,359
Speaker 4: so CERN really is this amazing human project where we've

893
00:52:28,440 --> 00:52:31,239
Speaker 4: learned to collaborate with thousands of people to achieve things

894
00:52:31,320 --> 00:52:35,120
Speaker 4: that certainly one lab can't do alone, one nation can't

895
00:52:35,160 --> 00:52:39,640
Speaker 4: do alone. These are truly global projects. So much so

896
00:52:39,920 --> 00:52:43,000
Speaker 4: that sort of successful collaboration that even the UN has

897
00:52:43,040 --> 00:52:45,680
Speaker 4: come to people at CERN, have come to people at

898
00:52:45,680 --> 00:52:50,160
Speaker 4: CERN and tried to work together on Okay, how come

899
00:52:50,239 --> 00:52:52,960
Speaker 4: STERN is so successful in its collaboration right? What can

900
00:52:53,000 --> 00:52:55,640
Speaker 4: the rest of us learn from the way that CERN

901
00:52:55,800 --> 00:53:00,399
Speaker 4: collaborates that could benefit the rest of the world, Even

902
00:53:00,440 --> 00:53:03,360
Speaker 4: if the technology doesn't float your boat. I think the

903
00:53:03,520 --> 00:53:08,120
Speaker 4: human collaboration aspect of it is something which most people

904
00:53:08,160 --> 00:53:13,600
Speaker 4: find quite inspiring. The other side of that is actually

905
00:53:13,640 --> 00:53:15,719
Speaker 4: around the technology itself. And as you say, I'm a

906
00:53:15,760 --> 00:53:19,239
Speaker 4: total nerd for particle accelerators. It is my professional day job.

907
00:53:19,360 --> 00:53:22,840
Speaker 4: I designed particle accelerators. I love it. They're great machines.

908
00:53:23,880 --> 00:53:25,560
Speaker 4: And one of the reasons I love it, and the

909
00:53:25,600 --> 00:53:28,880
Speaker 4: reason I chose it back when I chose my PhD topic,

910
00:53:29,640 --> 00:53:32,800
Speaker 4: was because someone who turned out to be my PhD

911
00:53:32,840 --> 00:53:34,799
Speaker 4: supervisor he called me and he was like, so, this

912
00:53:34,840 --> 00:53:37,279
Speaker 4: isn't what you applied for, because originally I applied to

913
00:53:37,280 --> 00:53:42,439
Speaker 4: do particle physics with Higgs Boson type stuff. And he said, okay,

914
00:53:42,480 --> 00:53:45,320
Speaker 4: hear me out. Hear me out. I want to design

915
00:53:45,360 --> 00:53:48,680
Speaker 4: a new type of particle accelerator to treat cancer. And

916
00:53:48,760 --> 00:53:53,399
Speaker 4: I was just like, what, what do you mean why

917
00:53:53,480 --> 00:53:57,400
Speaker 4: you find things people? And it turned out I was

918
00:53:57,440 --> 00:54:00,000
Speaker 4: just I just was a bit naive. I didn't realize

919
00:54:00,280 --> 00:54:04,400
Speaker 4: that you could use these technologies at smaller scales for

920
00:54:04,600 --> 00:54:08,920
Speaker 4: all sorts of societal applications. So about half of all

921
00:54:09,000 --> 00:54:13,000
Speaker 4: cancer treatments are actually done using small particle accelerators. For

922
00:54:13,280 --> 00:54:17,280
Speaker 4: what's called radiotherapy, which is one of the most successful

923
00:54:17,320 --> 00:54:20,279
Speaker 4: forms of cancer treatment that we've ever had, and it's

924
00:54:20,280 --> 00:54:23,080
Speaker 4: a small electron accelerator. It generates X rays and then

925
00:54:23,120 --> 00:54:26,520
Speaker 4: you shape those to the tumor inside the body, and

926
00:54:26,560 --> 00:54:29,600
Speaker 4: the whole accelerator actually rotates around the patient to be

927
00:54:29,680 --> 00:54:32,840
Speaker 4: able to deliver beams from different angles. And nowadays we

928
00:54:32,880 --> 00:54:35,920
Speaker 4: have more advanced forms of cancer treatment using heavier particles

929
00:54:35,960 --> 00:54:39,480
Speaker 4: like protons and carbon ions that are more precise in

930
00:54:39,560 --> 00:54:41,520
Speaker 4: the way that they deposit the dose. And that was

931
00:54:41,880 --> 00:54:46,279
Speaker 4: the area that I did my PhD on, and even

932
00:54:46,360 --> 00:54:50,719
Speaker 4: today I run a research group about accelerators for medical applications.

933
00:54:51,560 --> 00:54:54,000
Speaker 4: And so when you look at it, there's about fifty

934
00:54:54,080 --> 00:54:57,720
Speaker 4: thousand particle accelerators in the world, and only a fraction

935
00:54:57,760 --> 00:55:01,160
Speaker 4: of a percent are actually used for particle physics. And

936
00:55:01,239 --> 00:55:05,120
Speaker 4: so what has happened since we first invented accelerators in

937
00:55:05,120 --> 00:55:08,439
Speaker 4: the nineteen twenties and thirties is as we invent these

938
00:55:08,480 --> 00:55:13,360
Speaker 4: new technologies and the knowledge of how to accelerate beams

939
00:55:13,400 --> 00:55:18,280
Speaker 4: of fundamental particles and control them, more and more applications

940
00:55:18,320 --> 00:55:21,560
Speaker 4: have emerged, So not just in cancer treatment, but also

941
00:55:21,320 --> 00:55:26,000
Speaker 4: in industries. So you can use particle accelerators to change

942
00:55:26,040 --> 00:55:30,520
Speaker 4: the color of a gemstone by bombarding diamonds, you know,

943
00:55:30,680 --> 00:55:33,759
Speaker 4: diamond companies, to can change the color of a gemstone

944
00:55:34,520 --> 00:55:38,120
Speaker 4: often from clear to pink. Now that's you know, that's

945
00:55:38,200 --> 00:55:40,279
Speaker 4: quite capitalistic, isn't it. You're just trying to gain a

946
00:55:40,320 --> 00:55:42,480
Speaker 4: bit more money. That's not really a very very very

947
00:55:42,520 --> 00:55:46,480
Speaker 4: useful thing. But actually all the devices that we use

948
00:55:46,520 --> 00:55:50,400
Speaker 4: today rely on electronic chips, and today those are so

949
00:55:50,480 --> 00:55:52,839
Speaker 4: small that you have to implant ions one by one.

950
00:55:52,920 --> 00:55:55,080
Speaker 4: You can't do that using chemistry. You have to do

951
00:55:55,120 --> 00:55:59,880
Speaker 4: it using effectively a small particle accelerator. And so almost

952
00:56:00,080 --> 00:56:03,279
Speaker 4: everywhere you look, in every aspect of society, you will

953
00:56:03,280 --> 00:56:06,640
Speaker 4: find somewhere in there a story about how we use

954
00:56:06,680 --> 00:56:11,760
Speaker 4: this really advanced technologies to create sort of the modern

955
00:56:11,760 --> 00:56:14,600
Speaker 4: world around us. And yet we almost always don't know

956
00:56:15,040 --> 00:56:17,200
Speaker 4: don't know that it's there. And some of the most

957
00:56:18,480 --> 00:56:21,080
Speaker 4: I think inspiring work that happens there is when we're

958
00:56:21,080 --> 00:56:25,560
Speaker 4: looking at things like you know, in the environment or

959
00:56:25,560 --> 00:56:28,800
Speaker 4: in cultural heritage. So we're able to do really advanced

960
00:56:28,920 --> 00:56:34,680
Speaker 4: dating techniques putting together you know, the deep prehistorical story

961
00:56:34,719 --> 00:56:39,440
Speaker 4: of our Earth and our species and other species across

962
00:56:39,680 --> 00:56:42,880
Speaker 4: large tracts of time because we have these techniques that

963
00:56:42,960 --> 00:56:46,600
Speaker 4: come from fundamental physics. And so this is where I

964
00:56:46,640 --> 00:56:48,600
Speaker 4: get really excited, is because I'm like, Okay, so I

965
00:56:48,600 --> 00:56:51,120
Speaker 4: can sit in the lab every day, I can design

966
00:56:51,200 --> 00:56:53,680
Speaker 4: these machines, I can test them, and they can be

967
00:56:53,880 --> 00:56:59,480
Speaker 4: used for everything from you know, looking at an artwork

968
00:56:59,520 --> 00:57:05,240
Speaker 4: to discover for whether it's real or fake, to shrinking

969
00:57:05,480 --> 00:57:08,080
Speaker 4: the shrink wrap that goes around a Christmas turkey. That's

970
00:57:08,120 --> 00:57:12,319
Speaker 4: a real application. Polemer cross thinking is the technical term,

971
00:57:12,480 --> 00:57:16,320
Speaker 4: but you know, you know, to uncovering the Higgs boson

972
00:57:16,400 --> 00:57:18,960
Speaker 4: in the secrets of the universe. And to me, the

973
00:57:19,000 --> 00:57:22,480
Speaker 4: fact that it's the same physics and the same area

974
00:57:22,520 --> 00:57:24,800
Speaker 4: of research that I can do that that contributes to

975
00:57:24,840 --> 00:57:27,720
Speaker 4: all of these different areas of our society. That gets

976
00:57:27,720 --> 00:57:30,720
Speaker 4: me really excited because I'm never bored. I can always

977
00:57:30,800 --> 00:57:33,880
Speaker 4: choose a new application, I can always choose a new

978
00:57:33,920 --> 00:57:38,880
Speaker 4: type of machine to work on. And we're always trying

979
00:57:38,920 --> 00:57:42,680
Speaker 4: to make improvements in the energy efficiency, you know, trying

980
00:57:42,680 --> 00:57:46,440
Speaker 4: to make things smaller and better and cheaper, and just

981
00:57:46,520 --> 00:57:50,720
Speaker 4: trying to push forward the frontiers of these technologies using

982
00:57:50,720 --> 00:57:55,400
Speaker 4: our knowledge of fundamental physics, in order to do some

983
00:57:55,480 --> 00:57:57,960
Speaker 4: good in the world, you know, to actually make a

984
00:57:58,000 --> 00:58:01,120
Speaker 4: difference to people's lives. And that's why I show up

985
00:58:01,120 --> 00:58:03,160
Speaker 4: in the laborary day and I've had a lot of

986
00:58:03,200 --> 00:58:05,240
Speaker 4: people say, wow, I had no idea that you could

987
00:58:05,240 --> 00:58:08,480
Speaker 4: do that with physics. That's amazing. And so I've been

988
00:58:08,520 --> 00:58:10,680
Speaker 4: told on a number of occasions that my job today

989
00:58:10,880 --> 00:58:15,200
Speaker 4: is kind of the current equivalent of being a rocket scientist,

990
00:58:15,320 --> 00:58:17,960
Speaker 4: you know, I'm sort of working on this cutting edge

991
00:58:17,960 --> 00:58:20,960
Speaker 4: of technology which is taking us to new frontiers of

992
00:58:21,000 --> 00:58:25,760
Speaker 4: knowledge and exploration. And while it's not quite as dramatic

993
00:58:25,800 --> 00:58:27,840
Speaker 4: as a rocket, when you start up one of these machines,

994
00:58:28,600 --> 00:58:32,320
Speaker 4: it is to me incredibly inspiring. And every approach that

995
00:58:32,360 --> 00:58:36,040
Speaker 4: we take, whether it's collaborating, you know, in a multidisciplinary sense,

996
00:58:36,280 --> 00:58:40,520
Speaker 4: I collaborate very strongly with cancer researchers nowadays, or collaborating

997
00:58:40,520 --> 00:58:44,800
Speaker 4: across different nations and different technical skills. I think really

998
00:58:44,840 --> 00:58:50,360
Speaker 4: this type of research is sort of unique in a way,

999
00:58:50,800 --> 00:58:53,560
Speaker 4: but it's also representative of the approach that I think

1000
00:58:54,880 --> 00:58:59,000
Speaker 4: has led us to so many successes, both you know,

1001
00:58:59,080 --> 00:59:03,400
Speaker 4: both in science but also in terms of improving our

1002
00:59:03,480 --> 00:59:04,960
Speaker 4: lives as people.

1003
00:59:11,960 --> 00:59:18,720
Speaker 3: I have a question about how you approach experiments in physics.

1004
00:59:19,440 --> 00:59:24,120
Speaker 3: When you're doing an experiment and you're getting results that

1005
00:59:24,160 --> 00:59:27,800
Speaker 3: are not at all what you expect to see, how

1006
00:59:27,840 --> 00:59:32,040
Speaker 3: do you prioritize exploring the options that what you expect

1007
00:59:32,120 --> 00:59:35,160
Speaker 3: to see is wrong versus there is something wrong with

1008
00:59:35,200 --> 00:59:36,200
Speaker 3: your method.

1009
00:59:37,640 --> 00:59:40,240
Speaker 4: I always err on the side of assuming I'm an idiot,

1010
00:59:41,160 --> 00:59:47,280
Speaker 4: so maybe just imposters in drome, But no, okay, this

1011
00:59:48,160 --> 00:59:50,600
Speaker 4: is kind of what I mean about ensuring you one

1012
00:59:50,640 --> 00:59:53,880
Speaker 4: hundred percent understand your apparatus. So typically when you start

1013
00:59:53,920 --> 00:59:56,080
Speaker 4: out an experiment, and I'm thinking here of just a

1014
00:59:56,120 --> 01:00:00,439
Speaker 4: small experiment that I built in the UK, and when

1015
01:00:00,440 --> 01:00:02,320
Speaker 4: we first started using it, we'd get all these like

1016
01:00:02,360 --> 01:00:07,480
Speaker 4: electrical signals that we just didn't understand, and so my

1017
01:00:07,520 --> 01:00:10,400
Speaker 4: assumption there was not that the fundamental thing that I

1018
01:00:10,440 --> 01:00:14,800
Speaker 4: was trying to study was wrong. My assumption almost always

1019
01:00:14,920 --> 01:00:17,640
Speaker 4: is to assume that I don't understand my experiment well enough,

1020
01:00:18,280 --> 01:00:21,640
Speaker 4: and to devise little tests and little questions and little

1021
01:00:21,640 --> 01:00:25,720
Speaker 4: experiments to test my understanding of the equipment and to

1022
01:00:25,840 --> 01:00:29,560
Speaker 4: test you know, I'll always pull it back to a

1023
01:00:29,600 --> 01:00:31,880
Speaker 4: test case where I'm like, Okay, I should one hundred

1024
01:00:31,880 --> 01:00:35,160
Speaker 4: percent know the outcome of doing this test, so then

1025
01:00:35,200 --> 01:00:38,120
Speaker 4: I run that test, and if that one is still failing,

1026
01:00:38,880 --> 01:00:41,440
Speaker 4: then I'm like, Okay, there's something wrong with the equipment.

1027
01:00:41,840 --> 01:00:44,400
Speaker 4: And maybe there's something wrong, or maybe I've dialed it

1028
01:00:44,440 --> 01:00:46,880
Speaker 4: in wrong, or I've got the wrong impedance matching, or

1029
01:00:46,920 --> 01:00:50,600
Speaker 4: I've got, you know, like something, something that I've failed

1030
01:00:50,600 --> 01:00:54,560
Speaker 4: to recognize is important in the experiment doing what I

1031
01:00:54,600 --> 01:00:56,480
Speaker 4: wanted to do. And I think that would be a

1032
01:00:56,520 --> 01:00:59,760
Speaker 4: familiar experience to almost every experiment, which is to go

1033
01:00:59,880 --> 01:01:03,360
Speaker 4: in with this overabundance of optimism that everything's going to

1034
01:01:03,400 --> 01:01:06,560
Speaker 4: work first time, and then slowly work your way through

1035
01:01:06,800 --> 01:01:09,120
Speaker 4: the many, many, many ways in which you were wrong

1036
01:01:10,320 --> 01:01:14,360
Speaker 4: until you really fully understand everything that's happening. And then

1037
01:01:15,240 --> 01:01:19,000
Speaker 4: if you're testing your theory or maybe there isn't a theory.

1038
01:01:19,040 --> 01:01:21,280
Speaker 4: Maybe you're just testing something that doesn't have a theory yet,

1039
01:01:22,000 --> 01:01:23,800
Speaker 4: and if then it's coming back and giving you a

1040
01:01:23,840 --> 01:01:27,040
Speaker 4: result that you don't expect, then you start to get

1041
01:01:27,080 --> 01:01:30,240
Speaker 4: those little you know, I'm getting shivers just saying it's ridiculous,

1042
01:01:30,280 --> 01:01:32,640
Speaker 4: isn't it. But like those little shivers which say, oh,

1043
01:01:32,680 --> 01:01:34,600
Speaker 4: this is something new, this is a knowledge gap, this

1044
01:01:34,800 --> 01:01:39,400
Speaker 4: is a potential to discover something that no one's ever

1045
01:01:39,480 --> 01:01:44,040
Speaker 4: seen before. And it's in that mode where you're both

1046
01:01:44,160 --> 01:01:48,760
Speaker 4: confident in your experiment that you can really ask the

1047
01:01:48,840 --> 01:01:53,520
Speaker 4: questions about the nature of reality. And in that moment,

1048
01:01:53,840 --> 01:01:56,080
Speaker 4: I think more often than not, you want to be

1049
01:01:56,200 --> 01:02:01,720
Speaker 4: wrong right. You want nature to be throwing a curveball

1050
01:02:01,760 --> 01:02:05,240
Speaker 4: at you. You want it to be something surprising, and

1051
01:02:05,720 --> 01:02:08,360
Speaker 4: those are I think those are the moments in which

1052
01:02:10,440 --> 01:02:13,240
Speaker 4: would be the closest that I think you would get

1053
01:02:13,280 --> 01:02:16,280
Speaker 4: to having sort of a Eureka moment or that moment

1054
01:02:16,760 --> 01:02:20,280
Speaker 4: I've seen something new for the very first time. And

1055
01:02:20,320 --> 01:02:23,440
Speaker 4: it's only by working your way through those smaller steps

1056
01:02:23,440 --> 01:02:25,920
Speaker 4: that you can get to that level of confidence. And

1057
01:02:26,000 --> 01:02:29,320
Speaker 4: I think a lot of people don't realize that that

1058
01:02:29,520 --> 01:02:33,280
Speaker 4: is very much the day to day role of an

1059
01:02:33,280 --> 01:02:38,000
Speaker 4: experimental scientist is working your way through these annoying things,

1060
01:02:38,640 --> 01:02:41,440
Speaker 4: and you have to learn to love that process, right,

1061
01:02:41,520 --> 01:02:44,800
Speaker 4: You have to learn to love the small bits of

1062
01:02:44,880 --> 01:02:47,280
Speaker 4: understanding and the small discoveries that come along the way.

1063
01:02:47,320 --> 01:02:50,920
Speaker 4: You know, maybe you've discovered a new way of arranging

1064
01:02:50,920 --> 01:02:54,280
Speaker 4: your apparatus that happens to give you, you know, ten times

1065
01:02:54,360 --> 01:02:57,240
Speaker 4: more signal than you had before, and that's really satisfying.

1066
01:02:58,000 --> 01:03:02,200
Speaker 4: And so I think experimental science for that reason, it

1067
01:03:02,280 --> 01:03:05,320
Speaker 4: sort of appeals to people who like to tinker. It

1068
01:03:05,360 --> 01:03:08,760
Speaker 4: appeals to the detail orientated mind. At the same time,

1069
01:03:09,240 --> 01:03:12,840
Speaker 4: it has to appeal to people who have that bigger vision,

1070
01:03:13,000 --> 01:03:16,640
Speaker 4: you know, who have that longer term time frame, Because

1071
01:03:16,640 --> 01:03:18,600
Speaker 4: if you expect to go into the lab every day

1072
01:03:18,640 --> 01:03:20,640
Speaker 4: and make one discovery every day, you're going to be

1073
01:03:20,680 --> 01:03:24,320
Speaker 4: solely disappointed. But if you can keep in mind the

1074
01:03:24,480 --> 01:03:28,160
Speaker 4: big picture and work toward that over and often it

1075
01:03:28,200 --> 01:03:31,880
Speaker 4: is years, you know, and keep that enthusiasm and keep

1076
01:03:31,920 --> 01:03:35,680
Speaker 4: that wonder that happens in the lab every day, I

1077
01:03:35,680 --> 01:03:39,840
Speaker 4: think that's the sort of personality type that fits experimental

1078
01:03:39,880 --> 01:03:41,439
Speaker 4: science very very well.

1079
01:03:42,080 --> 01:03:44,040
Speaker 3: There's a point about your book that I really love

1080
01:03:44,080 --> 01:03:47,760
Speaker 3: you in talking about how big projects like the large

1081
01:03:47,800 --> 01:03:50,080
Speaker 3: Hadron collidor you've talked about this today as well, are

1082
01:03:50,560 --> 01:03:56,400
Speaker 3: illustrative of deeper points about human collaboration. And I wonder if,

1083
01:03:57,200 --> 01:03:58,920
Speaker 3: in a way you even alluded to this earlier when

1084
01:03:58,920 --> 01:04:01,360
Speaker 3: you were talking about what types of experiments are easier

1085
01:04:01,360 --> 01:04:03,560
Speaker 3: to talk about in the setting like you know, our

1086
01:04:03,600 --> 01:04:07,800
Speaker 3: conversation today. I wonder if these big collaborative stories like

1087
01:04:07,840 --> 01:04:11,200
Speaker 3: the large Hadron collider are more difficult to fit in

1088
01:04:11,280 --> 01:04:14,880
Speaker 3: the shape of a compelling and memorable narrative than stories

1089
01:04:14,920 --> 01:04:18,280
Speaker 3: with a single protagonist. Obviously, a lot of the most

1090
01:04:18,280 --> 01:04:21,120
Speaker 3: inspiring and amazing stories in your book are about these

1091
01:04:21,200 --> 01:04:25,360
Speaker 3: huge megaprojects with these unthinkable amounts of coordination and collaboration.

1092
01:04:25,960 --> 01:04:29,720
Speaker 3: Are there tricks to telling those stories in a way

1093
01:04:29,800 --> 01:04:32,720
Speaker 3: that makes them work as stories? But it's still true

1094
01:04:32,720 --> 01:04:33,520
Speaker 3: to the reality.

1095
01:04:35,560 --> 01:04:39,240
Speaker 4: It was very difficult, Yes, So I will definitely acknowledge

1096
01:04:39,280 --> 01:04:42,440
Speaker 4: it is so much harder to write about enormous collaborations

1097
01:04:42,440 --> 01:04:46,160
Speaker 4: than it is to write about a few individuals. And

1098
01:04:46,200 --> 01:04:50,000
Speaker 4: I think in terms of the story, you know, the

1099
01:04:50,040 --> 01:04:54,960
Speaker 4: story arc or the narrative creation process. I had to

1100
01:04:55,000 --> 01:05:00,480
Speaker 4: find my own route through that, and so I was

1101
01:05:00,520 --> 01:05:04,919
Speaker 4: looking for things like, okay, well, you know, if I'm

1102
01:05:05,080 --> 01:05:08,080
Speaker 4: if I'm creating a sort of story arc, so you know,

1103
01:05:08,120 --> 01:05:10,600
Speaker 4: what would my crisis moment be, What would you know,

1104
01:05:10,680 --> 01:05:14,240
Speaker 4: what would a sort of pinnacle moment be. What is

1105
01:05:14,280 --> 01:05:18,240
Speaker 4: my like sort of inciting idea that sort of sets

1106
01:05:18,600 --> 01:05:22,040
Speaker 4: sets that story off on a journey. And you can

1107
01:05:22,200 --> 01:05:26,680
Speaker 4: find those things within the stories of the big experiments.

1108
01:05:26,960 --> 01:05:31,200
Speaker 4: It does make it harder to focus on individual, but

1109
01:05:31,320 --> 01:05:34,760
Speaker 4: I actually, in the end, especially for the large Hadron collider,

1110
01:05:34,800 --> 01:05:37,760
Speaker 4: I use myself as an example of a tiny, tiny

1111
01:05:37,800 --> 01:05:41,320
Speaker 4: individual within this enormous collaboration, and that worked for me

1112
01:05:41,400 --> 01:05:44,560
Speaker 4: partly because I actually didn't go on to continue in

1113
01:05:44,560 --> 01:05:47,280
Speaker 4: that collaboration. I worked in it as a student. I

1114
01:05:47,320 --> 01:05:50,520
Speaker 4: did this very very small project which people love to

1115
01:05:51,880 --> 01:05:55,120
Speaker 4: to recite the name of the project that I did,

1116
01:05:55,200 --> 01:05:59,680
Speaker 4: which was it was the design of a no hang on,

1117
01:06:00,480 --> 01:06:01,840
Speaker 4: I'm going to get it, I'm going to get it wrong.

1118
01:06:01,880 --> 01:06:04,600
Speaker 4: But it was the design of a monitoring system for

1119
01:06:04,680 --> 01:06:08,640
Speaker 4: the heating, sorry for the heaters of the cooling system

1120
01:06:08,840 --> 01:06:11,360
Speaker 4: of the inner detector of the Atlas experiment.

1121
01:06:13,720 --> 01:06:15,760
Speaker 3: See cooling system.

1122
01:06:15,920 --> 01:06:18,560
Speaker 4: Now the monitoring system, Yes, the monitoring system for the

1123
01:06:18,600 --> 01:06:22,600
Speaker 4: heaters of the cooling system. Okay, if you have a

1124
01:06:22,640 --> 01:06:26,600
Speaker 4: cooling system and you don't want it to all like

1125
01:06:26,800 --> 01:06:30,400
Speaker 4: clog up with condensation, right, so sometimes you need heaters

1126
01:06:30,400 --> 01:06:32,920
Speaker 4: on there to bring the temperature back up and stabilize it,

1127
01:06:33,000 --> 01:06:34,440
Speaker 4: like you need to be able to move the temperature

1128
01:06:34,480 --> 01:06:39,160
Speaker 4: in two directions. Anyway, So that was my crazy, you know,

1129
01:06:39,240 --> 01:06:41,480
Speaker 4: tidy little project that I did for three months when

1130
01:06:41,520 --> 01:06:44,400
Speaker 4: I was a summer student as an undergraduate working at CERNE.

1131
01:06:45,000 --> 01:06:50,680
Speaker 4: And it was illustrative though, of this idea that you know,

1132
01:06:50,960 --> 01:06:53,520
Speaker 4: I was this sort of tiny cog in this enormous machine.

1133
01:06:55,000 --> 01:06:58,880
Speaker 4: And I think the way I used that story was

1134
01:06:58,960 --> 01:07:02,840
Speaker 4: also to sort of saying I doubted that this machine

1135
01:07:02,880 --> 01:07:06,880
Speaker 4: could ever work, because if I was making this contribution

1136
01:07:07,120 --> 01:07:09,760
Speaker 4: and deep within my code was the ability to switch

1137
01:07:09,760 --> 01:07:12,880
Speaker 4: the whole machine off, then surely, you know, statistically this

1138
01:07:12,920 --> 01:07:15,960
Speaker 4: thing was never going to work. And so I was

1139
01:07:16,000 --> 01:07:19,360
Speaker 4: as surprise as everybody else. Well, I don't think the

1140
01:07:20,040 --> 01:07:22,520
Speaker 4: actual rest of the collaboration would have been surprised when

1141
01:07:22,520 --> 01:07:27,040
Speaker 4: it worked, but I was surprised from my experience when

1142
01:07:27,080 --> 01:07:29,360
Speaker 4: it worked as well as it did when they started

1143
01:07:29,360 --> 01:07:33,360
Speaker 4: the machine up. Of course, people who remember back in

1144
01:07:33,360 --> 01:07:35,240
Speaker 4: two thousand and eight. Will remember that it worked for

1145
01:07:35,240 --> 01:07:38,240
Speaker 4: about seven days before it blew itself up, and then

1146
01:07:38,280 --> 01:07:40,600
Speaker 4: they spent a year fixing it before it came back online.

1147
01:07:41,480 --> 01:07:43,600
Speaker 4: And I was at an event the other day where

1148
01:07:43,640 --> 01:07:46,240
Speaker 4: someone referred to the startup of the large hydron collider,

1149
01:07:46,560 --> 01:07:49,480
Speaker 4: in which they said about two thousand and eight, with

1150
01:07:49,600 --> 01:07:52,160
Speaker 4: a shake of the hand. You know, this is sort

1151
01:07:52,160 --> 01:07:56,040
Speaker 4: of you know this Italian style like wobble of the

1152
01:07:56,120 --> 01:07:59,680
Speaker 4: hand that means roughly they did that. They said it

1153
01:07:59,680 --> 01:08:01,760
Speaker 4: suddenly in about two thousand and eight, and it was

1154
01:08:01,920 --> 01:08:05,520
Speaker 4: all about that hand wobble of like, oh, that means

1155
01:08:05,560 --> 01:08:07,600
Speaker 4: the machine blew itself up and it had to be

1156
01:08:07,640 --> 01:08:10,400
Speaker 4: fixed for a year. But anyway, so I'm getting off

1157
01:08:10,360 --> 01:08:12,720
Speaker 4: the track onto the large hundred collider. But I think,

1158
01:08:12,880 --> 01:08:16,360
Speaker 4: I think, yes, it is much more difficult to write

1159
01:08:16,439 --> 01:08:20,439
Speaker 4: narratives about enormous collaborations. But I think that speaks to

1160
01:08:20,479 --> 01:08:24,160
Speaker 4: something a little deeper, is something which has come out

1161
01:08:24,160 --> 01:08:28,640
Speaker 4: of conversations with people now that we're studying even larger colliders.

1162
01:08:29,400 --> 01:08:32,960
Speaker 4: So the next one, potential next iteration is one hundred

1163
01:08:33,040 --> 01:08:38,479
Speaker 4: kilometers in circumference and will take about forty years to build,

1164
01:08:38,680 --> 01:08:42,360
Speaker 4: to design and build that's getting to the same lengths

1165
01:08:42,439 --> 01:08:45,679
Speaker 4: as or longer than a lot of careers in the field,

1166
01:08:47,560 --> 01:08:51,040
Speaker 4: and so I think we are running into and it's

1167
01:08:51,040 --> 01:08:53,920
Speaker 4: something that I've been talking to people about, a sort

1168
01:08:53,960 --> 01:09:00,000
Speaker 4: of two big, too long, too complex problem with these collaborations.

1169
01:09:00,080 --> 01:09:03,200
Speaker 4: And even though they I find them more inspiring in

1170
01:09:03,240 --> 01:09:07,600
Speaker 4: what they have been able to achieve. If I was

1171
01:09:08,280 --> 01:09:12,000
Speaker 4: given the choice again, now you know, I'm a student,

1172
01:09:12,280 --> 01:09:15,720
Speaker 4: I'm raring to go in this field, I'm really interested,

1173
01:09:17,160 --> 01:09:19,960
Speaker 4: what would I choose to work on, for saying, my

1174
01:09:20,040 --> 01:09:24,200
Speaker 4: PhD now at the age of early twenties, embarking on

1175
01:09:24,240 --> 01:09:26,880
Speaker 4: a PhD, which can be anywhere between about three and

1176
01:09:27,640 --> 01:09:30,360
Speaker 4: however many years, you know, seven eight years. For some people,

1177
01:09:30,840 --> 01:09:33,080
Speaker 4: it's a huge commitment and a huge chunk of your

1178
01:09:33,080 --> 01:09:38,160
Speaker 4: life at that age. And totally I hear stories of

1179
01:09:38,280 --> 01:09:42,719
Speaker 4: professors who are struggling to recruit students to projects for

1180
01:09:42,800 --> 01:09:45,800
Speaker 4: the sort of next mega colliders because they're like, well,

1181
01:09:46,120 --> 01:09:47,880
Speaker 4: there's not going to be any data to work with

1182
01:09:48,000 --> 01:09:50,880
Speaker 4: for forty years, Like how am I going to have a

1183
01:09:50,920 --> 01:09:53,320
Speaker 4: career in this Why would I commit three to seven

1184
01:09:53,400 --> 01:09:57,080
Speaker 4: years to something that might not even be built? And

1185
01:09:57,160 --> 01:09:59,720
Speaker 4: so I don't want to make out like there's a

1186
01:09:59,760 --> 01:10:01,639
Speaker 4: cris there's or a lack of people who are interested

1187
01:10:01,720 --> 01:10:04,080
Speaker 4: and very committed to this field. But I just hear

1188
01:10:04,240 --> 01:10:11,519
Speaker 4: inklings of dissatisfaction or sort of little little inklings of trouble,

1189
01:10:13,000 --> 01:10:16,679
Speaker 4: and I'm I'm curious about that, and I'm curious about

1190
01:10:16,720 --> 01:10:20,080
Speaker 4: how we're going to resolve that. And I guess there's

1191
01:10:20,080 --> 01:10:22,200
Speaker 4: two parts. Either we find a way to resolve that

1192
01:10:22,240 --> 01:10:26,680
Speaker 4: through the career structure and through having shorter projects alongside

1193
01:10:26,720 --> 01:10:30,400
Speaker 4: these big, long ones that you keep people motivated and

1194
01:10:30,520 --> 01:10:33,639
Speaker 4: keep everyone working, or we really have to think about

1195
01:10:33,800 --> 01:10:38,880
Speaker 4: are these projects too big? Should we really be focusing

1196
01:10:39,240 --> 01:10:43,559
Speaker 4: all our energy on technologies which can shrink down the

1197
01:10:43,640 --> 01:10:47,480
Speaker 4: size of future collided projects, which is very very difficult

1198
01:10:47,880 --> 01:10:54,920
Speaker 4: although they are in progress. And also just refocus back

1199
01:10:54,960 --> 01:10:59,160
Speaker 4: down on the sort of structure in which these collaborations work,

1200
01:10:59,240 --> 01:11:02,400
Speaker 4: because realistic, you've got groups of about ten to twenty

1201
01:11:02,439 --> 01:11:06,120
Speaker 4: people in a research group in a university. Those work

1202
01:11:06,160 --> 01:11:08,720
Speaker 4: on specific sub areas of the experiment, and then they

1203
01:11:08,800 --> 01:11:11,160
Speaker 4: all join together and eventually you get, you know, two

1204
01:11:11,200 --> 01:11:15,599
Speaker 4: thousand people. And so it's not that two thousand people

1205
01:11:15,600 --> 01:11:19,280
Speaker 4: are sort of a negalitarian, you know, flat structure who

1206
01:11:19,320 --> 01:11:22,240
Speaker 4: all somehow know each other and communicate. That would be

1207
01:11:22,240 --> 01:11:27,640
Speaker 4: absolutely wild. There is a substructure, and so I'm interested

1208
01:11:28,240 --> 01:11:31,200
Speaker 4: in how we can use that substructure that works very

1209
01:11:31,200 --> 01:11:34,439
Speaker 4: well in small, close knit groups who then go out

1210
01:11:34,479 --> 01:11:37,400
Speaker 4: and work with other groups around the world. Perhaps there's

1211
01:11:37,400 --> 01:11:39,280
Speaker 4: a way we can do that in the time domain

1212
01:11:39,360 --> 01:11:42,880
Speaker 4: as well. Right, So, perhaps there's a way of having

1213
01:11:42,920 --> 01:11:47,960
Speaker 4: more contained sections of projects, perhaps with applications, you know,

1214
01:11:48,080 --> 01:11:50,800
Speaker 4: that sort of keep people interested on that sort of

1215
01:11:50,840 --> 01:11:54,880
Speaker 4: you know, few year timescale that can drive things along.

1216
01:11:54,920 --> 01:11:57,200
Speaker 4: So maybe instead of in the future, instead of contributing

1217
01:11:57,240 --> 01:11:59,720
Speaker 4: to hardware or sitting in a control room, maybe you

1218
01:11:59,840 --> 01:12:03,880
Speaker 4: can cotributing to the societal applications of the spin offs

1219
01:12:03,920 --> 01:12:06,880
Speaker 4: of the work that you're doing, alongside developing the longer

1220
01:12:06,960 --> 01:12:13,280
Speaker 4: term curiosity driven part. That's just my idea. It's very

1221
01:12:13,400 --> 01:12:16,519
Speaker 4: much an unsolved thing. But I think if I was

1222
01:12:16,560 --> 01:12:19,720
Speaker 4: given the chance again, I would struggle to commit to

1223
01:12:20,240 --> 01:12:22,599
Speaker 4: a project that wasn't going to have data for forty years.

1224
01:12:23,280 --> 01:12:25,439
Speaker 4: So I do want to acknowledge that it's a very

1225
01:12:25,439 --> 01:12:28,639
Speaker 4: interesting time for young people to be entering the field.

1226
01:12:28,640 --> 01:12:29,240
Speaker 4: In that sense.

1227
01:12:30,320 --> 01:12:32,080
Speaker 3: Right at the end of the book, you offer a

1228
01:12:32,080 --> 01:12:33,960
Speaker 3: couple of big lessons that you think we need to

1229
01:12:34,000 --> 01:12:37,519
Speaker 3: embrace for the future of physics and collaborative research projects.

1230
01:12:37,520 --> 01:12:39,400
Speaker 3: Do you want to mention those before we sign off?

1231
01:12:40,160 --> 01:12:40,360
Speaker 1: Yes.

1232
01:12:40,400 --> 01:12:42,160
Speaker 4: So, I think some of the things that I've learned

1233
01:12:42,160 --> 01:12:45,719
Speaker 4: through writing the book around collaboration and this curiosity driven

1234
01:12:45,880 --> 01:12:50,000
Speaker 4: research is that it is so important that we value it,

1235
01:12:50,040 --> 01:12:52,479
Speaker 4: that we value its impact in society, and that we

1236
01:12:52,680 --> 01:12:56,040
Speaker 4: create space for people to do this kind of research,

1237
01:12:56,880 --> 01:12:59,559
Speaker 4: not just space, but also it requires funding. And I

1238
01:12:59,560 --> 01:13:01,920
Speaker 4: know it sounds a little daddy to mix curiosity driven

1239
01:13:01,920 --> 01:13:05,439
Speaker 4: research and money, but in our society those two things

1240
01:13:05,479 --> 01:13:07,280
Speaker 4: are going to have to go hand in hand. So,

1241
01:13:07,800 --> 01:13:10,040
Speaker 4: you know, even the future, we want to be able

1242
01:13:10,080 --> 01:13:13,799
Speaker 4: to create collaborations so we can really get the best

1243
01:13:13,880 --> 01:13:18,439
Speaker 4: out of specialized skills that people have to the betterment

1244
01:13:18,479 --> 01:13:22,240
Speaker 4: of society. We need to really think about how we

1245
01:13:22,320 --> 01:13:26,000
Speaker 4: value things that don't set out with a goal in mind,

1246
01:13:26,680 --> 01:13:29,000
Speaker 4: and I think we need to center those and we

1247
01:13:29,080 --> 01:13:33,040
Speaker 4: need to really value the fact that somebody would commit

1248
01:13:33,160 --> 01:13:36,519
Speaker 4: their life and their career to something where they don't

1249
01:13:36,560 --> 01:13:39,280
Speaker 4: even know what the outcome is going to look like.

1250
01:13:39,520 --> 01:13:41,920
Speaker 4: We need to protect that with everything that we have

1251
01:13:42,040 --> 01:13:45,680
Speaker 4: because that is such a generative force in our society

1252
01:13:45,720 --> 01:13:46,120
Speaker 4: for good.

1253
01:13:46,680 --> 01:13:49,240
Speaker 3: Susie Shehei, thank you so much for talking today. It

1254
01:13:49,280 --> 01:13:50,360
Speaker 3: has been a privilege and a.

1255
01:13:50,280 --> 01:13:52,160
Speaker 4: Pleasure lovely to be here. Thanks Joy.

1256
01:13:53,080 --> 01:13:55,720
Speaker 3: All Right, well that's it for today. Thanks again to

1257
01:13:55,760 --> 01:13:58,640
Speaker 3: Susie Shehi for being so generous with their time. If

1258
01:13:58,680 --> 01:14:00,280
Speaker 3: you want to pick up a copy of the book,

1259
01:14:00,560 --> 01:14:04,560
Speaker 3: it is called The Matter of Everything, The Matter of Everything,

1260
01:14:04,680 --> 01:14:07,720
Speaker 3: and it's out in hardback, in ebook form and as

1261
01:14:07,760 --> 01:14:11,320
Speaker 3: an audiobook narrated by Susie herself. Stuff to Blow Your

1262
01:14:11,360 --> 01:14:13,920
Speaker 3: Mind is primarily a show about science and culture, with

1263
01:14:14,000 --> 01:14:16,920
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1264
01:14:17,040 --> 01:14:19,839
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1265
01:14:20,000 --> 01:14:22,760
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1266
01:14:22,800 --> 01:14:25,960
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1267
01:14:26,040 --> 01:14:30,240
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1268
01:14:30,600 --> 01:14:33,439
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1269
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Speaker 3: Artifact or the Monster Fact, and on Friday we do

1270
01:14:37,040 --> 01:14:40,559
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1272
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01:14:50,760 --> 01:14:54,519
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1275
01:14:54,840 --> 01:14:59,080
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1276
01:14:59,120 --> 01:15:01,000
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1277
01:15:01,080 --> 01:15:04,000
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1278
01:15:04,120 --> 01:15:07,800
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1279
01:15:07,960 --> 01:15:18,479
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1280
01:15:18,560 --> 01:15:21,519
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01:15:21,600 --> 01:15:25,440
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