Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Yesterday was
Speaker 1: a holiday, so we didn't have time to put together
Speaker 1: a brand new episode for today, so we're going into
Speaker 1: the vault. This is going to be The Matter of
Speaker 1: Everything with Susie she This is an interview that Joe
Speaker 1: conducted with the author of the Matter of Everything, How Curiosity,
Speaker 1: Physics and Improbable Experiments Changed the World. This was originally
Speaker 1: published eight eight, twenty twenty three. Let's dive right in.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3: Hello, and welcome to the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast.
Speaker 3: My name is Joe McCormick. My regular co host Robert
Speaker 3: Lamb is not with me today, but he'll be joining
Speaker 3: me again the next time. Today's episode is going to
Speaker 3: be an interview. This is a conversation I had with
Speaker 3: the accelerator physicist and author Suzie Sheehy about her recent
Speaker 3: book The Matter of Everything, How Curiosity, Physics and Improbable
Speaker 3: Experiments Changed the World. Susie's publisher sent us a copy
Speaker 3: of this book for review, and I really loved it.
Speaker 3: So it's a history of modern physics experiments from Runken's
Speaker 3: cathode ray tube and the discovery of X rays all
Speaker 3: the way up to the Large Hadron Collider and beyond.
Speaker 3: And what makes this book really special in my opinion,
Speaker 3: is that it focuses not just on theoretical advancements, but
Speaker 3: on the labor of designing and building experiments to test
Speaker 3: those new ideas. And because it illuminates so much about
Speaker 3: the experimental apparatus behind the progress of science, I think
Speaker 3: this book has a lot of interesting things to say,
Speaker 3: not just about the history of our quest to understand
Speaker 3: matter and energy, but about epistemology and critical thinking and
Speaker 3: work to read from her author bio. Susie Shehe is
Speaker 3: a physicist, science communicator and academic who divides her time
Speaker 3: between her research groups at the University of Oxford and
Speaker 3: the University of Melbourne. Her research addresses both curiosity driven
Speaker 3: and applied areas, and is currently focused on developing new
Speaker 3: particle accelerators for applications in medicine. Again, the book is
Speaker 3: called The Matter of Everything, and I guess that does
Speaker 3: it for the introduction. Here is my interview with Susie Shehe.
Speaker 3: Susie Shehey, welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 4: Thanks Joan, nice to be here.
Speaker 3: So I wanted to start off talking about how I
Speaker 3: think a lot of the histories of physics that I've
Speaker 3: read focused more on the theoretical side, like what led
Speaker 3: to the insights theoretical physicists had, how they dreamed up
Speaker 3: their models, and things like that. I really loved that
Speaker 3: this book was intensely focused on the experimental component of physics,
Speaker 3: and there was a lot of focus on the details
Speaker 3: of the experiments, how they did it, and understanding experiments
Speaker 3: as human projects operating under constraints. What kind of insights
Speaker 3: do you think are revealed by looking at the history
Speaker 3: of particle physics through the experimental lens, in particular, especially
Speaker 3: things that you might miss if you only talk about
Speaker 3: physics as a sort of history of ideas.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you phrased that so beautifully in there by the way,
Speaker 4: the importance of experiments. So I'm an experimental physicist, right.
Speaker 4: So one of the things that I observed when I
Speaker 4: sort of started on the journey of writing this book
Speaker 4: was that almost every other comparable book was written by
Speaker 4: theoretical physicist, and so you'd get these stories where you
Speaker 4: get this wonderful insight of say Einstein or one of
Speaker 4: the key theoretical physicists of the age, and it was
Speaker 4: like it was almost like they came to these insights
Speaker 4: purely from their own personal genius, right, And this was
Speaker 4: the story of physics that I was taught pretty much
Speaker 4: when I did at university as well, but it was
Speaker 4: also the story that comes across in these books. And
Speaker 4: I don't know whether this is just like an egotistical
Speaker 4: aggrandizing thing that people do. Certainly these people are very
Speaker 4: very smart, right, but they're not islands. And I think
Speaker 4: that's one of the key insights that you get from
Speaker 4: taking a different approach to looking at the history and
Speaker 4: looking more at the experiments and more at the wider
Speaker 4: view of how physics progresses. And I think any theoretical
Speaker 4: physicist today would all and hopefully also though is historically
Speaker 4: would admit that, you know, their work is nothing without
Speaker 4: the work of the experimentalists, because at the end of
Speaker 4: the day, physics is a subject which is trying to
Speaker 4: describe the universe, our actual universe, not just some theoretical,
Speaker 4: mathematical universe that doesn't really exist. And so the only
Speaker 4: way to meet those two things in the middle is
Speaker 4: through experiment. You have to actually get out there and
Speaker 4: and test nature. But that's where a lot of people,
Speaker 4: I think, naively think that we just we know what
Speaker 4: we're doing with that that we just we can go
Speaker 4: out there and build an experiment and test or find
Speaker 4: this thing, and that once the theorist predicts it, that
Speaker 4: it's a straightforward journey. So that's I think the next
Speaker 4: sort of key insight there is that it is not
Speaker 4: a straightforward journey to discover and uncover the nature of
Speaker 4: our universe, especially on these tiny scales that we're looking
Speaker 4: at that are so much smaller than what we can
Speaker 4: see with our own eyes. And so when you delve
Speaker 4: into that, then as you say, there's this detailed development
Speaker 4: of how experiments actually work, whether that's electronically, whether that's
Speaker 4: because they require two thousand people with different expertise to
Speaker 4: actually put them together, and also just that co development
Speaker 4: of technology and instrumentation along with the development of ideas
Speaker 4: and insights about the universe, and it really is sort
Speaker 4: of a logistic development. So there's I think a few
Speaker 4: things there about throwing out the long genius stereotype, managing
Speaker 4: to recognize how important it is that we actually interact
Speaker 4: in the real world and do experiments, and then just
Speaker 4: the unpredictable nature of doing those experiments at all.
Speaker 3: You mentioned in the book that some people think that
Speaker 3: Derac's equation is the most beautiful equation in all of physics.
Speaker 3: I'm sure that people who have a lot of math
Speaker 3: and physics knowledge would consider that subjective. But it made
Speaker 3: me curious about the different ways that instruments within science
Speaker 3: can be perceived not only as useful or accurate, but
Speaker 3: sometimes esthetically beautiful. So I was wondering about the other
Speaker 3: side of that. As an experimentalist, Do you have an
Speaker 3: opinion on what is the most beautiful experiment in all
Speaker 3: of physics? Or do you have at least a few candidates?
Speaker 4: Oh that's nice. Yeah, I think I definitely appreciate the
Speaker 4: beauty of a well designed experiment that can sort of
Speaker 4: cut through all the background noise and find the thing
Speaker 4: that they're looking for. But I'd say I appreciate the
Speaker 4: beauty of an experiment in multiple dimensions though, right, so
Speaker 4: you can. I can appreciate the beauty of an experiment
Speaker 4: which serendipitously found something that it didn't expect, as well
Speaker 4: as appreciating, you know, the sort of really well designed,
Speaker 4: very specific experiment. But now you're putting me on the
Speaker 4: spot if you asked me what my favorite experiment was,
Speaker 4: I mean, in the book, I really focus on twelve
Speaker 4: key experiments that I chose from what could have been
Speaker 4: thousands honestly, and focused on how those had contributed to
Speaker 4: our knowledge of particle physics over about the last one
Speaker 4: hundred and twenty years. And I think it's easier probably
Speaker 4: for me to choose a favorite from the earlier ones
Speaker 4: of those because they're smaller, it's easier to understand all
Speaker 4: the different parts of the experiment. And so in that sense,
Speaker 4: in a beauty and esthetic appreciation sense, I think I'm
Speaker 4: going to say the cloud chamber. And this was developed
Speaker 4: in the early nineteen hundreds by a physicist named CITR.
Speaker 4: Wilson Charles Wilson, whose first love was actually meteorology, but
Speaker 4: he was working in the Cavendis Lab in Cambridge in
Speaker 4: the UK, alongside all the people doing all the early
Speaker 4: work in radioactivity, so he was very well versed in
Speaker 4: radioactivity and those ideas. But he invented this chamber originally
Speaker 4: to try and study clouds and the interaction of light
Speaker 4: and electricity in the atmosphere, and then he later realized
Speaker 4: when someone held an X ray tube, or he and
Speaker 4: a colleague held next ray tube to the side of
Speaker 4: it that he could see the passage of radiation through
Speaker 4: this chamber, which had a sort of in his case
Speaker 4: water vapor and nowadays we use alcohol vapors, and these
Speaker 4: little trails would form, like little tracks of cloud as
Speaker 4: the radiation went through and left a little bit of
Speaker 4: energy inside the chamber. And I find this beautiful because
Speaker 4: it's really the first time as a species that we
Speaker 4: get to visualize radiation. We get to visualize this thing
Speaker 4: which is otherwise extremely uh you know, abstract and difficult
Speaker 4: to understand, and now we're seeing its effects almost in
Speaker 4: real time, so you can photograph as particles pass through,
Speaker 4: and then we get and I think the beauty comes
Speaker 4: in because it's this lovely interaction between our own capacities
Speaker 4: as humans and the development of a new instrumentation. Because
Speaker 4: then you can take you can leave these chambers up
Speaker 4: on mountains, you can take photographs of the interactions there,
Speaker 4: and from that we discover lots of new things, including
Speaker 4: we discover antimatter for the first time. So the positron
Speaker 4: is the opposite version of the electron, and when they
Speaker 4: come together, they annihilate, but they can also be produced
Speaker 4: in pairs electron positron pairs, And there were positrons detected
Speaker 4: by a guy called Karl Anderson in the US, and
Speaker 4: he discovered them in his experiments before he'd read about
Speaker 4: Direct's beautiful equation. I'm coming back to the equation again now.
Speaker 4: He actually wasn't aware of Dirac's work, which was published
Speaker 4: in nineteen twenty nine, but in nineteen thirty two he'd
Speaker 4: built this enormous chamber with this huge magnet around it
Speaker 4: and legged it up a mountain and discovered this type
Speaker 4: of anti matter. And I find that really beautiful because
Speaker 4: then he's literally able to use our internal sort of
Speaker 4: track recognition, you know, our patent finding system, our brain
Speaker 4: to look at the photographs and actually see that there's
Speaker 4: something new there. And there were other particles discovered later
Speaker 4: as well, the new one being a key one, which
Speaker 4: is a heavy version of an electron, and it was
Speaker 4: really the instrument of choice for many many years in
Speaker 4: the field, and it came from a meteorologist. So I
Speaker 4: don't know, there's something in that story for me which
Speaker 4: is just beautiful about how we can use our creativity
Speaker 4: sort of reuse of ideas in adjacent fields to really
Speaker 4: make amazing discoveries.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I love that example too, And there's a kind
Speaker 3: of beauty and a kind of lightness and elegance to
Speaker 3: it that in a way seems contrasted by other experiments
Speaker 3: you described that are also incredibly important and wonderful stories
Speaker 3: to understand, Like one that stands sort of opposite it
Speaker 3: in my mind is the story of Ernest Lawrence's team
Speaker 3: and their cyclotron. And this chapter struck me as interesting
Speaker 3: in part because I think this is the one where
Speaker 3: you illuminate a history of what struck me as interesting
Speaker 3: mistakes like you mentioned a faulty reading from an accelerator
Speaker 3: experiment due to I think it was like deuteron coding
Speaker 3: on target elements. Please correct me if I'm getting this wrong.
Speaker 3: And also an incident where they accidentally made the whole
Speaker 3: lab radioactive without realizing it, which interfered with their measurements
Speaker 3: on a Geiger counter like device. So what is the
Speaker 3: role of error and making a mess in scientific experiments?
Speaker 4: Do you know? I've been thinking about this more since
Speaker 4: writing the book, and I think we don't. I think
Speaker 4: we don't acknowledge the role of error and failure enough
Speaker 4: in science, in fact, we try and cover it up.
Speaker 4: It's a huge there's a huge issue in fact with
Speaker 4: failed experiments not being published, and in some fields like medicine,
Speaker 4: that's that's a huge issue. Actually in physics it's less
Speaker 4: of an issue, but it still happens. But Ernest Lawrence's
Speaker 4: example of the cycloton is a fantastic example where by
Speaker 4: sort of realizing their mistakes and their errors, they really
Speaker 4: made progress in their understanding. So, as you say, they
Speaker 4: developed this particle accelerator of this circular machine, and then
Speaker 4: over time they realize that they're not seeing the results
Speaker 4: that they think they should be seeing because, for example,
Speaker 4: in one in one situation, basically everything could become radioactive,
Speaker 4: and so all of their measurement devices were just picking
Speaker 4: up the background radiation and not the radiation they were
Speaker 4: trying to look for. But that helped them understand what
Speaker 4: was happening in the machine as it was accelerating, and
Speaker 4: they missed a number of key discoveries that were made
Speaker 4: by other research groups around the world, but they didn't
Speaker 4: mind too much. And Lawrence sort of had this mindset
Speaker 4: which is relevant to the question of errors and failures,
Speaker 4: which is. You know, he sort of would like to
Speaker 4: say there's research enough for everyone, or there's discovery enough
Speaker 4: for everyone, and so he was this big believer that
Speaker 4: he was quite quite a futurist, I guess because at
Speaker 4: the start of his career he was I think late
Speaker 4: twenties early thirties when he first invented the cyclotron, and
Speaker 4: he invented it because he couldn't see a path of
Speaker 4: the existing technology to the end of his career even
Speaker 4: you know, he was sort of looking thirty years in
Speaker 4: the future, going, well, these technologies are just they're going
Speaker 4: to be outdated by the time I get to that point,
Speaker 4: So I'm going to have to invent something new to
Speaker 4: give myself, you know, a path of growth through my career.
Speaker 4: And boy did he get it, you know, he really
Speaker 4: The cycloton was an incredible invention and they're still built
Speaker 4: today in hospitals to generate radioisotopes for medical procedures, which
Speaker 4: is very, very useful. But obviously along the way he
Speaker 4: could be perceived at having failed to make key discoveries
Speaker 4: in physics. So I think induced radioactivity was one of
Speaker 4: the ones that he missed actually, and was found by
Speaker 4: Julio and Curri in France. That's Marie Carey's daughter, Irene Kiri.
Speaker 4: So I've been thinking about this since writing the book,
Speaker 4: and I think I'd like to make the analogy with
Speaker 4: in the arts. Right, So if you if you have
Speaker 4: a creative practice in the arts, failure is an error.
Speaker 4: It's just an inherent part of it. And it's also
Speaker 4: very much acknowledged that by failing or making an error,
Speaker 4: you may just stumble upon something new, a new way
Speaker 4: of doing something, a new invention. I'm even thinking in
Speaker 4: the culinary world, you know. I know of a chef
Speaker 4: who who now runs a three Michelin starred restaurant in
Speaker 4: the UK, and one day he accidentally dropped hot coal
Speaker 4: into a vat of cooking oil and so they later,
Speaker 4: you know, decided to taste it and see how it tasted,
Speaker 4: and it tasted amazing, and he uses it in his
Speaker 4: signature dishes in a three Michelin starred restaurant now. And
Speaker 4: I love those stories of where errors lead you to
Speaker 4: new things and new ideas. And I do think in
Speaker 4: science we shy away a little bit from that, or
Speaker 4: we like to sort of cover it up and then
Speaker 4: we publish a paper that says, the story was a
Speaker 4: very linear one, and you know, we made all these discoveries,
Speaker 4: and in digging into the history of these experiments, which
Speaker 4: were so critical in understanding particle physics, I did discover
Speaker 4: that there was probably more failure than even I expected.
Speaker 4: And as an experimentalist myself, I've just come to accept
Speaker 4: that I often don't fully know what I'm doing because
Speaker 4: no one has ever tried to do it before. And
Speaker 4: sometimes I'm going to try things and they're going to fail.
Speaker 4: And there's a constant process in my lab with my
Speaker 4: students and staff of sort of openly talking about this
Speaker 4: right in it, you know, being candid about it and
Speaker 4: sort of being like that's all right, you know, like
Speaker 4: it's okay that it failed. You didn't know what you
Speaker 4: were doing because nobody knew what they were doing. But
Speaker 4: for example, you know, you might consider an earlier experiment
Speaker 4: in the book by William Rodkin, who discovered X rays,
Speaker 4: and he discovered them because a sort of painted fluorescent
Speaker 4: screen across his lab was glowing when he had a tube,
Speaker 4: a cathoedray tube on in his lab, and he noticed
Speaker 4: the glow and he decided to investigate it. Now we
Speaker 4: often refer to that as serendipitous, but depending on your perspective,
Speaker 4: you might consider it to be an error. You know,
Speaker 4: you probably shouldn't have had the wrong detector, you know,
Speaker 4: sort of out in the lab at the time. The
Speaker 4: other person that comes to mind is Robert Milliken, who
Speaker 4: did twelve years worth of experiments trying to measure what's
Speaker 4: called the photoelectric effect, which is the electrical current that
Speaker 4: flows when you shine light on particular metals. And this
Speaker 4: is an interesting one where along the way, the early
Speaker 4: phases of quantum mechanics had come around, and Einstein in
Speaker 4: particular had come out with this equation which predicted what
Speaker 4: should happen when you shine this light onto different metals.
Speaker 4: And the upshot of Einstein's theory was really abhorrent to
Speaker 4: the experimentalist. To Robert Milliken, he called it the reckless hypothesis,
Speaker 4: and that's because this hypothesis implied that light would be
Speaker 4: acting more like a particle than like a wave in
Speaker 4: this experiment. And so he set out to prove Einstein wrong,
Speaker 4: spent twelve years in the lab trying to do it,
Speaker 4: and all he did was pre Einstein right to a
Speaker 4: better precision than anyone had before. So again you might think,
Speaker 4: and he even thought that he was failing, right, He
Speaker 4: thought he was failing as an experimentalist. He was really
Speaker 4: struggling whether he had to build all his own equipment
Speaker 4: from scratch. And then at the end of twelve years
Speaker 4: he sort of comes out with this result, which I
Speaker 4: think even when he published it he still didn't fully believe,
Speaker 4: but he was able to sort of say, well, it
Speaker 4: is consistent with Einstein's prediction. And then later on about
Speaker 4: another ten years later, he was awarded the Nobel Prize
Speaker 4: for that and another famous experiment that he did about
Speaker 4: the charge on the electron, and he changes his tune.
Speaker 4: And I found this fascinating that, you know, this very
Speaker 4: fallible nature of the experimentalist, of sort of thinking one
Speaker 4: thing is going to happen and holding this bias that
Speaker 4: you know, no, nature can't possibly work that way. It's ridiculous.
Speaker 4: It's preposterous that a particle could be a wave. You know, sorry,
Speaker 4: a light could be a wave and a particle. And
Speaker 4: then he gets through his Nobel Prize speech or lecture
Speaker 4: and then he's saying, you know, however, many years ago,
Speaker 4: when I set out to demonstrate Einstein's photoelectric theory. So's
Speaker 4: he's making out like him meant to do it all along,
Speaker 4: and I was I was shocked. I was like, did
Speaker 4: someone transcribe that incorrectly? I don't think so. And so
Speaker 4: so it turns out that, you know, I think his
Speaker 4: bias against it was what it gave him this force,
Speaker 4: this will power to persist at his experiment for twelve
Speaker 4: years because he was just like, emotionally, he was just like,
Speaker 4: this cannot be right, this cannot be right. And you know,
Speaker 4: you would you would say that he failed in that
Speaker 4: enterprise because he was wrong, and I Stein was right.
Speaker 4: But this is I think this is how science progresses,
Speaker 4: and it's an important part of how science progresses is that, yes,
Speaker 4: we're all human, we're all you know, we're coming with
Speaker 4: our biases, we're very fallible. But isn't it amazing that
Speaker 4: we can then, you know, use the scientific process and
Speaker 4: apply you know, a sort of apply things to that
Speaker 4: that process to try and UnBias ourselves from the results
Speaker 4: and come out with the knowledge that is, you know,
Speaker 4: sort of accurate, regardless of the fact that you didn't
Speaker 4: believe it going into doing the experiment. I think that's
Speaker 4: actually a pretty amazing thing that we can do.
Speaker 3: And like the culture of experiment is the constraint on that. Yes, yeah, well,
Speaker 3: regarding ideas that are wrong but persistent. One of my
Speaker 3: favorite characters in the book is Ernest Rutherford, and there's
Speaker 3: a part where you quote Ernest Rutherford saying that he
Speaker 3: was originally brought up to think of the adam as.
Speaker 3: I think the quote is a nice hard fellow red
Speaker 3: or gray in color, according to your taste, and that
Speaker 3: struck me as very funny. But then you also mentioned
Speaker 3: in a footnote that even many physicists still, despite knowing better,
Speaker 3: thing of sub atomic particles and atoms as little balls.
Speaker 3: How do you visualize sub atomic particles or do you
Speaker 3: at all? And is there a better way we should
Speaker 3: try to picture this scale of matter in the mind's
Speaker 3: eye or is it pointless to even try?
Speaker 4: So I'm going to sheepishly admit that like all the
Speaker 4: other physicists I've asked, we don't want to admit it.
Speaker 4: But because the first time we were ever introduced to
Speaker 4: the concept of atoms and particles, they were little hard spheres.
Speaker 4: When you say protons and neutrons and electrons and the atom,
Speaker 4: I have. I have a terrible picture in my head
Speaker 4: that's I know is completely wrong, and yet it persists.
Speaker 4: You know, I have this this, Yeah, I have little
Speaker 4: hard spheres in my mind, just like Rutherford did. And
Speaker 4: I mean this is a This is a huge disservice
Speaker 4: that we do ourselves, I think, by persisting to describe
Speaker 4: in this way. But here's here's I think a key
Speaker 4: point about the models that we have in our heads,
Speaker 4: and I will answer the question about how better to
Speaker 4: visualize it in a moment. Physics and all the natural
Speaker 4: sciences really are sciences of different scales, and all the
Speaker 4: models that we have and all the theories that we
Speaker 4: have apply on different scales. So if you're a chemist
Speaker 4: or a biologist, it's well, other than some realms of chemistry,
Speaker 4: it's probably okay for you to visualize atoms and particles
Speaker 4: as little heart spheres. Because the models that predict the
Speaker 4: behavior which you're interested in on the scale that you're
Speaker 4: interested in, which is now much more macroscopic than microscopic.
Speaker 4: You know, it works perfectly fine, it can sort of
Speaker 4: approximate it. And quantum mechanics, though, is obviously the science
Speaker 4: when we get down to that very very small level,
Speaker 4: and we've realized that it no longer works in the
Speaker 4: same analogous way to say, billiard balls on a billiard table,
Speaker 4: and it works in a very different way. Everything is
Speaker 4: much more probabilistic. Nothing is as certain. We can't know
Speaker 4: things like the position and the momentum at the same
Speaker 4: time precisely, so everything becomes a little fuzzier. If I
Speaker 4: were to try and encourage you to properly visualize an atom,
Speaker 4: first of all, you know, the central nucleus of an
Speaker 4: atom is extremely dense and extremely small compared to the
Speaker 4: outer side of the atom. And Rutherford had another beautiful
Speaker 4: analogy for this, which is that if the electrons, which
Speaker 4: now you're considering in your head, the electrons to be
Speaker 4: kind of a wave or a sphere or a sort
Speaker 4: of much more, you know, much less like a little
Speaker 4: hard dot and much more like a probability cloud, that
Speaker 4: cloud would be at the walls of a cathedral. And
Speaker 4: if that was the size of a cathedral, then the
Speaker 4: nucleus in the center would be the size of a
Speaker 4: fly or a pee in the middle of the cathedral. So,
Speaker 4: first of all, the scales inside the atom are very
Speaker 4: different to the pictures that we look at when we're
Speaker 4: taught this kind of science, because you just can't fit
Speaker 4: those scales on a page and have them be sensible, right,
Speaker 4: so we condense everything down. So first of all, for
Speaker 4: most of us, the scales of what things look like
Speaker 4: inside the atom are kind of wrong. And this was
Speaker 4: also something that really blew the minds of even people
Speaker 4: like artists like Vasily Kandinski was really affected by this
Speaker 4: idea that the atom is mostly empty space. It really
Speaker 4: shifted his perception on what nature was made of, because
Speaker 4: suddenly everything around us that seemed solid is made of
Speaker 4: almost nothing, and it's purely the forces between these sort
Speaker 4: of ephemeral objects which are creating our experience of everything
Speaker 4: around us. Which back in twenty eighteen, I give a
Speaker 4: Tetec city talk and people have reflected back to me
Speaker 4: that the moment when they got shivers was when I
Speaker 4: said that you're not even touching the chair beneath you,
Speaker 4: you ever so slightly above it, And it's just the
Speaker 4: forces between the electrons in the chair and the electrons
Speaker 4: in your body opposing each other that makes you feel
Speaker 4: like you're in contact with the chair, but you're never
Speaker 4: The particles are never actually physically in contact with each other.
Speaker 4: It's just the electromagnetic force and gravity. First of all,
Speaker 4: that is a different way to view it. The scale
Speaker 4: is a different way to view it. And then not
Speaker 4: just the not just the electrons a wave like, but
Speaker 4: also those fundamental particles at the center, the protons and
Speaker 4: neutrons have constituent quarks. And even then, you know, we
Speaker 4: say that there's two types of quarks up and down
Speaker 4: quarks inside the protons and neutrons, but there's really a
Speaker 4: whole lot more so. It's kind of like that Nora's box.
Speaker 4: It's like if you go down further, you open it
Speaker 4: up and you're like, oh, there's all this other mess
Speaker 4: in there as well. And it depends how had I
Speaker 4: look at, what energy scale I look at, And it's
Speaker 4: just you know, so I like to imagine the nucleus
Speaker 4: as sort of as a you know, a group of
Speaker 4: protons and neutrons. But then if I try and visualize
Speaker 4: opening up those protons and neutrons, that's where even my
Speaker 4: brain goes, Nope, nope, I cannot do that. That's too comfixt.
Speaker 3: So you give a bunch of examples in the Book
Speaker 3: of Discoveries in the history of particle physics that were
Speaker 3: thought by some to be pure intellectual curiosities with no
Speaker 3: practical use, only to later become very important in broader civilization.
Speaker 3: Maybe they become the backbone of whole new genres of technology,
Speaker 3: or unlock new discoveries, sort of unlock new wings in
Speaker 3: the mansion of physics. Do you want to tell the
Speaker 3: story of one or two examples like this?
Speaker 4: Sure? I think let's start right at the start the
Speaker 4: discovery of the first subatomic particle of the electron, and
Speaker 4: this was done using the same experimental equipment basically as
Speaker 4: the X ray discovery. So A Catherine Retube and JJ
Speaker 4: Thompson in England in eighteen ninety seven sort of picked
Speaker 4: up where others had left off and realized that he
Speaker 4: could do a series of experiments bending around the beam
Speaker 4: of so called cathode rays. So that's a glowing, glowing
Speaker 4: green ray down the center of this tube that they
Speaker 4: didn't and they didn't know how it worked at that
Speaker 4: time or what it was made of. So he set
Speaker 4: out to investigate the nature of these cathode rays by
Speaker 4: deflecting them with electric fields and magnetic fields and catching
Speaker 4: the charge and seeing how it moved around, and as
Speaker 4: a result of all of those experiments, which I should
Speaker 4: say he definitely needed help with, even though I say
Speaker 4: it was him, he had to have his expert glass blower,
Speaker 4: Ebenezer Everett create all the experimental apparatus for him, because
Speaker 4: JJ Thompson, despite being like the leading physicist in England
Speaker 4: at the time, was I think I can't remember the
Speaker 4: exact phrase, but it was like exceptionally helpless with his
Speaker 4: hands is the phrase that comes to mind. So that's
Speaker 4: a quote of someone describing his experimental skills. So somebody
Speaker 4: else had to create all of his paradus. But anyway,
Speaker 4: he was able to use Ebenezer's apparatus to bend the electrons,
Speaker 4: to bend the beam around, and from that he managed
Speaker 4: to establish that not only is the beam made of particles,
Speaker 4: but that those particles were lighter than any atom that
Speaker 4: had ever been observed before, and so he was able
Speaker 4: to establish that this must be some kind of new
Speaker 4: fundamental particle which we now call the electron, which is
Speaker 4: about two thousand times lighter than the heaviest atom that
Speaker 4: had been seen before, and he was able to tell
Speaker 4: that that was really a fundamental component of matter. Because
Speaker 4: it didn't matter which cathoide he used. So the cathode
Speaker 4: is the part that the rays jump out of, and
Speaker 4: if it was just an atom, then you would expect
Speaker 4: if you change the cathoid or have you changed the
Speaker 4: gas inside the tube, that the results would vary, and
Speaker 4: they didn't. So that told him that this electron was
Speaker 4: somehow inside every single type of atom that he was working,
Speaker 4: so that that was an amazing discovery. And they used
Speaker 4: to be a toast in the Cavendish Lab in Cambridge
Speaker 4: where he made this discovery, and they have this annual
Speaker 4: party where you know, they sort of I don't know sings,
Speaker 4: they make up songs and they make up poems and
Speaker 4: they have a fancy dinner and you know, having spent
Speaker 4: over a decade myself in the UK at Oxford, I'm
Speaker 4: kind of imagining this in a wood paneled room, you know,
Speaker 4: with candlesticks and fancy, fancy food and everyone's wearing black tie.
Speaker 4: And there used to be a toast at this annual
Speaker 4: event where they would toast to the electron and they
Speaker 4: would say, to the electron, may it never be of
Speaker 4: use to anyone, because when he discovered it, it really was
Speaker 4: just him trying to figure out the fundamental nature of
Speaker 4: how these rays happened in this in this tube that
Speaker 4: numerous scientists had in their labs around the world. And
Speaker 4: in the few years after he discovered the electron, he
Speaker 4: also discovered the process called thermionic emission, which is the
Speaker 4: process by which the electron actually jump out of materials
Speaker 4: when you heat them up. And this then became an
Speaker 4: incredibly important piece of knowledge, which he obviously published and
Speaker 4: wrote all many things about, because a few years a
Speaker 4: few years later, an electrical engineer would sort of pick
Speaker 4: up this information and a previous discovery that had been
Speaker 4: made by Thomas Edison when he was trying to manufacture
Speaker 4: reliable light bulbs, and they'd put those two ideas together
Speaker 4: and come up with the first electric valve. So that
Speaker 4: is a device which can control the flow of electricity.
Speaker 4: You apply a small voltage and it either lets the
Speaker 4: current pass or it stops the current. And then more
Speaker 4: and more electronic devices then were invented after this, and
Speaker 4: in order to make those devices, they were one hundred
Speaker 4: percent reliant on JJ. Thompson's materials, on his theories, and
Speaker 4: on the things that he had developed as a result
Speaker 4: of his experiment, and those early tubes were very similar
Speaker 4: in their makeup to the tubes that Thompson was working with. Anyway,
Speaker 4: it's all very similar technology. But one thing I find
Speaker 4: quite interesting is that Thomas Edison just you know, he
Speaker 4: sort of made this discovery which was called the Edison effect,
Speaker 4: which was kind of about the flow of electricity, but
Speaker 4: he hadn't fully understood it. He just if he put
Speaker 4: an extra electrode inside a light bulb, he noticed that
Speaker 4: it affected the flow of electricity, and he patented it,
Speaker 4: but he couldn't think of any good ideas for it,
Speaker 4: so he just set it aside and ignored it. And
Speaker 4: if that had been the history, then nothing, you know,
Speaker 4: nothing would have been done about it at all. And
Speaker 4: I'm always amazed that people sort of look at Edison
Speaker 4: and his trial and error approach and they hold it
Speaker 4: up as this example of amazing innovation, and I'm like, well, okay,
Speaker 4: but he ignored possibly the most important thing he ever discovered.
Speaker 4: And it was only because other people picked up the
Speaker 4: ideas and understood it through JJ Thompson's investigations and his
Speaker 4: theories that then it led to the first electronic devices,
Speaker 4: the first and our ability through vacuum tubes to create
Speaker 4: things like the telecommunications industry to you know, and long
Speaker 4: distance communications. The first computers, all of the early electronics
Speaker 4: were based on these vacuum tubes, and of course that's
Speaker 4: changed a bit now everything's based in silicon and in
Speaker 4: the future, who knows what it will be based on.
Speaker 4: But if that fundamental investigation hadn't happened at the right time,
Speaker 4: and that knowledge wasn't there for the electrical engineers to
Speaker 4: build off, I sort of questioned, perhaps we'd have got
Speaker 4: there eventually with the electronics industry, but the story would
Speaker 4: have looked very, very different. So that's I find that
Speaker 4: an interesting example of the ways in which this sort
Speaker 4: of curiosity driven research, you know, trying to uncover the
Speaker 4: nature of the universe, and our innovation stories and our
Speaker 4: entrepreneurial stories kind of merge all into one and you
Speaker 4: start to see it not as one is superior to
Speaker 4: the other, but that they are essential to each other,
Speaker 4: and that we need both approaches and we can't just
Speaker 4: always sort of seed fund some entrepreneurial project or support
Speaker 4: some you know, innovator who's full of energy. You actually
Speaker 4: do need the people in the background doing that curiosity
Speaker 4: driven research in order to have new knowledge for those
Speaker 4: people to build on.
Speaker 3: Well, speaking of the people in the background, another interesting
Speaker 3: thing to me about a lot of the stories you
Speaker 3: tell are that some physics experiments that are very important
Speaker 3: in history are surprisingly laborious. Like I think of the
Speaker 3: example of particle counting, these experiments that involve just staring
Speaker 3: at a screen for hours and counting flashes of light
Speaker 3: by hand. Yeah, what are some of the ways that
Speaker 3: crucial physics discoveries depended on types of work that people
Speaker 3: might not think of when they try to imagine what
Speaker 3: scientists are doing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think there's a We love them, we love
Speaker 4: the moment of discovery, right, but we're often unwilling to
Speaker 4: figure out exactly what went into that discovery. And I
Speaker 4: have to say it's often it often comes as a
Speaker 4: surprise to people as you say how laborious it was.
Speaker 4: So that example you're talking about is in those early
Speaker 4: days of nuclear physics, where the only detectors we had
Speaker 4: were these fluorescent screens that lit up when high energy
Speaker 4: particles hit them. And so in Cambridge in the UK especially,
Speaker 4: they trained all their students and all their staff of
Speaker 4: how to sit in a dark room and look through
Speaker 4: a microscope at these plates when they were radioactive sources
Speaker 4: present and count each flash of light. But of course
Speaker 4: every human eye and brain is different, and so everyone
Speaker 4: was everyone was trained up and kind of measured to
Speaker 4: see how good they were at this particle counting. Right,
Speaker 4: So there's all these I mean. To get reliable scientific results,
Speaker 4: you need things like calibration. You know, these boring things,
Speaker 4: you know, the things that are not sexy or exciting
Speaker 4: about science. Good calibration. You need to know your instruments very,
Speaker 4: very very well. And I think any physicist today would
Speaker 4: tell you that until you know your experiment inside out,
Speaker 4: you will not get reliable results from it. And it's
Speaker 4: something that frustrates the heck out of undergraduate students in
Speaker 4: the lab when they're learning physics and they're trying to
Speaker 4: recreate experiments that were done in the past, and even
Speaker 4: though they've got apparatus that someone has prepared for them
Speaker 4: that should be working, they're still driven mad by the
Speaker 4: intricacies of it. And this is the reality. I mean, unfortunately,
Speaker 4: but you know, it's the reality of experimental life, which
Speaker 4: is that this stuff is not easy. And if it
Speaker 4: was easy, we would have done it hundreds of years ago, right,
Speaker 4: But it's difficult, it's often laborious, and often what we're
Speaker 4: trying to do in inventing new technologies and pushing at
Speaker 4: the cutting edge of technologies in experimental science is sometimes
Speaker 4: to get around the laboriousness, or even just to create
Speaker 4: a method to collect enough data that we can actually
Speaker 4: that we can actually use. So obviously, nowadays we don't
Speaker 4: use people sitting in a room particle counting. But there
Speaker 4: was a whole phase of experimental physics where after the
Speaker 4: technologies were invented that allowed you to photograph the tracks
Speaker 4: of particles. Well, then who processes the photographic data? Right?
Speaker 4: Who maps out those tracks and who turns all of
Speaker 4: that into tables that can be analyzed and searched for
Speaker 4: new physics. And the answer that most people probably don't
Speaker 4: realize is women did it. And in the early days
Speaker 4: these women were called there was the computers, So the
Speaker 4: women who did calculations by hand before the computer meant
Speaker 4: something very different to us. And in particle physics even
Speaker 4: into the forties, fifties, and sixties, you had the so
Speaker 4: called scanning girls and women who almost all women. There
Speaker 4: were some men who did it should I should say,
Speaker 4: who would sit at these enormous light tables with the
Speaker 4: with the copies of the photographic images, and they would
Speaker 4: follow a very precise sort of protocol in mapping out
Speaker 4: where the interesting things were in those photographs. And there
Speaker 4: were many, many discoveries made this way, something I do
Speaker 4: find interesting in the history. And I'm sure we'll get
Speaker 4: to the discussion of women in physics in a moment.
Speaker 4: But while some of these women were so called scanning girls,
Speaker 4: it was also considered to be a task that all
Speaker 4: the physicists should also know how to do. And this
Speaker 4: continues to this day. Even when you get these big
Speaker 4: collaborations like the large hadron collider, there's a sort of
Speaker 4: commitment to the experiment that you do some of this
Speaker 4: grunt work, you do some of this laborious work, and
Speaker 4: today that means sitting in a control room and overseeing
Speaker 4: the running of enormous colliders and detectors. But back then
Speaker 4: it would mean that you would do your share of
Speaker 4: analyzing these images. So this in a way is inseparable work.
Speaker 4: It specialized work, but it's work where the physicists did
Speaker 4: as well, and there were female physicists at that time
Speaker 4: who were also doing these kinds of analyses. And I
Speaker 4: almost wonder in this time, and this is just a
Speaker 4: it's just an idea that has come to me a
Speaker 4: number of times, I almost wonder if the women who
Speaker 4: were working as physicists in those laboratories were somewhat overlooked
Speaker 4: because the women's work at the time was as the
Speaker 4: scanning girls mostly, you know, and so there was this
Speaker 4: gender divide in roles. And even though the women were contributing,
Speaker 4: and some of them were physicists not you know, they
Speaker 4: weren't just hired as scanning girls, and yet their contributions
Speaker 4: were overlooked far more often than the contributions of their
Speaker 4: male colleagues. And I do wonder how this gender divide
Speaker 4: in the roles of this grunt work actually played into
Speaker 4: that overlooking at the time. But that's just one It's
Speaker 4: just one aspect of the sort of gendered nature of
Speaker 4: physics as we as we now know it, I think.
Speaker 4: But yeah, the I think a lot of people would
Speaker 4: be really surprised by how laborius a lot of the
Speaker 4: work is. And of course that's where automation nowadays and
Speaker 4: even AI tools are just changing the game. So dramatically
Speaker 4: because now that you can automate all of these processes
Speaker 4: and all of our detectors are you know, full of
Speaker 4: electronics instead of photographs. You know, the process of actually
Speaker 4: gathering the data is now much much easier, and so
Speaker 4: people and people can access the data around the world,
Speaker 4: including via the World Wide Web, which was invented at
Speaker 4: SNE just for that purpose. And so now we can
Speaker 4: focus on the analysis and we can focus on the physics,
Speaker 4: and the contributions to the hardware software become the grunt
Speaker 4: work and that part of the project as the experimentalist.
Speaker 4: So yeah, it's an interesting shift through time.
Speaker 3: Coming back to the issue of women in the history
Speaker 3: of physics, you mentioned in the book this idea of
Speaker 3: the Matilda effect in physics, and it strikes me that
Speaker 3: there are at least two different ways that the historical
Speaker 3: discrimination against women in physics manifests. There's one where there's
Speaker 3: just direct limitations on their participation, like some researchers having
Speaker 3: projects they considered not suitable for women to work on,
Speaker 3: or the marriage bar where women who had previously been
Speaker 3: involved in research were disallowed from doing so after marriage.
Speaker 3: But there are also cases where women researchers made significant
Speaker 3: contributions to physics discoveries, and their role in this work
Speaker 3: was sometimes deliberately censored from public records and recognition. Could
Speaker 3: you talk about a couple of these examples.
Speaker 4: Yeah, sure, I think that's really insightful that there are
Speaker 4: these different ways in which women's involvement in physics was
Speaker 4: a stopped, as you say, you know, sort of prevented,
Speaker 4: but then also that their contributions were diminished. And that
Speaker 4: second one is really where the Matilda effect comes in.
Speaker 4: So one person I'm thinking of here, her name is
Speaker 4: Marietta Blau, and she was a researcher in Austria, and
Speaker 4: she invented a new type of particle detector. So I
Speaker 4: talked before about how beautiful I thought the cloud chamber was.
Speaker 4: That's a very active detector. Things have to happen in
Speaker 4: real time. You have to photograph things in real time.
Speaker 4: It's very laborious to look after. And what she invented
Speaker 4: in staid, because she had a background both in physics
Speaker 4: and photography, was a photographic plate method of detecting particles.
Speaker 4: So she had this very thick so called emulsions, and
Speaker 4: they would create stacks of these emulsions for high energy
Speaker 4: charge particles to go through. And this now, instead of
Speaker 4: being looked after and photographed it every minute, could just
Speaker 4: be left at the top of a mountain for a month,
Speaker 4: two months, and it would just collect data over time
Speaker 4: and then it would be pulled apart and analyzed. And
Speaker 4: blouse invention led to a whole load of discoveries, and
Speaker 4: she herself was actually nominated for the Nobel Prize but
Speaker 4: never won it, and her invention led to I think
Speaker 4: at least I can think of at least two other
Speaker 4: Nobel Prizes that relied on her invention of this photographic
Speaker 4: emulsion method. But she also actually made amazing discoveries with
Speaker 4: it herself, one of which she called a star of disintegration,
Speaker 4: which was when a high energy cosmic ray coming from
Speaker 4: space came in and was sort of a direct hit
Speaker 4: on a heavy nucleus and then that nucleus itself sort
Speaker 4: of loaded and it left this amazing shower like a
Speaker 4: super and nova on the on the photographic emulsions. And
Speaker 4: this was a you know, she published, I'm pretty sure
Speaker 4: that one was published in Nature and her her sort
Speaker 4: of contemporary or not long after she was working there
Speaker 4: was an Indian physicist named Bieber Chowdery working in India,
Speaker 4: and she was one who was told that her professor
Speaker 4: didn't have any suitable projects for her as a woman,
Speaker 4: but she persisted anyway, and eventually sort of I guess,
Speaker 4: won him over because she ended up working with him.
Speaker 4: And she used similar photographic plates, but not of such
Speaker 4: great quality because she didn't have them available to her.
Speaker 4: It was during World War two and she was in India,
Speaker 4: so the supply chain wasn't great. But she actually uses
Speaker 4: photographic plates up mountains in India. And then she managed
Speaker 4: to discover the two different types of particles, which we
Speaker 4: would now call the muon and the pion, and those
Speaker 4: were those were some of the first observations of those particles,
Speaker 4: and as far as I can tell, it was the
Speaker 4: first time when it had been really recognized that there
Speaker 4: were two different particles. But I think she couldn't quite
Speaker 4: because of the quality of her equipment. She couldn't quite
Speaker 4: sort of say what was what or you know, the
Speaker 4: difference in masses between the two or something like that
Speaker 4: was missing. But this is the first authored paper in nature,
Speaker 4: and this time I know it was definitely in nature.
Speaker 4: You know, the top top journal in the world, and
Speaker 4: then in the nineteen fifties, so not long after Cecil
Speaker 4: Powell working in England. Sorry, his Nobel Prize was nineteen fifty.
Speaker 4: I think his work would have been late forties. He
Speaker 4: used exactly the same technique with superior emulsions to discover
Speaker 4: the pion. And in his earlier writing, in his It's
Speaker 4: definitely at least one textbook that he writes about, he
Speaker 4: acknowledges biber Chowdery's earlier work and references her Nature paper.
Speaker 4: And then when he wins the Well Prize in nineteen fifty,
Speaker 4: every reference of his that referenced her work and not
Speaker 4: used in the citation for the Nobel Prize. So all
Speaker 4: the papers that are cited of his for the Nobel
Speaker 4: Prize were the ones that didn't recognize the earlier work
Speaker 4: of this woman working in India. And I had never
Speaker 4: heard of her before I wrote this book. I'd never
Speaker 4: come across her story. But I thought that was phenomenal
Speaker 4: because Powell himself was not you know, he wasn't a
Speaker 4: rephensible human. He was a very left leaning liberal person.
Speaker 4: He had an unusually high number of female physicists in
Speaker 4: his lab in Bristol in the UK, and I think
Speaker 4: he himself was I haven't looked into his sort of
Speaker 4: journals and things, whether they exist. I would love to
Speaker 4: know how he felt about the fact that he had
Speaker 4: recognized the precedent and the Nobel Prize committee had not.
Speaker 4: And so Biber Chowdery is someone that even my particle
Speaker 4: physics colleagues have never heard of, even though she made
Speaker 4: this amazing discovery. And so these kinds of behaviors of
Speaker 4: sort of the ignoring of the women's contribution, like people
Speaker 4: will use their contributions but won't acknowledge them properly. And
Speaker 4: so we get this historical track record of you know,
Speaker 4: the Nobel Prize winners who are almost always men other
Speaker 4: than Marie Currey because she was so damn good no
Speaker 4: one could deny it. And you get these contributions of
Speaker 4: these women sort of falling by the wayside. And it's
Speaker 4: called the Matilda effect after Matilda Gage, who was a
Speaker 4: suffragist who first recognized that the contributions of women, and
Speaker 4: back then she was talking about the contributions to technology,
Speaker 4: but she first recognized that these contributions were being overlooked
Speaker 4: or attributed to their male counterparts or peers or even
Speaker 4: their husbands, and not properly attributed to the women who
Speaker 4: made them because of the biases that existed in our society.
Speaker 4: And a historian named Margaret Rossiter sort of coined this
Speaker 4: term the Matilda effect, named after michielda Gauge, and really
Speaker 4: encouraged all of us to look for those stories when
Speaker 4: we're looking at the history of especially technological fields and
Speaker 4: highly technical fields like physics, where there is a lack
Speaker 4: of women today. First of all, because and even I
Speaker 4: wasn't aware of this, that you know, you will probably
Speaker 4: find women that you weren't aware of, and this was
Speaker 4: absolutely my experience in writing this story. But secondly, she
Speaker 4: then encouraged us to write their stories back in because
Speaker 4: you know, there's sort of no other way to correct
Speaker 4: the record, and they have simply been overlooked. And so
Speaker 4: I mean, what could I do other than you know,
Speaker 4: it was sort of a call to arms as far
Speaker 4: as I was concerned, because here was I, you know,
Speaker 4: a female physicist today, having never heard of these women
Speaker 4: who made these amazing discoveries. And I thought, well, if
Speaker 4: I've never heard of them, and I'm writing a book
Speaker 4: about the history of these experiments then probably no one
Speaker 4: else has ever heard of, and that turned out to
Speaker 4: be true, and so it was just such a wonderful
Speaker 4: privilege actually to take up Margaret Rossiter's you know, sort
Speaker 4: of call to arms and write their stories back into
Speaker 4: the main stories of the history of these experiments, because
Speaker 4: they're so so important and to me as a female
Speaker 4: physicist working today, it made me realize, you know, all
Speaker 4: of the people who laid the foundations of my field,
Speaker 4: whom I sort of grew up in the field thinking
Speaker 4: that they were pretty much all men other than Marie Curriy,
Speaker 4: that that was false, and it created for me this
Speaker 4: sense of sort of belonging that I didn't expect to get.
Speaker 4: Out of the process of writing this book, I sort
Speaker 4: of thought, Wow, women like me have always been that,
Speaker 4: Women who've been curious about the universe, women who've wanted
Speaker 4: to be in the lab and using their technical skills
Speaker 4: and making these contributions to society and to our knowledge,
Speaker 4: have always been there. This isn't a weird thing that
Speaker 4: I'm doing. I'm not unusual to want to do this.
Speaker 4: And yeah, I've since had that sentiment reflected back by
Speaker 4: women young and old. Actually, you know, sort of young
Speaker 4: women starting out thinking of whether physics is for them.
Speaker 4: I've had some lovely feedback that they, you know, sort
Speaker 4: of read the book. They read about these women who fought,
Speaker 4: you know, I mean it was so hard to achieve
Speaker 4: them as well, because often these women were denied formal
Speaker 4: education in physics and weren't even allowed in the lecture theaters.
Speaker 4: So to realize that they were there and the things
Speaker 4: that they achieved, just you know, it was a very
Speaker 4: very encouraging and positive thing for me, even though in
Speaker 4: their own lives it was obviously a very negative experience sometimes.
Speaker 4: But to me today these stories, writing them back in
Speaker 4: brings I think, a new perspective on who gets to
Speaker 4: do physics.
Speaker 3: It's definitely a powerful thing learning these stories. So I
Speaker 3: want to come to the part of the book where
Speaker 3: you talk about particle accelerators. Clearly you have a love
Speaker 3: for accelerators. That's your field. Imagine somebody who is generally
Speaker 3: positive about science, but views particle accelerators, especially the big projects,
Speaker 3: the big colliders, as maybe too big and complicated to
Speaker 3: be charismatic, as like objects of the imagination, and maybe
Speaker 3: views their findings as too abstract to digest. What would
Speaker 3: you tell this person to give them particle accelerator fever, like,
Speaker 3: how would you make them fall in love?
Speaker 4: Oh? That's really that's really interesting. So I think we
Speaker 4: live in an interesting time in terms of particle accelerators
Speaker 4: because you know, obviously they're very well developed now, and
Speaker 4: we have these enormous machines. So the Larde hydron collider
Speaker 4: in Switzerland is twenty seven kilometers in circumference one hundred
Speaker 4: meters underground. Right, it's fricking enormous and it's very difficult
Speaker 4: to wrap your head around. First of all, I would
Speaker 4: say to anybody who doesn't find that kind of experiment
Speaker 4: charismatic on paper, I implore you to go and visit.
Speaker 4: It will blow your mind. Honestly. It is just such
Speaker 4: an enormous feet of human ingenuity. And today, in order
Speaker 4: to achieve these enormous experiments, we all have to work
Speaker 4: together and collaborate, and CERN is an amazing example of that,
Speaker 4: and the big national labs in the US have also
Speaker 4: been great examples of that, where you're bringing together experts
Speaker 4: from so many different areas because these projects are things
Speaker 4: that we cannot achieve alone. Now, CERN is a wonderful example,
Speaker 4: because it was created post World War two somewhat as
Speaker 4: a peace building project. So in its remit or in
Speaker 4: its constitution is science for peace. So they are not
Speaker 4: allowed to work on any defense related projects, are not
Speaker 4: allowed to work on anything with weapon ability. It's probably
Speaker 4: the word that I should use. They're not even allowed
Speaker 4: to turn a profit, not even in the gift shop,
Speaker 4: which took some people by surprise. And I've had a
Speaker 4: few people comment on that, but I noted that in
Speaker 4: the book. But to me it was obvious because it's CERN,
Speaker 4: and they exist, you know, to seek new knowledge in physics,
Speaker 4: and they exist sort of for the best of humanity
Speaker 4: in a sort of grand sense. And so after nineteen
Speaker 4: fifty six, you've got people working at cerne across borders
Speaker 4: from countries who were at war just a few years earlier.
Speaker 4: And this continues today. You know, there are both Russian
Speaker 4: and Ukrainian scientists working at CERN alongside each other. And
Speaker 4: so CERN really is this amazing human project where we've
Speaker 4: learned to collaborate with thousands of people to achieve things
Speaker 4: that certainly one lab can't do alone, one nation can't
Speaker 4: do alone. These are truly global projects. So much so
Speaker 4: that sort of successful collaboration that even the UN has
Speaker 4: come to people at CERN, have come to people at
Speaker 4: CERN and tried to work together on Okay, how come
Speaker 4: STERN is so successful in its collaboration right? What can
Speaker 4: the rest of us learn from the way that CERN
Speaker 4: collaborates that could benefit the rest of the world, Even
Speaker 4: if the technology doesn't float your boat. I think the
Speaker 4: human collaboration aspect of it is something which most people
Speaker 4: find quite inspiring. The other side of that is actually
Speaker 4: around the technology itself. And as you say, I'm a
Speaker 4: total nerd for particle accelerators. It is my professional day job.
Speaker 4: I designed particle accelerators. I love it. They're great machines.
Speaker 4: And one of the reasons I love it, and the
Speaker 4: reason I chose it back when I chose my PhD topic,
Speaker 4: was because someone who turned out to be my PhD
Speaker 4: supervisor he called me and he was like, so, this
Speaker 4: isn't what you applied for, because originally I applied to
Speaker 4: do particle physics with Higgs Boson type stuff. And he said, okay,
Speaker 4: hear me out. Hear me out. I want to design
Speaker 4: a new type of particle accelerator to treat cancer. And
Speaker 4: I was just like, what, what do you mean why
Speaker 4: you find things people? And it turned out I was
Speaker 4: just I just was a bit naive. I didn't realize
Speaker 4: that you could use these technologies at smaller scales for
Speaker 4: all sorts of societal applications. So about half of all
Speaker 4: cancer treatments are actually done using small particle accelerators. For
Speaker 4: what's called radiotherapy, which is one of the most successful
Speaker 4: forms of cancer treatment that we've ever had, and it's
Speaker 4: a small electron accelerator. It generates X rays and then
Speaker 4: you shape those to the tumor inside the body, and
Speaker 4: the whole accelerator actually rotates around the patient to be
Speaker 4: able to deliver beams from different angles. And nowadays we
Speaker 4: have more advanced forms of cancer treatment using heavier particles
Speaker 4: like protons and carbon ions that are more precise in
Speaker 4: the way that they deposit the dose. And that was
Speaker 4: the area that I did my PhD on, and even
Speaker 4: today I run a research group about accelerators for medical applications.
Speaker 4: And so when you look at it, there's about fifty
Speaker 4: thousand particle accelerators in the world, and only a fraction
Speaker 4: of a percent are actually used for particle physics. And
Speaker 4: so what has happened since we first invented accelerators in
Speaker 4: the nineteen twenties and thirties is as we invent these
Speaker 4: new technologies and the knowledge of how to accelerate beams
Speaker 4: of fundamental particles and control them, more and more applications
Speaker 4: have emerged, So not just in cancer treatment, but also
Speaker 4: in industries. So you can use particle accelerators to change
Speaker 4: the color of a gemstone by bombarding diamonds, you know,
Speaker 4: diamond companies, to can change the color of a gemstone
Speaker 4: often from clear to pink. Now that's you know, that's
Speaker 4: quite capitalistic, isn't it. You're just trying to gain a
Speaker 4: bit more money. That's not really a very very very
Speaker 4: useful thing. But actually all the devices that we use
Speaker 4: today rely on electronic chips, and today those are so
Speaker 4: small that you have to implant ions one by one.
Speaker 4: You can't do that using chemistry. You have to do
Speaker 4: it using effectively a small particle accelerator. And so almost
Speaker 4: everywhere you look, in every aspect of society, you will
Speaker 4: find somewhere in there a story about how we use
Speaker 4: this really advanced technologies to create sort of the modern
Speaker 4: world around us. And yet we almost always don't know
Speaker 4: don't know that it's there. And some of the most
Speaker 4: I think inspiring work that happens there is when we're
Speaker 4: looking at things like you know, in the environment or
Speaker 4: in cultural heritage. So we're able to do really advanced
Speaker 4: dating techniques putting together you know, the deep prehistorical story
Speaker 4: of our Earth and our species and other species across
Speaker 4: large tracts of time because we have these techniques that
Speaker 4: come from fundamental physics. And so this is where I
Speaker 4: get really excited, is because I'm like, Okay, so I
Speaker 4: can sit in the lab every day, I can design
Speaker 4: these machines, I can test them, and they can be
Speaker 4: used for everything from you know, looking at an artwork
Speaker 4: to discover for whether it's real or fake, to shrinking
Speaker 4: the shrink wrap that goes around a Christmas turkey. That's
Speaker 4: a real application. Polemer cross thinking is the technical term,
Speaker 4: but you know, you know, to uncovering the Higgs boson
Speaker 4: in the secrets of the universe. And to me, the
Speaker 4: fact that it's the same physics and the same area
Speaker 4: of research that I can do that that contributes to
Speaker 4: all of these different areas of our society. That gets
Speaker 4: me really excited because I'm never bored. I can always
Speaker 4: choose a new application, I can always choose a new
Speaker 4: type of machine to work on. And we're always trying
Speaker 4: to make improvements in the energy efficiency, you know, trying
Speaker 4: to make things smaller and better and cheaper, and just
Speaker 4: trying to push forward the frontiers of these technologies using
Speaker 4: our knowledge of fundamental physics, in order to do some
Speaker 4: good in the world, you know, to actually make a
Speaker 4: difference to people's lives. And that's why I show up
Speaker 4: in the laborary day and I've had a lot of
Speaker 4: people say, wow, I had no idea that you could
Speaker 4: do that with physics. That's amazing. And so I've been
Speaker 4: told on a number of occasions that my job today
Speaker 4: is kind of the current equivalent of being a rocket scientist,
Speaker 4: you know, I'm sort of working on this cutting edge
Speaker 4: of technology which is taking us to new frontiers of
Speaker 4: knowledge and exploration. And while it's not quite as dramatic
Speaker 4: as a rocket, when you start up one of these machines,
Speaker 4: it is to me incredibly inspiring. And every approach that
Speaker 4: we take, whether it's collaborating, you know, in a multidisciplinary sense,
Speaker 4: I collaborate very strongly with cancer researchers nowadays, or collaborating
Speaker 4: across different nations and different technical skills. I think really
Speaker 4: this type of research is sort of unique in a way,
Speaker 4: but it's also representative of the approach that I think
Speaker 4: has led us to so many successes, both you know,
Speaker 4: both in science but also in terms of improving our
Speaker 4: lives as people.
Speaker 3: I have a question about how you approach experiments in physics.
Speaker 3: When you're doing an experiment and you're getting results that
Speaker 3: are not at all what you expect to see, how
Speaker 3: do you prioritize exploring the options that what you expect
Speaker 3: to see is wrong versus there is something wrong with
Speaker 3: your method.
Speaker 4: I always err on the side of assuming I'm an idiot,
Speaker 4: so maybe just imposters in drome, But no, okay, this
Speaker 4: is kind of what I mean about ensuring you one
Speaker 4: hundred percent understand your apparatus. So typically when you start
Speaker 4: out an experiment, and I'm thinking here of just a
Speaker 4: small experiment that I built in the UK, and when
Speaker 4: we first started using it, we'd get all these like
Speaker 4: electrical signals that we just didn't understand, and so my
Speaker 4: assumption there was not that the fundamental thing that I
Speaker 4: was trying to study was wrong. My assumption almost always
Speaker 4: is to assume that I don't understand my experiment well enough,
Speaker 4: and to devise little tests and little questions and little
Speaker 4: experiments to test my understanding of the equipment and to
Speaker 4: test you know, I'll always pull it back to a
Speaker 4: test case where I'm like, Okay, I should one hundred
Speaker 4: percent know the outcome of doing this test, so then
Speaker 4: I run that test, and if that one is still failing,
Speaker 4: then I'm like, Okay, there's something wrong with the equipment.
Speaker 4: And maybe there's something wrong, or maybe I've dialed it
Speaker 4: in wrong, or I've got the wrong impedance matching, or
Speaker 4: I've got, you know, like something, something that I've failed
Speaker 4: to recognize is important in the experiment doing what I
Speaker 4: wanted to do. And I think that would be a
Speaker 4: familiar experience to almost every experiment, which is to go
Speaker 4: in with this overabundance of optimism that everything's going to
Speaker 4: work first time, and then slowly work your way through
Speaker 4: the many, many, many ways in which you were wrong
Speaker 4: until you really fully understand everything that's happening. And then
Speaker 4: if you're testing your theory or maybe there isn't a theory.
Speaker 4: Maybe you're just testing something that doesn't have a theory yet,
Speaker 4: and if then it's coming back and giving you a
Speaker 4: result that you don't expect, then you start to get
Speaker 4: those little you know, I'm getting shivers just saying it's ridiculous,
Speaker 4: isn't it. But like those little shivers which say, oh,
Speaker 4: this is something new, this is a knowledge gap, this
Speaker 4: is a potential to discover something that no one's ever
Speaker 4: seen before. And it's in that mode where you're both
Speaker 4: confident in your experiment that you can really ask the
Speaker 4: questions about the nature of reality. And in that moment,
Speaker 4: I think more often than not, you want to be
Speaker 4: wrong right. You want nature to be throwing a curveball
Speaker 4: at you. You want it to be something surprising, and
Speaker 4: those are I think those are the moments in which
Speaker 4: would be the closest that I think you would get
Speaker 4: to having sort of a Eureka moment or that moment
Speaker 4: I've seen something new for the very first time. And
Speaker 4: it's only by working your way through those smaller steps
Speaker 4: that you can get to that level of confidence. And
Speaker 4: I think a lot of people don't realize that that
Speaker 4: is very much the day to day role of an
Speaker 4: experimental scientist is working your way through these annoying things,
Speaker 4: and you have to learn to love that process, right,
Speaker 4: You have to learn to love the small bits of
Speaker 4: understanding and the small discoveries that come along the way.
Speaker 4: You know, maybe you've discovered a new way of arranging
Speaker 4: your apparatus that happens to give you, you know, ten times
Speaker 4: more signal than you had before, and that's really satisfying.
Speaker 4: And so I think experimental science for that reason, it
Speaker 4: sort of appeals to people who like to tinker. It
Speaker 4: appeals to the detail orientated mind. At the same time,
Speaker 4: it has to appeal to people who have that bigger vision,
Speaker 4: you know, who have that longer term time frame, Because
Speaker 4: if you expect to go into the lab every day
Speaker 4: and make one discovery every day, you're going to be
Speaker 4: solely disappointed. But if you can keep in mind the
Speaker 4: big picture and work toward that over and often it
Speaker 4: is years, you know, and keep that enthusiasm and keep
Speaker 4: that wonder that happens in the lab every day, I
Speaker 4: think that's the sort of personality type that fits experimental
Speaker 4: science very very well.
Speaker 3: There's a point about your book that I really love
Speaker 3: you in talking about how big projects like the large
Speaker 3: Hadron collidor you've talked about this today as well, are
Speaker 3: illustrative of deeper points about human collaboration. And I wonder if,
Speaker 3: in a way you even alluded to this earlier when
Speaker 3: you were talking about what types of experiments are easier
Speaker 3: to talk about in the setting like you know, our
Speaker 3: conversation today. I wonder if these big collaborative stories like
Speaker 3: the large Hadron collider are more difficult to fit in
Speaker 3: the shape of a compelling and memorable narrative than stories
Speaker 3: with a single protagonist. Obviously, a lot of the most
Speaker 3: inspiring and amazing stories in your book are about these
Speaker 3: huge megaprojects with these unthinkable amounts of coordination and collaboration.
Speaker 3: Are there tricks to telling those stories in a way
Speaker 3: that makes them work as stories? But it's still true
Speaker 3: to the reality.
Speaker 4: It was very difficult, Yes, So I will definitely acknowledge
Speaker 4: it is so much harder to write about enormous collaborations
Speaker 4: than it is to write about a few individuals. And
Speaker 4: I think in terms of the story, you know, the
Speaker 4: story arc or the narrative creation process. I had to
Speaker 4: find my own route through that, and so I was
Speaker 4: looking for things like, okay, well, you know, if I'm
Speaker 4: if I'm creating a sort of story arc, so you know,
Speaker 4: what would my crisis moment be, What would you know,
Speaker 4: what would a sort of pinnacle moment be. What is
Speaker 4: my like sort of inciting idea that sort of sets
Speaker 4: sets that story off on a journey. And you can
Speaker 4: find those things within the stories of the big experiments.
Speaker 4: It does make it harder to focus on individual, but
Speaker 4: I actually, in the end, especially for the large Hadron collider,
Speaker 4: I use myself as an example of a tiny, tiny
Speaker 4: individual within this enormous collaboration, and that worked for me
Speaker 4: partly because I actually didn't go on to continue in
Speaker 4: that collaboration. I worked in it as a student. I
Speaker 4: did this very very small project which people love to
Speaker 4: to recite the name of the project that I did,
Speaker 4: which was it was the design of a no hang on,
Speaker 4: I'm going to get it, I'm going to get it wrong.
Speaker 4: But it was the design of a monitoring system for
Speaker 4: the heating, sorry for the heaters of the cooling system
Speaker 4: of the inner detector of the Atlas experiment.
Speaker 3: See cooling system.
Speaker 4: Now the monitoring system, Yes, the monitoring system for the
Speaker 4: heaters of the cooling system. Okay, if you have a
Speaker 4: cooling system and you don't want it to all like
Speaker 4: clog up with condensation, right, so sometimes you need heaters
Speaker 4: on there to bring the temperature back up and stabilize it,
Speaker 4: like you need to be able to move the temperature
Speaker 4: in two directions. Anyway, So that was my crazy, you know,
Speaker 4: tidy little project that I did for three months when
Speaker 4: I was a summer student as an undergraduate working at CERNE.
Speaker 4: And it was illustrative though, of this idea that you know,
Speaker 4: I was this sort of tiny cog in this enormous machine.
Speaker 4: And I think the way I used that story was
Speaker 4: also to sort of saying I doubted that this machine
Speaker 4: could ever work, because if I was making this contribution
Speaker 4: and deep within my code was the ability to switch
Speaker 4: the whole machine off, then surely, you know, statistically this
Speaker 4: thing was never going to work. And so I was
Speaker 4: as surprise as everybody else. Well, I don't think the
Speaker 4: actual rest of the collaboration would have been surprised when
Speaker 4: it worked, but I was surprised from my experience when
Speaker 4: it worked as well as it did when they started
Speaker 4: the machine up. Of course, people who remember back in
Speaker 4: two thousand and eight. Will remember that it worked for
Speaker 4: about seven days before it blew itself up, and then
Speaker 4: they spent a year fixing it before it came back online.
Speaker 4: And I was at an event the other day where
Speaker 4: someone referred to the startup of the large hydron collider,
Speaker 4: in which they said about two thousand and eight, with
Speaker 4: a shake of the hand. You know, this is sort
Speaker 4: of you know this Italian style like wobble of the
Speaker 4: hand that means roughly they did that. They said it
Speaker 4: suddenly in about two thousand and eight, and it was
Speaker 4: all about that hand wobble of like, oh, that means
Speaker 4: the machine blew itself up and it had to be
Speaker 4: fixed for a year. But anyway, so I'm getting off
Speaker 4: the track onto the large hundred collider. But I think,
Speaker 4: I think, yes, it is much more difficult to write
Speaker 4: narratives about enormous collaborations. But I think that speaks to
Speaker 4: something a little deeper, is something which has come out
Speaker 4: of conversations with people now that we're studying even larger colliders.
Speaker 4: So the next one, potential next iteration is one hundred
Speaker 4: kilometers in circumference and will take about forty years to build,
Speaker 4: to design and build that's getting to the same lengths
Speaker 4: as or longer than a lot of careers in the field,
Speaker 4: and so I think we are running into and it's
Speaker 4: something that I've been talking to people about, a sort
Speaker 4: of two big, too long, too complex problem with these collaborations.
Speaker 4: And even though they I find them more inspiring in
Speaker 4: what they have been able to achieve. If I was
Speaker 4: given the choice again, now you know, I'm a student,
Speaker 4: I'm raring to go in this field, I'm really interested,
Speaker 4: what would I choose to work on, for saying, my
Speaker 4: PhD now at the age of early twenties, embarking on
Speaker 4: a PhD, which can be anywhere between about three and
Speaker 4: however many years, you know, seven eight years. For some people,
Speaker 4: it's a huge commitment and a huge chunk of your
Speaker 4: life at that age. And totally I hear stories of
Speaker 4: professors who are struggling to recruit students to projects for
Speaker 4: the sort of next mega colliders because they're like, well,
Speaker 4: there's not going to be any data to work with
Speaker 4: for forty years, Like how am I going to have a
Speaker 4: career in this Why would I commit three to seven
Speaker 4: years to something that might not even be built? And
Speaker 4: so I don't want to make out like there's a
Speaker 4: cris there's or a lack of people who are interested
Speaker 4: and very committed to this field. But I just hear
Speaker 4: inklings of dissatisfaction or sort of little little inklings of trouble,
Speaker 4: and I'm I'm curious about that, and I'm curious about
Speaker 4: how we're going to resolve that. And I guess there's
Speaker 4: two parts. Either we find a way to resolve that
Speaker 4: through the career structure and through having shorter projects alongside
Speaker 4: these big, long ones that you keep people motivated and
Speaker 4: keep everyone working, or we really have to think about
Speaker 4: are these projects too big? Should we really be focusing
Speaker 4: all our energy on technologies which can shrink down the
Speaker 4: size of future collided projects, which is very very difficult
Speaker 4: although they are in progress. And also just refocus back
Speaker 4: down on the sort of structure in which these collaborations work,
Speaker 4: because realistic, you've got groups of about ten to twenty
Speaker 4: people in a research group in a university. Those work
Speaker 4: on specific sub areas of the experiment, and then they
Speaker 4: all join together and eventually you get, you know, two
Speaker 4: thousand people. And so it's not that two thousand people
Speaker 4: are sort of a negalitarian, you know, flat structure who
Speaker 4: all somehow know each other and communicate. That would be
Speaker 4: absolutely wild. There is a substructure, and so I'm interested
Speaker 4: in how we can use that substructure that works very
Speaker 4: well in small, close knit groups who then go out
Speaker 4: and work with other groups around the world. Perhaps there's
Speaker 4: a way we can do that in the time domain
Speaker 4: as well. Right, So, perhaps there's a way of having
Speaker 4: more contained sections of projects, perhaps with applications, you know,
Speaker 4: that sort of keep people interested on that sort of
Speaker 4: you know, few year timescale that can drive things along.
Speaker 4: So maybe instead of in the future, instead of contributing
Speaker 4: to hardware or sitting in a control room, maybe you
Speaker 4: can cotributing to the societal applications of the spin offs
Speaker 4: of the work that you're doing, alongside developing the longer
Speaker 4: term curiosity driven part. That's just my idea. It's very
Speaker 4: much an unsolved thing. But I think if I was
Speaker 4: given the chance again, I would struggle to commit to
Speaker 4: a project that wasn't going to have data for forty years.
Speaker 4: So I do want to acknowledge that it's a very
Speaker 4: interesting time for young people to be entering the field.
Speaker 4: In that sense.
Speaker 3: Right at the end of the book, you offer a
Speaker 3: couple of big lessons that you think we need to
Speaker 3: embrace for the future of physics and collaborative research projects.
Speaker 3: Do you want to mention those before we sign off?
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 4: So, I think some of the things that I've learned
Speaker 4: through writing the book around collaboration and this curiosity driven
Speaker 4: research is that it is so important that we value it,
Speaker 4: that we value its impact in society, and that we
Speaker 4: create space for people to do this kind of research,
Speaker 4: not just space, but also it requires funding. And I
Speaker 4: know it sounds a little daddy to mix curiosity driven
Speaker 4: research and money, but in our society those two things
Speaker 4: are going to have to go hand in hand. So,
Speaker 4: you know, even the future, we want to be able
Speaker 4: to create collaborations so we can really get the best
Speaker 4: out of specialized skills that people have to the betterment
Speaker 4: of society. We need to really think about how we
Speaker 4: value things that don't set out with a goal in mind,
Speaker 4: and I think we need to center those and we
Speaker 4: need to really value the fact that somebody would commit
Speaker 4: their life and their career to something where they don't
Speaker 4: even know what the outcome is going to look like.
Speaker 4: We need to protect that with everything that we have
Speaker 4: because that is such a generative force in our society
Speaker 4: for good.
Speaker 3: Susie Shehei, thank you so much for talking today. It
Speaker 3: has been a privilege and a.
Speaker 4: Pleasure lovely to be here. Thanks Joy.
Speaker 3: All Right, well that's it for today. Thanks again to
Speaker 3: Susie Shehi for being so generous with their time. If
Speaker 3: you want to pick up a copy of the book,
Speaker 3: it is called The Matter of Everything, The Matter of Everything,
Speaker 3: and it's out in hardback, in ebook form and as
Speaker 3: an audiobook narrated by Susie herself. Stuff to Blow Your
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