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