Suzie Sheehy Quotes

I'll tell you very briefly how they work. ...The first thing we need is some ...s, or even atoms themselves perhaps.

So it's interesting, even though it seems like a stupid question to say what would happen if you stuck your head in it. It does actually present some interesting real problems in engineering, in actually designing these machines.

Four different types of particles: electrons, s, s and gold atoms. ...Can anyone suggest which one you can't put in a particle accelerator? ...A . Yep! Do you know why? Because it isn't charged. Thank you very much. ...[I]t doesn't have an .

The amazing thing about this collection of particles, which admittedly looks arbitrary until you learn it in more detail, is that you can take the entire description of every known particle and interaction, other than gravity, in the universe, and write it down on a mug.

The reason the Large Hadron Collider was built was... to... investigate the fundamental constituents of matter...

The interesting thing about radiation is it is naturally present in most of the things around us. ...How many bananas do you think you'd have to eat to get a dose of radiation that would make you sick? ...It's the in the bananas. ...A very small percentage of the potassium is naturally radioactive, but you... have to eat five million... in one sitting to get sick...

If you use protons instead you can... get a much better defined distribution of the dose and this is really a fantastic treatment. It is more expensive than x-ray radiotherapy, but based on the basic physics of how a beam reacts inside... the body, or inside tissue... it's a fantastic treatment, and one that we should look forward to using in the future.

Try something for me. ...Hold [the tube] halfway down. [Half of the lamp goes out] ...You're grounding any of the electrons which are... moving inside there...

That's only one particle accelerator. There are actually over 26,000 of them in the world.

I'd just like to leave you with my advice in choosing your career... [F]ind something that makes you sit up and think, "This is really important" or "This is fascinating" or "This is what I'm passionate about" and it can be in any area... Something like space might get you, of climate change... you might really like astronomy, or you might be more passionate about world hunger, injustices in the world, the availability of water, energy, health, aging, anything like that. Think about it, and do something about it. That's all, really, you need to do, and make a career out of doing something about it. Because if you do something that you're passionate about, and you love... You're not even going to feel like you're going to work each day. ...You're just going to feel like you're getting up and you're doing what it is that you're passionate about...

So the final thing that you probably shouldn't do with a particle accelerator is: You probably shouldn't destroy the Earth with it. ...People seem to think that when we design new massive particle accelerators that are going to have particles that are huge energies that we've never created before in the lab, that somehow... we just built it for the lulls, and then we're going to destroy the earth with it, and that we haven't quite thought it through, and that we're not quite sure what we're doing... If you're at all concerned, please go to HasTheLargeHadronColliderDestroyedTheWorldYet.com and... you can tell me what you find there.

In the days of Cockroft and Walton, when they were first developing particle accelerators they didn't know about the dangers of radiation, and so one of the ways that they counted the events... what was happening in their experiments, was... to sit... under the beam. The beam would come down, some nuclear reaction would happen, and... his fluorescent screen... would light up every time what they were looking for happened... [T]hey would sit there and count each time it lit up, sitting underneath the beam, being irradiated. ...[T]hese people lived relatively healthy lives, and Cockroft and Walton got a for work, which doesn't justify it, but there have been people who have stuck their heads in particle accelerators.

So why was that particular one built? ...I don't have time to give you a crash course in particle physics. Are there any particle physicist in the room..? No, I'm safe. It's fine, okay. No, I used to be one, and then I switched fields.

Number three. Don't use a particle accelerator as a death ray. When I was putting together this lecture I asked... my very esteemed colleagues, "Has anyone ever tried to develop an accelerator as a weapon?" And they said, "Oh mumble, mumble cold war, space, Star Wars something or other... No" That was their conclusion... They were wrong.

So we still use a few cyclotrons, but most of the machines that people talk about, especially in the media, are a different type of machine which we call a , and we have two of these types of machines at the Rutherford lab at Harwell. One is the ISIS Neutron Source that I'm associated with, and there's also the ...