Suzie Sheehy Quotes

[T]his is called the Standard Model Lagrangian, that curly <math>\mathcal{L}</math> at the start is for Lagrangian... and there's lots of different components of that. Now if I write it out in full, I get what is the most egotistical physics teacher in the entire world. So if I wrote it out in full... really you don't need to read it, I promise, all of the different terms in that equation describe an interaction between different types of particles and force carriers...

So there's some really interesting applications of accelerators, way outside of the realm of particle physics, that we're starting to get a handle on.

Well they quickly realized that this was crazy, and that they were never going to be able to actually make a weapon out of one of these machines. Mostly for the reasons that I explained before. Even if you had the Large Hadron Collider in space, I have no idea how you'd get it up there, but even if you did, it would... be difficult to do damage with it. Mostly because beams would just go through things and out the other side.

So that's one example of how a wave can be used to accelerate particles, but... I brought along some scale model protons [large beach balls] and I thought what I'd get you to do is for you guys to be the wave and the scale model protons are going to accelerate across the wave [beach balls moved by audience hand wave]... Eleven-year-olds do this really well, I'm warning you. You've got competition.

If you look at a real one... the ISIS synchrotron. There are 10 sections that look almost identical... and you have these big yellow magnets... They're... s. They bend the beam around, and then there's two other main components. There are ... and... a radiofrequency cavity. Now this is basically a big box like your microwave, into which we pump electromagnetic waves, and this sets up a inside there, and you have to time the voltage of that standing wave with the passage of the particles in order to get them to accelerate.

So when we're thinking about radiation and radioactivity, it is worth keeping in mind that just the fact that something is radioactive does not means it's harmful...

[I]nside the atom there are only... three different types of particles, which are the up and s, they're the constituents of s and s inside the atom, and the electron. Everything else there plays very little role in our day-to-day lives. But over about the last century we've discovered that all of these particles fit together in a neat theory that describes our universe to something like 9 or 10 decimal places. It is an incredible amount of discovery and work that's gone into it, and I cannot do it justice in... two minutes. But the latest piece that we've discovered using the Large Hadron Collider, and one of the reasons, but not the only reason that it was built, was to discover... the Higgs boson.

This thing... is a , and it will tell us whether these things are radioactive. ...There is something coming off [clicking noise from the thoriated rods] there. Just to demonstrate that the bananas are really only mildly radioactive, we can't pick them up with a Geiger counter. It's really is very mild.

Over the last century the experiments... have gone from single-room setups led by one person to the largest machines on Earth. The era of "Big Science," which began in the 1950s... now... involve collaborations of over a hundred countries and tens of thousands of scientists. ...[N]o individual country can achieve these feats alone.

A lot of s' food is irradiated before they send it up so that they... aren't going to get sick from it.

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

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.

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 .

And if you go up and up and up and up, we understand how the different forces in the universe work, from electromagnetism to the strong and weak nuclear force, and then finally right at the top we get to this Higgs thing, which is the theory behind why all of the other particles in the Standard Model have a .

Has anyone heard of a particle accelerator other than the Large Hadron Collider? ...We actually have two at Harwell... If you were pushed, could you give a back of the envelope explanation of how a particle accelerator works?