Suzie Sheehy Quotes

I have a demonstration... which is the simplest particle accelerator I could make.... in a giant salad bowl. ...[W]hen it goes over the charged strip it picks up the same charge and it gets repelled ...then it hits the grounded strip and it dumps all of that charge, but it keeps its momentum, it keeps rolling around ...So every time it goes over one of those four [repelling] strips ....it gets a kick, or gets accelerated and it gains energy again and again. ...In this demonstration, the ball has to change charge, and fundamental particles don't change charge, so in this case my voltage in constant and the ...[ball] changes charge, in a real accelerator we have a constant charged particle, and that means we have to change the voltage.

So I'm tasking you with the job. When you're older and one of these machines starts up, and people start going, "It's going to destroy the earth!" That you think uh-huh, I've heard this before. It's not really going to happen.

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.

What could you do... if you took particle accelerators, and you made them really powerful... [T]his is something that I work on, is taking proton accelerators of relatively low energy, but putting more and more particles in, and getting a really high beam power...

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

In physics I use this energy range of s which means the energy an electron would gain if I put it through a potential of 1 . So MeV is million electronvolts. And that's the scale of that... [cyclotron] they're standing next to...

So we can't use it as a weapon. ...No deployed weapon has ever used this technology.

Accelerator physicists constantly discover new ways of creating beams to help learn... about particle physics. ...[T]he nearest hospital almost certainly houses a particle accelerator. ...We build particle accelerators to study viruses, chocolate and ancient scrolls.

The Standard Model of particle physics classifies all known particles in nature and the forces through which they interact. ...[O]ur current version came about in the 1970s. This theory is an absolute triumph: it is mathematically elegant and unbelievably precise, yet it fits on the side of a mug.

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 ...

Suddenly, nothing else mattered. I wanted to know... about gravity and particles and and relativity. About stars and atoms and light and energy. Above all, I wanted to know how it was all connected and how I was connected to it. ...[I]t mattered to me as a human ...if I managed it even a little bit, I'd not have wasted this little blip of time as a conscious being. I decided to become a physicist.

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.

[D]on't be afraid to challenge yourself. Don't shy off doing something just because you think that it's hard. It's when we're doing something hard that we really make a difference. So dig deep and don't be afraid to dream.

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.

[Y]ou can have two... main types of radiation, which are ionizing, or non-ionizing.