Suzie Sheehy Quotes

[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.

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...

What I'm going to talk about today is the fascinating world, and I really think it's wonderful, of particle accelerators.

Now there's another one... that might not have an electric charge... The gold atom, yes. Can anyone suggest a way to get that gold atom into a particle accelerator? ...You can ionize it. Thank you. So to ionize a gold atom you can rip the electrons off or add more electrons on... Give it an electric charge, and then we can put it into a particle accelerator. So that's the kind of particles we need.

[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...

It's really hard to convey in a few minutes, how amazing it is that we know this about the universe, and the predictive power that it has... [T]hat is the reason why we really built the Large Hadron Collider.

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.

So that's 5 things you should never do with a particle accelerator. Thank you.

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?

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.

So my name's Suzie. I'm a physicist... an accelerator physicist, and I work at the University of Oxford. I run a research group there in... high intensity s... I... spend half my time at Harwell campus... I'm also a member of the , not the other ISIS, just to be clear.

In answer to some of the questions that we had a few years ago when the Large Hadron Collider started up... "Could it destroy the world?" ...The most convincing answer to me as to why it couldn't, is because we have particles in outer space from cosmic rays and things like that, at much much higher energies than we could ever dream of creating in the lab. And so far they haven't done anything catastrophic to us and we're perfectly fine. So in terms of just reaching a higher and higher energy... it doesn't really matter what we do in the lab. We should be safe on earth from these high energy particles.

It depends on which accelerator we're talking about, but let's consider the . ...It's minus 271 degrees. ...This is a picture of one of the 15m long s, one of the [beam] bending magnets in the machine... but it's extremely difficult to get your head in there. So... you wouldn't stick your head in the dipole. You'd stick it in somewhere easier... that wasn't cooled down to minus 271.

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.

So it sounded like a crazy question, but if you had a brain tumor you might very well want to stick your head in the beam of a particle accelerator.