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...

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.

So what is ? It's energy in the form of moving particles or waves, emitted by an atom or another body as it changes from one energy state to another. That's the official definition.

What I'm going to do is suck out all of the air out of this container and see what happens to marshmallow man, or indeed, what might happen to our pet bunny rabbit in a particle accelerator. ...Oh my gosh it's huge! That's amazing! Sorry, we haven't tested this. I didn't realize it was going to be this good. ...That's probably what would happen to your little bunny rabbit, but in a slightly more horrific fashion.

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.

Our view of the smallest constituents in nature has changed rapidly in the last 120 years... Some way into the twentieth century this work became known as "high-energy physics,"... Today the study of all the many particles and how they formed, behave and transform is simply called particle physics.

Building up charge, actually building up , is the key to giving particles energy in a particle accelerator. ...Now some of the first particle accelerators were actually genuinely using this mechanism of having a belt and some rollers, and building up lots of voltage. They were called Van de Graaff accelerators. They still exist. I've worked on one... If they're the same charge, which get repelled, and there's force there, they're pushed away and they gain some energy... [I]n the case of an accelerator we'll get our particles... going faster and faster and faster toward the speed of light.

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.

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...

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.

What about the ? ...People have done studies in outer space of astronauts and how long they could survive in the vacuum... That information say that you can survive in outer space with your spacesuit open for about ten seconds before you're ripped apart by the vacuum. So I don't think that's going to get you first.

Now it's not obvious to most people how this acceleration mechanism of using a wave to accelerate particles actually works. So I have a little demonstration... of an everyday example where I can use a wave to accelerate some particles. This is just an ordinary fluorescent tube that you have in the ceiling... Over here I have a plasma ball which has a 30 kHz oscillating AC voltage supply. So there's a voltage, it's a couple of kilovolts that's going up and down, up and down, up and down in the center of that thing, 30,000 times a second. And because of that, out of the plasma ball... comes an electromagnetic wave that's traveling... through space. So move towards the plasma ball and point the fluorescent tube toward the plasma ball. [It lights up] ...So actually if you move it away, notice that it's still on. Now a lot of people show this demonstration with the fluorescent tube touching the plasma ball and say that it's something about completing a circuit... It's not. It's the electromagnetic wave that's coming out... which is traveling through the fluorescent tube, exciting the electrons inside. ...you know how a fluorescent tube works.

Now is the stuff that does us damage, and there's three... types... called alpha, beta and gamma radiation. ...Alpha radiation won't go through your hand, beta radiation won't go through a piece of aluminum [a few millimeters thick] and gamma radiation is penetrating and won't go through a big piece of .

This... is only one in the world... there are actually about 35,000 of them...

[S]ometimes some of our craziest ideas, and I've been through some pretty crazy ideas of things that you could do with a particle accelerator here... [S]ometimes they turn out to be surprisingly good ones if you do them in the right way, and these machines are not just useful for particle physics. They're useful for all sorts of other things like cancer treatment, like killing bacteria in food, and other things I haven't discussed like carbon dating, and imaging down to the atomic scale, and all sorts of other things...