Suzie Sheehy Quotes

[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...

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.

But they did, in fact. One of the interesting things I discovered, they did put a particle accelerator in space, which I think is fantastic.

[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 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.

So we can't use it as a weapon of mass destruction. This is another one... that someone told me that you shouldn't do with a particle accelerator... [Y]ou shouldn't eat it, which is true.

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.

They developed this machine which was only about this big [~1 meter] and they used ultra-lightweight materials, and it only weighed about 50 kg. So compare that with a 27 kilometer long ring. ...It was only low energy but they... sent it up in a rocket and they actually tested it in space and brought it back down... and they tested it again on earth, and it still worked, which I think is an incredible feat of engineering... [P]eople really haven't heard of this experiment... It's called the BEAR (Beam Experiments Aboard a Rocket) project in 1989, and I have a contact who worked on it...

That thing... is radioactive. They're called thoriated rods, and they're used in welding. You can... just buy them.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 .

Physics will always be, at its core, about understanding our place in the Universe...