Suzie Sheehy Quotes

Number three. Don't use a particle accelerator as a death ray. When I was putting together this lecture I asked... my very esteemed colleagues, "Has anyone ever tried to develop an accelerator as a weapon?" And they said, "Oh mumble, mumble cold war, space, Star Wars something or other... No" That was their conclusion... They were wrong.

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.

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.

[T]he way that we've learned all of this stuff about the universe is by taking the particles... smashing them into each other, and literally seeing what comes out.

[I]f you take Einstein's equation E=mc², E is energy, m is the mass and c is 299,792,458 meters per second, so that squared, I'd have to get to tell me what that is, but that's a very big number. So it takes an enormous amount of energy to create even a tiny tiny amount of matter. So that's why, over the years, our machines have gotten bigger and bigger and bigger, and reached up to higher and higher energies in order to create particles of higher and higher masses. Now that might seem slightly counterintuitive, but if we look down at the low energy scale, we get our... everyday objects, and in fact up here at sort of 10 MeV, which is like a sort of everyday energy scale, are the up and s where our s and s are created from. And if we go up in energy scale, we slowly... over time discovered all these other types of s and s, and all these other things that seem to play no role in our everyday lives.

[Y]ou may have seen... when the LHC was in the news, diagrams that look a little bit like this. These are called s after the famous physicist, Richard Feynman... [W]hat... most of my colleagues in particle physics do, is they take this [full Standard Model] equation, they figure out which particle's interacting and how: what's coming in, what coming out. They do twenty-one pages of calculations, and they come out with a number that is the probability of that interaction happening... [D]epending on which particles go in, you choose a different term that corresponds to those, and which particle comes out, you choose a different term that corresponds to those. Turn the handle and you get your result out the other end. I just taught you quantum field theory in about 2 seconds.

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.

The interesting thing about radiation is it is naturally present in most of the things around us. ...How many bananas do you think you'd have to eat to get a dose of radiation that would make you sick? ...It's the in the bananas. ...A very small percentage of the potassium is naturally radioactive, but you... have to eat five million... in one sitting to get sick...

So my number two thing you probably shouldn't do with a particle accelerator. You probably shouldn't put your head in the beam... On this one I want to have... a vote... What might kill you first? ...Would your head freeze because of the ? It's at minus 271 degrees <nowiki>[</nowiki>Celsius] in some accelerators... take the Large Hadron Collider for example. There the magnets are pretty cold, or would the heat from the beam make your head explode, or would your head explode from the , or would you die from the dose? ...I want a show of hands for which one you think would get you first.

So what about the heat from the beam? Well this is a challenge... [I]t's actually incredibly difficult to stop the beam, and if you put your head in front of the beam... it would actually go straight through and out the other side. In fact it has enough energy to go through your head and out the other side about 100,000 times before it loses all it's energy... [T]hat's actually one of the issues they had to deal with when designing the machine, is how do you stop the beam... [W]e want to stop it occasionally, intentionally...