From the Vault: The Matter of Everything, with Suzie Sheehy

In this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Joe chats with physicist Suzie Sheehy, author of "The Matter of Everything: How Curiosity, Physics, and Improbable Experiments Changed the World." (originally published 08/08/2023)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Yesterday was
a holiday, so we didn't have time to put together
a brand new episode for today, so we're going into
the vault. This is going to be The Matter of
Everything with Susie she This is an interview that Joe
conducted with the author of the Matter of Everything, How Curiosity,
Physics and Improbable Experiments Changed the World. This was originally

(00:29):
published eight eight, twenty twenty three. Let's dive right in.

Speaker 2 (00:37):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 3 (00:47):
Hello, and welcome to the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast.
My name is Joe McCormick. My regular co host Robert
Lamb is not with me today, but he'll be joining
me again the next time. Today's episode is going to
be an interview. This is a conversation I had with
the accelerator physicist and author Suzie Sheehy about her recent
book The Matter of Everything, How Curiosity, Physics and Improbable

(01:11):
Experiments Changed the World. Susie's publisher sent us a copy
of this book for review, and I really loved it.
So it's a history of modern physics experiments from Runken's
cathode ray tube and the discovery of X rays all
the way up to the Large Hadron Collider and beyond.
And what makes this book really special in my opinion,
is that it focuses not just on theoretical advancements, but

(01:34):
on the labor of designing and building experiments to test
those new ideas. And because it illuminates so much about
the experimental apparatus behind the progress of science, I think
this book has a lot of interesting things to say,
not just about the history of our quest to understand
matter and energy, but about epistemology and critical thinking and

(01:57):
work to read from her author bio. Susie Shehe is
a physicist, science communicator and academic who divides her time
between her research groups at the University of Oxford and
the University of Melbourne. Her research addresses both curiosity driven
and applied areas, and is currently focused on developing new

(02:18):
particle accelerators for applications in medicine. Again, the book is
called The Matter of Everything, and I guess that does
it for the introduction. Here is my interview with Susie Shehe.
Susie Shehey, welcome to the podcast.

Speaker 4 (02:33):
Thanks Joan, nice to be here.

Speaker 3 (02:35):
So I wanted to start off talking about how I
think a lot of the histories of physics that I've
read focused more on the theoretical side, like what led
to the insights theoretical physicists had, how they dreamed up
their models, and things like that. I really loved that
this book was intensely focused on the experimental component of physics,

(02:56):
and there was a lot of focus on the details
of the experiments, how they did it, and understanding experiments
as human projects operating under constraints. What kind of insights
do you think are revealed by looking at the history
of particle physics through the experimental lens, in particular, especially
things that you might miss if you only talk about

(03:19):
physics as a sort of history of ideas.

Speaker 4 (03:22):
Yeah, you phrased that so beautifully in there by the way,
the importance of experiments. So I'm an experimental physicist, right.
So one of the things that I observed when I
sort of started on the journey of writing this book
was that almost every other comparable book was written by

(03:42):
theoretical physicist, and so you'd get these stories where you
get this wonderful insight of say Einstein or one of
the key theoretical physicists of the age, and it was
like it was almost like they came to these insights
purely from their own personal genius, right, And this was

(04:03):
the story of physics that I was taught pretty much
when I did at university as well, but it was
also the story that comes across in these books. And
I don't know whether this is just like an egotistical
aggrandizing thing that people do. Certainly these people are very
very smart, right, but they're not islands. And I think
that's one of the key insights that you get from
taking a different approach to looking at the history and

(04:26):
looking more at the experiments and more at the wider
view of how physics progresses. And I think any theoretical
physicist today would all and hopefully also though is historically
would admit that, you know, their work is nothing without
the work of the experimentalists, because at the end of
the day, physics is a subject which is trying to
describe the universe, our actual universe, not just some theoretical,

(04:50):
mathematical universe that doesn't really exist. And so the only
way to meet those two things in the middle is
through experiment. You have to actually get out there and
and test nature. But that's where a lot of people,
I think, naively think that we just we know what
we're doing with that that we just we can go

(05:10):
out there and build an experiment and test or find
this thing, and that once the theorist predicts it, that
it's a straightforward journey. So that's I think the next
sort of key insight there is that it is not
a straightforward journey to discover and uncover the nature of
our universe, especially on these tiny scales that we're looking
at that are so much smaller than what we can

(05:32):
see with our own eyes. And so when you delve
into that, then as you say, there's this detailed development
of how experiments actually work, whether that's electronically, whether that's
because they require two thousand people with different expertise to
actually put them together, and also just that co development
of technology and instrumentation along with the development of ideas

(05:56):
and insights about the universe, and it really is sort
of a logistic development. So there's I think a few
things there about throwing out the long genius stereotype, managing
to recognize how important it is that we actually interact
in the real world and do experiments, and then just
the unpredictable nature of doing those experiments at all.

Speaker 3 (06:18):
You mentioned in the book that some people think that
Derac's equation is the most beautiful equation in all of physics.
I'm sure that people who have a lot of math
and physics knowledge would consider that subjective. But it made
me curious about the different ways that instruments within science
can be perceived not only as useful or accurate, but

(06:39):
sometimes esthetically beautiful. So I was wondering about the other
side of that. As an experimentalist, Do you have an
opinion on what is the most beautiful experiment in all
of physics? Or do you have at least a few candidates?

Speaker 4 (06:53):
Oh that's nice. Yeah, I think I definitely appreciate the
beauty of a well designed experiment that can sort of
cut through all the background noise and find the thing
that they're looking for. But I'd say I appreciate the
beauty of an experiment in multiple dimensions though, right, so
you can. I can appreciate the beauty of an experiment

(07:16):
which serendipitously found something that it didn't expect, as well
as appreciating, you know, the sort of really well designed,
very specific experiment. But now you're putting me on the
spot if you asked me what my favorite experiment was,
I mean, in the book, I really focus on twelve
key experiments that I chose from what could have been
thousands honestly, and focused on how those had contributed to

(07:42):
our knowledge of particle physics over about the last one
hundred and twenty years. And I think it's easier probably
for me to choose a favorite from the earlier ones
of those because they're smaller, it's easier to understand all
the different parts of the experiment. And so in that sense,
in a beauty and esthetic appreciation sense, I think I'm

(08:03):
going to say the cloud chamber. And this was developed
in the early nineteen hundreds by a physicist named CITR.
Wilson Charles Wilson, whose first love was actually meteorology, but
he was working in the Cavendis Lab in Cambridge in
the UK, alongside all the people doing all the early
work in radioactivity, so he was very well versed in

(08:24):
radioactivity and those ideas. But he invented this chamber originally
to try and study clouds and the interaction of light
and electricity in the atmosphere, and then he later realized
when someone held an X ray tube, or he and
a colleague held next ray tube to the side of
it that he could see the passage of radiation through

(08:46):
this chamber, which had a sort of in his case
water vapor and nowadays we use alcohol vapors, and these
little trails would form, like little tracks of cloud as
the radiation went through and left a little bit of
energy inside the chamber. And I find this beautiful because
it's really the first time as a species that we

(09:06):
get to visualize radiation. We get to visualize this thing
which is otherwise extremely uh you know, abstract and difficult
to understand, and now we're seeing its effects almost in
real time, so you can photograph as particles pass through,
and then we get and I think the beauty comes

(09:27):
in because it's this lovely interaction between our own capacities
as humans and the development of a new instrumentation. Because
then you can take you can leave these chambers up
on mountains, you can take photographs of the interactions there,
and from that we discover lots of new things, including
we discover antimatter for the first time. So the positron

(09:48):
is the opposite version of the electron, and when they
come together, they annihilate, but they can also be produced
in pairs electron positron pairs, And there were positrons detected
by a guy called Karl Anderson in the US, and
he discovered them in his experiments before he'd read about

(10:08):
Direct's beautiful equation. I'm coming back to the equation again now.
He actually wasn't aware of Dirac's work, which was published
in nineteen twenty nine, but in nineteen thirty two he'd
built this enormous chamber with this huge magnet around it
and legged it up a mountain and discovered this type
of anti matter. And I find that really beautiful because
then he's literally able to use our internal sort of

(10:32):
track recognition, you know, our patent finding system, our brain
to look at the photographs and actually see that there's
something new there. And there were other particles discovered later
as well, the new one being a key one, which
is a heavy version of an electron, and it was
really the instrument of choice for many many years in
the field, and it came from a meteorologist. So I

(10:53):
don't know, there's something in that story for me which
is just beautiful about how we can use our creativity
sort of reuse of ideas in adjacent fields to really
make amazing discoveries.

Speaker 3 (11:06):
Yeah. I love that example too, And there's a kind
of beauty and a kind of lightness and elegance to
it that in a way seems contrasted by other experiments
you described that are also incredibly important and wonderful stories
to understand, Like one that stands sort of opposite it
in my mind is the story of Ernest Lawrence's team

(11:29):
and their cyclotron. And this chapter struck me as interesting
in part because I think this is the one where
you illuminate a history of what struck me as interesting
mistakes like you mentioned a faulty reading from an accelerator
experiment due to I think it was like deuteron coding
on target elements. Please correct me if I'm getting this wrong.

(11:50):
And also an incident where they accidentally made the whole
lab radioactive without realizing it, which interfered with their measurements
on a Geiger counter like device. So what is the
role of error and making a mess in scientific experiments?

Speaker 4 (12:07):
Do you know? I've been thinking about this more since
writing the book, and I think we don't. I think
we don't acknowledge the role of error and failure enough
in science, in fact, we try and cover it up.
It's a huge there's a huge issue in fact with
failed experiments not being published, and in some fields like medicine,
that's that's a huge issue. Actually in physics it's less

(12:28):
of an issue, but it still happens. But Ernest Lawrence's
example of the cycloton is a fantastic example where by
sort of realizing their mistakes and their errors, they really
made progress in their understanding. So, as you say, they
developed this particle accelerator of this circular machine, and then
over time they realize that they're not seeing the results

(12:50):
that they think they should be seeing because, for example,
in one in one situation, basically everything could become radioactive,
and so all of their measurement devices were just picking
up the background radiation and not the radiation they were
trying to look for. But that helped them understand what
was happening in the machine as it was accelerating, and
they missed a number of key discoveries that were made

(13:11):
by other research groups around the world, but they didn't
mind too much. And Lawrence sort of had this mindset
which is relevant to the question of errors and failures,
which is. You know, he sort of would like to
say there's research enough for everyone, or there's discovery enough
for everyone, and so he was this big believer that
he was quite quite a futurist, I guess because at

(13:31):
the start of his career he was I think late
twenties early thirties when he first invented the cyclotron, and
he invented it because he couldn't see a path of
the existing technology to the end of his career even
you know, he was sort of looking thirty years in
the future, going, well, these technologies are just they're going
to be outdated by the time I get to that point,

(13:52):
So I'm going to have to invent something new to
give myself, you know, a path of growth through my career.
And boy did he get it, you know, he really
The cycloton was an incredible invention and they're still built
today in hospitals to generate radioisotopes for medical procedures, which
is very, very useful. But obviously along the way he
could be perceived at having failed to make key discoveries

(14:15):
in physics. So I think induced radioactivity was one of
the ones that he missed actually, and was found by
Julio and Curri in France. That's Marie Carey's daughter, Irene Kiri.
So I've been thinking about this since writing the book,
and I think I'd like to make the analogy with

(14:37):
in the arts. Right, So if you if you have
a creative practice in the arts, failure is an error.
It's just an inherent part of it. And it's also
very much acknowledged that by failing or making an error,
you may just stumble upon something new, a new way
of doing something, a new invention. I'm even thinking in
the culinary world, you know. I know of a chef

(14:59):
who who now runs a three Michelin starred restaurant in
the UK, and one day he accidentally dropped hot coal
into a vat of cooking oil and so they later,
you know, decided to taste it and see how it tasted,
and it tasted amazing, and he uses it in his
signature dishes in a three Michelin starred restaurant now. And

(15:20):
I love those stories of where errors lead you to
new things and new ideas. And I do think in
science we shy away a little bit from that, or
we like to sort of cover it up and then
we publish a paper that says, the story was a
very linear one, and you know, we made all these discoveries,
and in digging into the history of these experiments, which

(15:41):
were so critical in understanding particle physics, I did discover
that there was probably more failure than even I expected.
And as an experimentalist myself, I've just come to accept
that I often don't fully know what I'm doing because
no one has ever tried to do it before. And
sometimes I'm going to try things and they're going to fail.

(16:02):
And there's a constant process in my lab with my
students and staff of sort of openly talking about this
right in it, you know, being candid about it and
sort of being like that's all right, you know, like
it's okay that it failed. You didn't know what you
were doing because nobody knew what they were doing. But
for example, you know, you might consider an earlier experiment

(16:23):
in the book by William Rodkin, who discovered X rays,
and he discovered them because a sort of painted fluorescent
screen across his lab was glowing when he had a tube,
a cathoedray tube on in his lab, and he noticed
the glow and he decided to investigate it. Now we
often refer to that as serendipitous, but depending on your perspective,

(16:46):
you might consider it to be an error. You know,
you probably shouldn't have had the wrong detector, you know,
sort of out in the lab at the time. The
other person that comes to mind is Robert Milliken, who
did twelve years worth of experiments trying to measure what's
called the photoelectric effect, which is the electrical current that
flows when you shine light on particular metals. And this

(17:10):
is an interesting one where along the way, the early
phases of quantum mechanics had come around, and Einstein in
particular had come out with this equation which predicted what
should happen when you shine this light onto different metals.
And the upshot of Einstein's theory was really abhorrent to
the experimentalist. To Robert Milliken, he called it the reckless hypothesis,

(17:32):
and that's because this hypothesis implied that light would be
acting more like a particle than like a wave in
this experiment. And so he set out to prove Einstein wrong,
spent twelve years in the lab trying to do it,
and all he did was pre Einstein right to a
better precision than anyone had before. So again you might think,

(17:52):
and he even thought that he was failing, right, He
thought he was failing as an experimentalist. He was really
struggling whether he had to build all his own equipment
from scratch. And then at the end of twelve years
he sort of comes out with this result, which I
think even when he published it he still didn't fully believe,
but he was able to sort of say, well, it
is consistent with Einstein's prediction. And then later on about

(18:16):
another ten years later, he was awarded the Nobel Prize
for that and another famous experiment that he did about
the charge on the electron, and he changes his tune.
And I found this fascinating that, you know, this very
fallible nature of the experimentalist, of sort of thinking one
thing is going to happen and holding this bias that
you know, no, nature can't possibly work that way. It's ridiculous.

(18:39):
It's preposterous that a particle could be a wave. You know, sorry,
a light could be a wave and a particle. And
then he gets through his Nobel Prize speech or lecture
and then he's saying, you know, however, many years ago,
when I set out to demonstrate Einstein's photoelectric theory. So's

(19:01):
he's making out like him meant to do it all along,
and I was I was shocked. I was like, did
someone transcribe that incorrectly? I don't think so. And so
so it turns out that, you know, I think his
bias against it was what it gave him this force,
this will power to persist at his experiment for twelve

(19:25):
years because he was just like, emotionally, he was just like,
this cannot be right, this cannot be right. And you know,
you would you would say that he failed in that
enterprise because he was wrong, and I Stein was right.
But this is I think this is how science progresses,
and it's an important part of how science progresses is that, yes,

(19:47):
we're all human, we're all you know, we're coming with
our biases, we're very fallible. But isn't it amazing that
we can then, you know, use the scientific process and
apply you know, a sort of apply things to that
that process to try and UnBias ourselves from the results
and come out with the knowledge that is, you know,

(20:08):
sort of accurate, regardless of the fact that you didn't
believe it going into doing the experiment. I think that's
actually a pretty amazing thing that we can do.

Speaker 3 (20:15):
And like the culture of experiment is the constraint on that. Yes, yeah, well,
regarding ideas that are wrong but persistent. One of my
favorite characters in the book is Ernest Rutherford, and there's

(20:38):
a part where you quote Ernest Rutherford saying that he
was originally brought up to think of the adam as.
I think the quote is a nice hard fellow red
or gray in color, according to your taste, and that
struck me as very funny. But then you also mentioned
in a footnote that even many physicists still, despite knowing better,

(20:59):
thing of sub atomic particles and atoms as little balls.
How do you visualize sub atomic particles or do you
at all? And is there a better way we should
try to picture this scale of matter in the mind's
eye or is it pointless to even try?

Speaker 4 (21:18):
So I'm going to sheepishly admit that like all the
other physicists I've asked, we don't want to admit it.
But because the first time we were ever introduced to
the concept of atoms and particles, they were little hard spheres.
When you say protons and neutrons and electrons and the atom,
I have. I have a terrible picture in my head

(21:41):
that's I know is completely wrong, and yet it persists.
You know, I have this this, Yeah, I have little
hard spheres in my mind, just like Rutherford did. And
I mean this is a This is a huge disservice
that we do ourselves, I think, by persisting to describe
in this way. But here's here's I think a key

(22:01):
point about the models that we have in our heads,
and I will answer the question about how better to
visualize it in a moment. Physics and all the natural
sciences really are sciences of different scales, and all the
models that we have and all the theories that we
have apply on different scales. So if you're a chemist
or a biologist, it's well, other than some realms of chemistry,

(22:23):
it's probably okay for you to visualize atoms and particles
as little heart spheres. Because the models that predict the
behavior which you're interested in on the scale that you're
interested in, which is now much more macroscopic than microscopic.
You know, it works perfectly fine, it can sort of
approximate it. And quantum mechanics, though, is obviously the science

(22:46):
when we get down to that very very small level,
and we've realized that it no longer works in the
same analogous way to say, billiard balls on a billiard table,
and it works in a very different way. Everything is
much more probabilistic. Nothing is as certain. We can't know
things like the position and the momentum at the same

(23:08):
time precisely, so everything becomes a little fuzzier. If I
were to try and encourage you to properly visualize an atom,
first of all, you know, the central nucleus of an
atom is extremely dense and extremely small compared to the
outer side of the atom. And Rutherford had another beautiful

(23:28):
analogy for this, which is that if the electrons, which
now you're considering in your head, the electrons to be
kind of a wave or a sphere or a sort
of much more, you know, much less like a little
hard dot and much more like a probability cloud, that
cloud would be at the walls of a cathedral. And

(23:52):
if that was the size of a cathedral, then the
nucleus in the center would be the size of a
fly or a pee in the middle of the cathedral. So,
first of all, the scales inside the atom are very
different to the pictures that we look at when we're
taught this kind of science, because you just can't fit
those scales on a page and have them be sensible, right,
so we condense everything down. So first of all, for

(24:15):
most of us, the scales of what things look like
inside the atom are kind of wrong. And this was
also something that really blew the minds of even people
like artists like Vasily Kandinski was really affected by this
idea that the atom is mostly empty space. It really
shifted his perception on what nature was made of, because

(24:36):
suddenly everything around us that seemed solid is made of
almost nothing, and it's purely the forces between these sort
of ephemeral objects which are creating our experience of everything
around us. Which back in twenty eighteen, I give a
Tetec city talk and people have reflected back to me
that the moment when they got shivers was when I
said that you're not even touching the chair beneath you,

(24:59):
you ever so slightly above it, And it's just the
forces between the electrons in the chair and the electrons
in your body opposing each other that makes you feel
like you're in contact with the chair, but you're never
The particles are never actually physically in contact with each other.
It's just the electromagnetic force and gravity. First of all,
that is a different way to view it. The scale

(25:22):
is a different way to view it. And then not
just the not just the electrons a wave like, but
also those fundamental particles at the center, the protons and
neutrons have constituent quarks. And even then, you know, we
say that there's two types of quarks up and down
quarks inside the protons and neutrons, but there's really a
whole lot more so. It's kind of like that Nora's box.

(25:45):
It's like if you go down further, you open it
up and you're like, oh, there's all this other mess
in there as well. And it depends how had I
look at, what energy scale I look at, And it's
just you know, so I like to imagine the nucleus
as sort of as a you know, a group of
protons and neutrons. But then if I try and visualize

(26:06):
opening up those protons and neutrons, that's where even my
brain goes, Nope, nope, I cannot do that. That's too comfixt.

Speaker 3 (26:14):
So you give a bunch of examples in the Book
of Discoveries in the history of particle physics that were
thought by some to be pure intellectual curiosities with no
practical use, only to later become very important in broader civilization.
Maybe they become the backbone of whole new genres of technology,
or unlock new discoveries, sort of unlock new wings in

(26:37):
the mansion of physics. Do you want to tell the
story of one or two examples like this?

Speaker 4 (26:42):
Sure? I think let's start right at the start the
discovery of the first subatomic particle of the electron, and
this was done using the same experimental equipment basically as
the X ray discovery. So A Catherine Retube and JJ
Thompson in England in eighteen ninety seven sort of picked
up where others had left off and realized that he
could do a series of experiments bending around the beam

(27:04):
of so called cathode rays. So that's a glowing, glowing
green ray down the center of this tube that they
didn't and they didn't know how it worked at that
time or what it was made of. So he set
out to investigate the nature of these cathode rays by
deflecting them with electric fields and magnetic fields and catching
the charge and seeing how it moved around, and as

(27:26):
a result of all of those experiments, which I should
say he definitely needed help with, even though I say
it was him, he had to have his expert glass blower,
Ebenezer Everett create all the experimental apparatus for him, because
JJ Thompson, despite being like the leading physicist in England
at the time, was I think I can't remember the
exact phrase, but it was like exceptionally helpless with his

(27:49):
hands is the phrase that comes to mind. So that's
a quote of someone describing his experimental skills. So somebody
else had to create all of his paradus. But anyway,
he was able to use Ebenezer's apparatus to bend the electrons,
to bend the beam around, and from that he managed

(28:09):
to establish that not only is the beam made of particles,
but that those particles were lighter than any atom that
had ever been observed before, and so he was able
to establish that this must be some kind of new
fundamental particle which we now call the electron, which is
about two thousand times lighter than the heaviest atom that

(28:31):
had been seen before, and he was able to tell
that that was really a fundamental component of matter. Because
it didn't matter which cathoide he used. So the cathode
is the part that the rays jump out of, and
if it was just an atom, then you would expect
if you change the cathoid or have you changed the
gas inside the tube, that the results would vary, and

(28:53):
they didn't. So that told him that this electron was
somehow inside every single type of atom that he was working,
so that that was an amazing discovery. And they used
to be a toast in the Cavendish Lab in Cambridge
where he made this discovery, and they have this annual
party where you know, they sort of I don't know sings,

(29:14):
they make up songs and they make up poems and
they have a fancy dinner and you know, having spent
over a decade myself in the UK at Oxford, I'm
kind of imagining this in a wood paneled room, you know,
with candlesticks and fancy, fancy food and everyone's wearing black tie.
And there used to be a toast at this annual
event where they would toast to the electron and they

(29:34):
would say, to the electron, may it never be of
use to anyone, because when he discovered it, it really was
just him trying to figure out the fundamental nature of
how these rays happened in this in this tube that
numerous scientists had in their labs around the world. And
in the few years after he discovered the electron, he
also discovered the process called thermionic emission, which is the

(29:58):
process by which the electron actually jump out of materials
when you heat them up. And this then became an
incredibly important piece of knowledge, which he obviously published and
wrote all many things about, because a few years a
few years later, an electrical engineer would sort of pick

(30:18):
up this information and a previous discovery that had been
made by Thomas Edison when he was trying to manufacture
reliable light bulbs, and they'd put those two ideas together
and come up with the first electric valve. So that
is a device which can control the flow of electricity.
You apply a small voltage and it either lets the

(30:41):
current pass or it stops the current. And then more
and more electronic devices then were invented after this, and
in order to make those devices, they were one hundred
percent reliant on JJ. Thompson's materials, on his theories, and
on the things that he had developed as a result
of his experiment, and those early tubes were very similar

(31:03):
in their makeup to the tubes that Thompson was working with. Anyway,
it's all very similar technology. But one thing I find
quite interesting is that Thomas Edison just you know, he
sort of made this discovery which was called the Edison effect,
which was kind of about the flow of electricity, but
he hadn't fully understood it. He just if he put
an extra electrode inside a light bulb, he noticed that

(31:25):
it affected the flow of electricity, and he patented it,
but he couldn't think of any good ideas for it,
so he just set it aside and ignored it. And
if that had been the history, then nothing, you know,
nothing would have been done about it at all. And
I'm always amazed that people sort of look at Edison
and his trial and error approach and they hold it

(31:46):
up as this example of amazing innovation, and I'm like, well, okay,
but he ignored possibly the most important thing he ever discovered.
And it was only because other people picked up the
ideas and understood it through JJ Thompson's investigations and his
theories that then it led to the first electronic devices,
the first and our ability through vacuum tubes to create

(32:09):
things like the telecommunications industry to you know, and long
distance communications. The first computers, all of the early electronics
were based on these vacuum tubes, and of course that's
changed a bit now everything's based in silicon and in
the future, who knows what it will be based on.
But if that fundamental investigation hadn't happened at the right time,

(32:31):
and that knowledge wasn't there for the electrical engineers to
build off, I sort of questioned, perhaps we'd have got
there eventually with the electronics industry, but the story would
have looked very, very different. So that's I find that
an interesting example of the ways in which this sort
of curiosity driven research, you know, trying to uncover the

(32:51):
nature of the universe, and our innovation stories and our
entrepreneurial stories kind of merge all into one and you
start to see it not as one is superior to
the other, but that they are essential to each other,
and that we need both approaches and we can't just
always sort of seed fund some entrepreneurial project or support

(33:15):
some you know, innovator who's full of energy. You actually
do need the people in the background doing that curiosity
driven research in order to have new knowledge for those
people to build on.

Speaker 3 (33:25):
Well, speaking of the people in the background, another interesting
thing to me about a lot of the stories you
tell are that some physics experiments that are very important
in history are surprisingly laborious. Like I think of the
example of particle counting, these experiments that involve just staring
at a screen for hours and counting flashes of light

(33:46):
by hand. Yeah, what are some of the ways that
crucial physics discoveries depended on types of work that people
might not think of when they try to imagine what
scientists are doing.

Speaker 4 (34:00):
Yeah, I think there's a We love them, we love
the moment of discovery, right, but we're often unwilling to
figure out exactly what went into that discovery. And I
have to say it's often it often comes as a
surprise to people as you say how laborious it was.
So that example you're talking about is in those early
days of nuclear physics, where the only detectors we had

(34:22):
were these fluorescent screens that lit up when high energy
particles hit them. And so in Cambridge in the UK especially,
they trained all their students and all their staff of
how to sit in a dark room and look through
a microscope at these plates when they were radioactive sources
present and count each flash of light. But of course

(34:46):
every human eye and brain is different, and so everyone
was everyone was trained up and kind of measured to
see how good they were at this particle counting. Right,
So there's all these I mean. To get reliable scientific results,
you need things like calibration. You know, these boring things,
you know, the things that are not sexy or exciting
about science. Good calibration. You need to know your instruments very,

(35:09):
very very well. And I think any physicist today would
tell you that until you know your experiment inside out,
you will not get reliable results from it. And it's
something that frustrates the heck out of undergraduate students in
the lab when they're learning physics and they're trying to
recreate experiments that were done in the past, and even
though they've got apparatus that someone has prepared for them

(35:32):
that should be working, they're still driven mad by the
intricacies of it. And this is the reality. I mean, unfortunately,
but you know, it's the reality of experimental life, which
is that this stuff is not easy. And if it
was easy, we would have done it hundreds of years ago, right,
But it's difficult, it's often laborious, and often what we're

(35:54):
trying to do in inventing new technologies and pushing at
the cutting edge of technologies in experimental science is sometimes
to get around the laboriousness, or even just to create
a method to collect enough data that we can actually
that we can actually use. So obviously, nowadays we don't
use people sitting in a room particle counting. But there

(36:14):
was a whole phase of experimental physics where after the
technologies were invented that allowed you to photograph the tracks
of particles. Well, then who processes the photographic data? Right?
Who maps out those tracks and who turns all of
that into tables that can be analyzed and searched for

(36:36):
new physics. And the answer that most people probably don't
realize is women did it. And in the early days
these women were called there was the computers, So the
women who did calculations by hand before the computer meant
something very different to us. And in particle physics even
into the forties, fifties, and sixties, you had the so

(36:57):
called scanning girls and women who almost all women. There
were some men who did it should I should say,
who would sit at these enormous light tables with the
with the copies of the photographic images, and they would
follow a very precise sort of protocol in mapping out
where the interesting things were in those photographs. And there

(37:20):
were many, many discoveries made this way, something I do
find interesting in the history. And I'm sure we'll get
to the discussion of women in physics in a moment.
But while some of these women were so called scanning girls,
it was also considered to be a task that all
the physicists should also know how to do. And this

(37:41):
continues to this day. Even when you get these big
collaborations like the large hadron collider, there's a sort of
commitment to the experiment that you do some of this
grunt work, you do some of this laborious work, and
today that means sitting in a control room and overseeing
the running of enormous colliders and detectors. But back then
it would mean that you would do your share of

(38:03):
analyzing these images. So this in a way is inseparable work.
It specialized work, but it's work where the physicists did
as well, and there were female physicists at that time
who were also doing these kinds of analyses. And I
almost wonder in this time, and this is just a

(38:25):
it's just an idea that has come to me a
number of times, I almost wonder if the women who
were working as physicists in those laboratories were somewhat overlooked
because the women's work at the time was as the
scanning girls mostly, you know, and so there was this
gender divide in roles. And even though the women were contributing,

(38:49):
and some of them were physicists not you know, they
weren't just hired as scanning girls, and yet their contributions
were overlooked far more often than the contributions of their
male colleagues. And I do wonder how this gender divide
in the roles of this grunt work actually played into
that overlooking at the time. But that's just one It's

(39:10):
just one aspect of the sort of gendered nature of
physics as we as we now know it, I think.
But yeah, the I think a lot of people would
be really surprised by how laborius a lot of the
work is. And of course that's where automation nowadays and
even AI tools are just changing the game. So dramatically
because now that you can automate all of these processes

(39:32):
and all of our detectors are you know, full of
electronics instead of photographs. You know, the process of actually
gathering the data is now much much easier, and so
people and people can access the data around the world,
including via the World Wide Web, which was invented at
SNE just for that purpose. And so now we can

(39:54):
focus on the analysis and we can focus on the physics,
and the contributions to the hardware software become the grunt
work and that part of the project as the experimentalist.
So yeah, it's an interesting shift through time.

Speaker 3 (40:18):
Coming back to the issue of women in the history
of physics, you mentioned in the book this idea of
the Matilda effect in physics, and it strikes me that
there are at least two different ways that the historical
discrimination against women in physics manifests. There's one where there's
just direct limitations on their participation, like some researchers having

(40:43):
projects they considered not suitable for women to work on,
or the marriage bar where women who had previously been
involved in research were disallowed from doing so after marriage.
But there are also cases where women researchers made significant
contributions to physics discoveries, and their role in this work
was sometimes deliberately censored from public records and recognition. Could

(41:05):
you talk about a couple of these examples.

Speaker 4 (41:07):
Yeah, sure, I think that's really insightful that there are
these different ways in which women's involvement in physics was
a stopped, as you say, you know, sort of prevented,
but then also that their contributions were diminished. And that
second one is really where the Matilda effect comes in.
So one person I'm thinking of here, her name is

(41:29):
Marietta Blau, and she was a researcher in Austria, and
she invented a new type of particle detector. So I
talked before about how beautiful I thought the cloud chamber was.
That's a very active detector. Things have to happen in
real time. You have to photograph things in real time.
It's very laborious to look after. And what she invented
in staid, because she had a background both in physics

(41:51):
and photography, was a photographic plate method of detecting particles.
So she had this very thick so called emulsions, and
they would create stacks of these emulsions for high energy
charge particles to go through. And this now, instead of
being looked after and photographed it every minute, could just
be left at the top of a mountain for a month,

(42:13):
two months, and it would just collect data over time
and then it would be pulled apart and analyzed. And
blouse invention led to a whole load of discoveries, and
she herself was actually nominated for the Nobel Prize but
never won it, and her invention led to I think

(42:34):
at least I can think of at least two other
Nobel Prizes that relied on her invention of this photographic
emulsion method. But she also actually made amazing discoveries with
it herself, one of which she called a star of disintegration,
which was when a high energy cosmic ray coming from
space came in and was sort of a direct hit

(42:57):
on a heavy nucleus and then that nucleus itself sort
of loaded and it left this amazing shower like a
super and nova on the on the photographic emulsions. And
this was a you know, she published, I'm pretty sure
that one was published in Nature and her her sort
of contemporary or not long after she was working there

(43:17):
was an Indian physicist named Bieber Chowdery working in India,
and she was one who was told that her professor
didn't have any suitable projects for her as a woman,
but she persisted anyway, and eventually sort of I guess,
won him over because she ended up working with him.
And she used similar photographic plates, but not of such

(43:37):
great quality because she didn't have them available to her.
It was during World War two and she was in India,
so the supply chain wasn't great. But she actually uses
photographic plates up mountains in India. And then she managed
to discover the two different types of particles, which we
would now call the muon and the pion, and those

(43:58):
were those were some of the first observations of those particles,
and as far as I can tell, it was the
first time when it had been really recognized that there
were two different particles. But I think she couldn't quite
because of the quality of her equipment. She couldn't quite
sort of say what was what or you know, the

(44:18):
difference in masses between the two or something like that
was missing. But this is the first authored paper in nature,
and this time I know it was definitely in nature.
You know, the top top journal in the world, and
then in the nineteen fifties, so not long after Cecil
Powell working in England. Sorry, his Nobel Prize was nineteen fifty.
I think his work would have been late forties. He

(44:42):
used exactly the same technique with superior emulsions to discover
the pion. And in his earlier writing, in his It's
definitely at least one textbook that he writes about, he
acknowledges biber Chowdery's earlier work and references her Nature paper.
And then when he wins the Well Prize in nineteen fifty,
every reference of his that referenced her work and not

(45:05):
used in the citation for the Nobel Prize. So all
the papers that are cited of his for the Nobel
Prize were the ones that didn't recognize the earlier work
of this woman working in India. And I had never
heard of her before I wrote this book. I'd never
come across her story. But I thought that was phenomenal
because Powell himself was not you know, he wasn't a

(45:27):
rephensible human. He was a very left leaning liberal person.
He had an unusually high number of female physicists in
his lab in Bristol in the UK, and I think
he himself was I haven't looked into his sort of
journals and things, whether they exist. I would love to
know how he felt about the fact that he had
recognized the precedent and the Nobel Prize committee had not.

(45:52):
And so Biber Chowdery is someone that even my particle
physics colleagues have never heard of, even though she made
this amazing discovery. And so these kinds of behaviors of
sort of the ignoring of the women's contribution, like people
will use their contributions but won't acknowledge them properly. And
so we get this historical track record of you know,

(46:14):
the Nobel Prize winners who are almost always men other
than Marie Currey because she was so damn good no
one could deny it. And you get these contributions of
these women sort of falling by the wayside. And it's
called the Matilda effect after Matilda Gage, who was a
suffragist who first recognized that the contributions of women, and

(46:37):
back then she was talking about the contributions to technology,
but she first recognized that these contributions were being overlooked
or attributed to their male counterparts or peers or even
their husbands, and not properly attributed to the women who
made them because of the biases that existed in our society.
And a historian named Margaret Rossiter sort of coined this

(47:01):
term the Matilda effect, named after michielda Gauge, and really
encouraged all of us to look for those stories when
we're looking at the history of especially technological fields and
highly technical fields like physics, where there is a lack
of women today. First of all, because and even I
wasn't aware of this, that you know, you will probably

(47:23):
find women that you weren't aware of, and this was
absolutely my experience in writing this story. But secondly, she
then encouraged us to write their stories back in because
you know, there's sort of no other way to correct
the record, and they have simply been overlooked. And so
I mean, what could I do other than you know,
it was sort of a call to arms as far

(47:45):
as I was concerned, because here was I, you know,
a female physicist today, having never heard of these women
who made these amazing discoveries. And I thought, well, if
I've never heard of them, and I'm writing a book
about the history of these experiments then probably no one
else has ever heard of, and that turned out to
be true, and so it was just such a wonderful
privilege actually to take up Margaret Rossiter's you know, sort

(48:07):
of call to arms and write their stories back into
the main stories of the history of these experiments, because
they're so so important and to me as a female
physicist working today, it made me realize, you know, all
of the people who laid the foundations of my field,
whom I sort of grew up in the field thinking

(48:29):
that they were pretty much all men other than Marie Curriy,
that that was false, and it created for me this
sense of sort of belonging that I didn't expect to get.
Out of the process of writing this book, I sort
of thought, Wow, women like me have always been that,
Women who've been curious about the universe, women who've wanted
to be in the lab and using their technical skills

(48:51):
and making these contributions to society and to our knowledge,
have always been there. This isn't a weird thing that
I'm doing. I'm not unusual to want to do this.
And yeah, I've since had that sentiment reflected back by
women young and old. Actually, you know, sort of young
women starting out thinking of whether physics is for them.
I've had some lovely feedback that they, you know, sort

(49:14):
of read the book. They read about these women who fought,
you know, I mean it was so hard to achieve
them as well, because often these women were denied formal
education in physics and weren't even allowed in the lecture theaters.
So to realize that they were there and the things
that they achieved, just you know, it was a very
very encouraging and positive thing for me, even though in
their own lives it was obviously a very negative experience sometimes.

(49:36):
But to me today these stories, writing them back in
brings I think, a new perspective on who gets to
do physics.

Speaker 3 (49:45):
It's definitely a powerful thing learning these stories. So I
want to come to the part of the book where
you talk about particle accelerators. Clearly you have a love
for accelerators. That's your field. Imagine somebody who is generally
positive about science, but views particle accelerators, especially the big projects,

(50:06):
the big colliders, as maybe too big and complicated to
be charismatic, as like objects of the imagination, and maybe
views their findings as too abstract to digest. What would
you tell this person to give them particle accelerator fever, like,
how would you make them fall in love?

Speaker 4 (50:24):
Oh? That's really that's really interesting. So I think we
live in an interesting time in terms of particle accelerators
because you know, obviously they're very well developed now, and
we have these enormous machines. So the Larde hydron collider
in Switzerland is twenty seven kilometers in circumference one hundred
meters underground. Right, it's fricking enormous and it's very difficult

(50:45):
to wrap your head around. First of all, I would
say to anybody who doesn't find that kind of experiment
charismatic on paper, I implore you to go and visit.
It will blow your mind. Honestly. It is just such
an enormous feet of human ingenuity. And today, in order
to achieve these enormous experiments, we all have to work

(51:08):
together and collaborate, and CERN is an amazing example of that,
and the big national labs in the US have also
been great examples of that, where you're bringing together experts
from so many different areas because these projects are things
that we cannot achieve alone. Now, CERN is a wonderful example,
because it was created post World War two somewhat as

(51:29):
a peace building project. So in its remit or in
its constitution is science for peace. So they are not
allowed to work on any defense related projects, are not
allowed to work on anything with weapon ability. It's probably
the word that I should use. They're not even allowed
to turn a profit, not even in the gift shop,
which took some people by surprise. And I've had a

(51:50):
few people comment on that, but I noted that in
the book. But to me it was obvious because it's CERN,
and they exist, you know, to seek new knowledge in physics,
and they exist sort of for the best of humanity
in a sort of grand sense. And so after nineteen
fifty six, you've got people working at cerne across borders

(52:10):
from countries who were at war just a few years earlier.
And this continues today. You know, there are both Russian
and Ukrainian scientists working at CERN alongside each other. And
so CERN really is this amazing human project where we've
learned to collaborate with thousands of people to achieve things

(52:31):
that certainly one lab can't do alone, one nation can't
do alone. These are truly global projects. So much so
that sort of successful collaboration that even the UN has
come to people at CERN, have come to people at
CERN and tried to work together on Okay, how come
STERN is so successful in its collaboration right? What can

(52:53):
the rest of us learn from the way that CERN
collaborates that could benefit the rest of the world, Even
if the technology doesn't float your boat. I think the
human collaboration aspect of it is something which most people
find quite inspiring. The other side of that is actually

(53:13):
around the technology itself. And as you say, I'm a
total nerd for particle accelerators. It is my professional day job.
I designed particle accelerators. I love it. They're great machines.
And one of the reasons I love it, and the
reason I chose it back when I chose my PhD topic,
was because someone who turned out to be my PhD
supervisor he called me and he was like, so, this

(53:34):
isn't what you applied for, because originally I applied to
do particle physics with Higgs Boson type stuff. And he said, okay,
hear me out. Hear me out. I want to design
a new type of particle accelerator to treat cancer. And
I was just like, what, what do you mean why
you find things people? And it turned out I was

(53:57):
just I just was a bit naive. I didn't realize
that you could use these technologies at smaller scales for
all sorts of societal applications. So about half of all
cancer treatments are actually done using small particle accelerators. For
what's called radiotherapy, which is one of the most successful
forms of cancer treatment that we've ever had, and it's

(54:20):
a small electron accelerator. It generates X rays and then
you shape those to the tumor inside the body, and
the whole accelerator actually rotates around the patient to be
able to deliver beams from different angles. And nowadays we
have more advanced forms of cancer treatment using heavier particles
like protons and carbon ions that are more precise in
the way that they deposit the dose. And that was

(54:41):
the area that I did my PhD on, and even
today I run a research group about accelerators for medical applications.
And so when you look at it, there's about fifty
thousand particle accelerators in the world, and only a fraction
of a percent are actually used for particle physics. And
so what has happened since we first invented accelerators in

(55:05):
the nineteen twenties and thirties is as we invent these
new technologies and the knowledge of how to accelerate beams
of fundamental particles and control them, more and more applications
have emerged, So not just in cancer treatment, but also
in industries. So you can use particle accelerators to change

(55:26):
the color of a gemstone by bombarding diamonds, you know,
diamond companies, to can change the color of a gemstone
often from clear to pink. Now that's you know, that's
quite capitalistic, isn't it. You're just trying to gain a
bit more money. That's not really a very very very
useful thing. But actually all the devices that we use

(55:46):
today rely on electronic chips, and today those are so
small that you have to implant ions one by one.
You can't do that using chemistry. You have to do
it using effectively a small particle accelerator. And so almost
everywhere you look, in every aspect of society, you will
find somewhere in there a story about how we use

(56:06):
this really advanced technologies to create sort of the modern
world around us. And yet we almost always don't know
don't know that it's there. And some of the most
I think inspiring work that happens there is when we're
looking at things like you know, in the environment or
in cultural heritage. So we're able to do really advanced

(56:28):
dating techniques putting together you know, the deep prehistorical story
of our Earth and our species and other species across
large tracts of time because we have these techniques that
come from fundamental physics. And so this is where I
get really excited, is because I'm like, Okay, so I
can sit in the lab every day, I can design

(56:51):
these machines, I can test them, and they can be
used for everything from you know, looking at an artwork
to discover for whether it's real or fake, to shrinking
the shrink wrap that goes around a Christmas turkey. That's
a real application. Polemer cross thinking is the technical term,

(57:12):
but you know, you know, to uncovering the Higgs boson
in the secrets of the universe. And to me, the
fact that it's the same physics and the same area
of research that I can do that that contributes to
all of these different areas of our society. That gets
me really excited because I'm never bored. I can always
choose a new application, I can always choose a new

(57:33):
type of machine to work on. And we're always trying
to make improvements in the energy efficiency, you know, trying
to make things smaller and better and cheaper, and just
trying to push forward the frontiers of these technologies using
our knowledge of fundamental physics, in order to do some

(57:55):
good in the world, you know, to actually make a
difference to people's lives. And that's why I show up
in the laborary day and I've had a lot of
people say, wow, I had no idea that you could
do that with physics. That's amazing. And so I've been
told on a number of occasions that my job today
is kind of the current equivalent of being a rocket scientist,
you know, I'm sort of working on this cutting edge

(58:17):
of technology which is taking us to new frontiers of
knowledge and exploration. And while it's not quite as dramatic
as a rocket, when you start up one of these machines,
it is to me incredibly inspiring. And every approach that
we take, whether it's collaborating, you know, in a multidisciplinary sense,
I collaborate very strongly with cancer researchers nowadays, or collaborating

(58:40):
across different nations and different technical skills. I think really
this type of research is sort of unique in a way,
but it's also representative of the approach that I think
has led us to so many successes, both you know,
both in science but also in terms of improving our

(59:03):
lives as people.

Speaker 3 (59:11):
I have a question about how you approach experiments in physics.
When you're doing an experiment and you're getting results that
are not at all what you expect to see, how
do you prioritize exploring the options that what you expect

(59:32):
to see is wrong versus there is something wrong with
your method.

Speaker 4 (59:37):
I always err on the side of assuming I'm an idiot,
so maybe just imposters in drome, But no, okay, this
is kind of what I mean about ensuring you one
hundred percent understand your apparatus. So typically when you start
out an experiment, and I'm thinking here of just a
small experiment that I built in the UK, and when

(01:00:00):
we first started using it, we'd get all these like
electrical signals that we just didn't understand, and so my
assumption there was not that the fundamental thing that I
was trying to study was wrong. My assumption almost always
is to assume that I don't understand my experiment well enough,
and to devise little tests and little questions and little

(01:00:21):
experiments to test my understanding of the equipment and to
test you know, I'll always pull it back to a
test case where I'm like, Okay, I should one hundred
percent know the outcome of doing this test, so then
I run that test, and if that one is still failing,
then I'm like, Okay, there's something wrong with the equipment.

(01:00:41):
And maybe there's something wrong, or maybe I've dialed it
in wrong, or I've got the wrong impedance matching, or
I've got, you know, like something, something that I've failed
to recognize is important in the experiment doing what I
wanted to do. And I think that would be a
familiar experience to almost every experiment, which is to go
in with this overabundance of optimism that everything's going to

(01:01:03):
work first time, and then slowly work your way through
the many, many, many ways in which you were wrong
until you really fully understand everything that's happening. And then
if you're testing your theory or maybe there isn't a theory.
Maybe you're just testing something that doesn't have a theory yet,
and if then it's coming back and giving you a

(01:01:23):
result that you don't expect, then you start to get
those little you know, I'm getting shivers just saying it's ridiculous,
isn't it. But like those little shivers which say, oh,
this is something new, this is a knowledge gap, this
is a potential to discover something that no one's ever
seen before. And it's in that mode where you're both

(01:01:44):
confident in your experiment that you can really ask the
questions about the nature of reality. And in that moment,
I think more often than not, you want to be
wrong right. You want nature to be throwing a curveball
at you. You want it to be something surprising, and

(01:02:05):
those are I think those are the moments in which
would be the closest that I think you would get
to having sort of a Eureka moment or that moment
I've seen something new for the very first time. And
it's only by working your way through those smaller steps
that you can get to that level of confidence. And

(01:02:26):
I think a lot of people don't realize that that
is very much the day to day role of an
experimental scientist is working your way through these annoying things,
and you have to learn to love that process, right,
You have to learn to love the small bits of
understanding and the small discoveries that come along the way.

(01:02:47):
You know, maybe you've discovered a new way of arranging
your apparatus that happens to give you, you know, ten times
more signal than you had before, and that's really satisfying.
And so I think experimental science for that reason, it
sort of appeals to people who like to tinker. It
appeals to the detail orientated mind. At the same time,

(01:03:09):
it has to appeal to people who have that bigger vision,
you know, who have that longer term time frame, Because
if you expect to go into the lab every day
and make one discovery every day, you're going to be
solely disappointed. But if you can keep in mind the
big picture and work toward that over and often it
is years, you know, and keep that enthusiasm and keep

(01:03:31):
that wonder that happens in the lab every day, I
think that's the sort of personality type that fits experimental
science very very well.

Speaker 3 (01:03:42):
There's a point about your book that I really love
you in talking about how big projects like the large
Hadron collidor you've talked about this today as well, are
illustrative of deeper points about human collaboration. And I wonder if,
in a way you even alluded to this earlier when
you were talking about what types of experiments are easier
to talk about in the setting like you know, our

(01:04:03):
conversation today. I wonder if these big collaborative stories like
the large Hadron collider are more difficult to fit in
the shape of a compelling and memorable narrative than stories
with a single protagonist. Obviously, a lot of the most
inspiring and amazing stories in your book are about these
huge megaprojects with these unthinkable amounts of coordination and collaboration.

(01:04:25):
Are there tricks to telling those stories in a way
that makes them work as stories? But it's still true
to the reality.

Speaker 4 (01:04:35):
It was very difficult, Yes, So I will definitely acknowledge
it is so much harder to write about enormous collaborations
than it is to write about a few individuals. And
I think in terms of the story, you know, the
story arc or the narrative creation process. I had to
find my own route through that, and so I was

(01:05:00):
looking for things like, okay, well, you know, if I'm
if I'm creating a sort of story arc, so you know,
what would my crisis moment be, What would you know,
what would a sort of pinnacle moment be. What is
my like sort of inciting idea that sort of sets
sets that story off on a journey. And you can

(01:05:22):
find those things within the stories of the big experiments.
It does make it harder to focus on individual, but
I actually, in the end, especially for the large Hadron collider,
I use myself as an example of a tiny, tiny
individual within this enormous collaboration, and that worked for me
partly because I actually didn't go on to continue in

(01:05:44):
that collaboration. I worked in it as a student. I
did this very very small project which people love to
to recite the name of the project that I did,
which was it was the design of a no hang on,
I'm going to get it, I'm going to get it wrong.
But it was the design of a monitoring system for

(01:06:04):
the heating, sorry for the heaters of the cooling system
of the inner detector of the Atlas experiment.

Speaker 3 (01:06:13):
See cooling system.

Speaker 4 (01:06:15):
Now the monitoring system, Yes, the monitoring system for the
heaters of the cooling system. Okay, if you have a
cooling system and you don't want it to all like
clog up with condensation, right, so sometimes you need heaters
on there to bring the temperature back up and stabilize it,
like you need to be able to move the temperature
in two directions. Anyway, So that was my crazy, you know,

(01:06:39):
tidy little project that I did for three months when
I was a summer student as an undergraduate working at CERNE.
And it was illustrative though, of this idea that you know,
I was this sort of tiny cog in this enormous machine.
And I think the way I used that story was
also to sort of saying I doubted that this machine

(01:07:02):
could ever work, because if I was making this contribution
and deep within my code was the ability to switch
the whole machine off, then surely, you know, statistically this
thing was never going to work. And so I was
as surprise as everybody else. Well, I don't think the
actual rest of the collaboration would have been surprised when
it worked, but I was surprised from my experience when

(01:07:27):
it worked as well as it did when they started
the machine up. Of course, people who remember back in
two thousand and eight. Will remember that it worked for
about seven days before it blew itself up, and then
they spent a year fixing it before it came back online.
And I was at an event the other day where
someone referred to the startup of the large hydron collider,
in which they said about two thousand and eight, with

(01:07:49):
a shake of the hand. You know, this is sort
of you know this Italian style like wobble of the
hand that means roughly they did that. They said it
suddenly in about two thousand and eight, and it was
all about that hand wobble of like, oh, that means
the machine blew itself up and it had to be
fixed for a year. But anyway, so I'm getting off

(01:08:10):
the track onto the large hundred collider. But I think,
I think, yes, it is much more difficult to write
narratives about enormous collaborations. But I think that speaks to
something a little deeper, is something which has come out
of conversations with people now that we're studying even larger colliders.
So the next one, potential next iteration is one hundred

(01:08:33):
kilometers in circumference and will take about forty years to build,
to design and build that's getting to the same lengths
as or longer than a lot of careers in the field,
and so I think we are running into and it's
something that I've been talking to people about, a sort

(01:08:53):
of two big, too long, too complex problem with these collaborations.
And even though they I find them more inspiring in
what they have been able to achieve. If I was
given the choice again, now you know, I'm a student,
I'm raring to go in this field, I'm really interested,

(01:09:17):
what would I choose to work on, for saying, my
PhD now at the age of early twenties, embarking on
a PhD, which can be anywhere between about three and
however many years, you know, seven eight years. For some people,
it's a huge commitment and a huge chunk of your
life at that age. And totally I hear stories of

(01:09:38):
professors who are struggling to recruit students to projects for
the sort of next mega colliders because they're like, well,
there's not going to be any data to work with
for forty years, Like how am I going to have a
career in this Why would I commit three to seven
years to something that might not even be built? And
so I don't want to make out like there's a

(01:09:59):
cris there's or a lack of people who are interested
and very committed to this field. But I just hear
inklings of dissatisfaction or sort of little little inklings of trouble,
and I'm I'm curious about that, and I'm curious about
how we're going to resolve that. And I guess there's

(01:10:20):
two parts. Either we find a way to resolve that
through the career structure and through having shorter projects alongside
these big, long ones that you keep people motivated and
keep everyone working, or we really have to think about
are these projects too big? Should we really be focusing
all our energy on technologies which can shrink down the

(01:10:43):
size of future collided projects, which is very very difficult
although they are in progress. And also just refocus back
down on the sort of structure in which these collaborations work,
because realistic, you've got groups of about ten to twenty
people in a research group in a university. Those work

(01:11:06):
on specific sub areas of the experiment, and then they
all join together and eventually you get, you know, two
thousand people. And so it's not that two thousand people
are sort of a negalitarian, you know, flat structure who
all somehow know each other and communicate. That would be
absolutely wild. There is a substructure, and so I'm interested

(01:11:28):
in how we can use that substructure that works very
well in small, close knit groups who then go out
and work with other groups around the world. Perhaps there's
a way we can do that in the time domain
as well. Right, So, perhaps there's a way of having
more contained sections of projects, perhaps with applications, you know,
that sort of keep people interested on that sort of

(01:11:50):
you know, few year timescale that can drive things along.
So maybe instead of in the future, instead of contributing
to hardware or sitting in a control room, maybe you
can cotributing to the societal applications of the spin offs
of the work that you're doing, alongside developing the longer
term curiosity driven part. That's just my idea. It's very

(01:12:13):
much an unsolved thing. But I think if I was
given the chance again, I would struggle to commit to
a project that wasn't going to have data for forty years.
So I do want to acknowledge that it's a very
interesting time for young people to be entering the field.
In that sense.

Speaker 3 (01:12:30):
Right at the end of the book, you offer a
couple of big lessons that you think we need to
embrace for the future of physics and collaborative research projects.
Do you want to mention those before we sign off?

Speaker 1 (01:12:40):
Yes.

Speaker 4 (01:12:40):
So, I think some of the things that I've learned
through writing the book around collaboration and this curiosity driven
research is that it is so important that we value it,
that we value its impact in society, and that we
create space for people to do this kind of research,
not just space, but also it requires funding. And I
know it sounds a little daddy to mix curiosity driven

(01:13:01):
research and money, but in our society those two things
are going to have to go hand in hand. So,
you know, even the future, we want to be able
to create collaborations so we can really get the best
out of specialized skills that people have to the betterment
of society. We need to really think about how we

(01:13:22):
value things that don't set out with a goal in mind,
and I think we need to center those and we
need to really value the fact that somebody would commit
their life and their career to something where they don't
even know what the outcome is going to look like.
We need to protect that with everything that we have
because that is such a generative force in our society

(01:13:45):
for good.

Speaker 3 (01:13:46):
Susie Shehei, thank you so much for talking today. It
has been a privilege and a.

Speaker 4 (01:13:50):
Pleasure lovely to be here. Thanks Joy.

Speaker 3 (01:13:53):
All Right, well that's it for today. Thanks again to
Susie Shehi for being so generous with their time. If
you want to pick up a copy of the book,
it is called The Matter of Everything, The Matter of Everything,
and it's out in hardback, in ebook form and as
an audiobook narrated by Susie herself. Stuff to Blow Your
Mind is primarily a show about science and culture, with

(01:14:14):
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Speaker 2 (01:15:18):
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