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Suzie Sheehy
100 quotes
“What is a particle accelerator? ...This is the ...the world's biggest particle accelerator. It's 27 kilometers in circumference ...buried about 100 meters underground between the borders of France and Switzerland, near Geneva.”
Suzie Sheehy (born 1984) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That's only one particle accelerator. There are actually over 26,000 of them in the world.”
Suzie Sheehy (born 1984) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I'll tell you very briefly how they work. ...The first thing we need is some ...s, or even atoms themselves perhaps.”
Suzie Sheehy (born 1984) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Four different types of particles: electrons, s, s and gold atoms. ...Can anyone suggest which one you can't put in a particle accelerator? ...A . Yep! Do you know why? Because it isn't charged. Thank you very much. ...[I]t doesn't have an .”
Suzie Sheehy (born 1984) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Suzie Sheehy (born 1984) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The next thing we want to do with those particles is to give them some energy. That's the basics of how an accelerator works. I've got a machine here called a which does that...”
Suzie Sheehy (born 1984) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Suzie Sheehy (born 1984) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Why couldn't you put your pet in a particle accelerator? ...It doesn't have an electric charge. ...He's slightly too big, and the other thing... he's going to be affected by the vacuum in the pipe of the machine...”
Suzie Sheehy (born 1984) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Suzie Sheehy (born 1984) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 [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.”
Suzie Sheehy (born 1984) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Suzie Sheehy (born 1984) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Suzie Sheehy (born 1984) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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...”
Suzie Sheehy (born 1984) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So they had to put a lot of effort into designing... the , which is a massive long block of very dense , which absorbs the energy. But even then there's so much energy that they can't just dump it directly on it, or the would make the thing explode. So they actually have to paint the beam in... a swirly pattern... to spread out the load of the heat from the beam on this huge graphite block.”
Suzie Sheehy (born 1984) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you just put this beam onto a massive block of copper, you could actually melt 600 tons of copper from solid to liquid, just using the Large Hadron Collider beam.”
Suzie Sheehy (born 1984) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Suzie Sheehy (born 1984) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So you can actually put your head in the beam of an accelerator and survive it. And he's not the only one to have done it.”
Suzie Sheehy (born 1984) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nowadays you wouldn't want to do that voluntarily, and you wouldn't want to do it without understanding the consequences, but there are some situations that you might want to do it in... [T]here's a very good reason for that, because if you take a much lower energy beam that the Large Hadron Collider beam, and you put it into water, or into the human body, or into tissue and you start it with the correct amount of energy, it will actually slow down and stop, and deposit almost all of its dose (or its energy) in one spot... [W]e call this the .”
Suzie Sheehy (born 1984) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Now the radiation dose that the LHC beam could give you could kill you 76,000 times over, but the radiation dose you'd receive from a beam of say 200 MeV, a relatively modest proton beam, is much lower and can... be used to treat cancer... [W]e use this in... , which we're getting in the UK. We actually did pioneer it and... it hasn't quite come back onto the NHS yet...”
Suzie Sheehy (born 1984) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[I]n cancer therapy usually you like to direct a dose of radiation exactly where you'd like it, so in this case... a child with a spine that needs irradiating. They've had a tumor removed from the base of the skull and they need to irradiate the spine in order to stop the cancer spreading down the spine... With... usual X-ray radiotherapy the dose distribution there is the best that we can do using all modern techniques. You can see that underneath the spine in... the stomach area there is quite a lot of radiation dose that we might not want...”
Suzie Sheehy (born 1984) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Suzie Sheehy (born 1984) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Suzie Sheehy (born 1984) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Suzie Sheehy (born 1984) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People in the U.S. did think about building a particle accelerator (a neutral beam accelerator) that they would launch into space... and then they would use it to shoot down satellites and... missiles and destroy anything that they didn't like, because they were going to have this super powerful beam in space.”
Suzie Sheehy (born 1984) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Well they quickly realized that this was crazy, and that they were never going to be able to actually make a weapon out of one of these machines. Mostly for the reasons that I explained before. Even if you had the Large Hadron Collider in space, I have no idea how you'd get it up there, but even if you did, it would... be difficult to do damage with it. Mostly because beams would just go through things and out the other side.”
Suzie Sheehy (born 1984) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Suzie Sheehy (born 1984) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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...”
Suzie Sheehy (born 1984) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So we can't use it as a weapon. ...No deployed weapon has ever used this technology.”
Suzie Sheehy (born 1984) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What could you do... if you took particle accelerators, and you made them really powerful... [T]his is something that I work on, is taking proton accelerators of relatively low energy, but putting more and more particles in, and getting a really high beam power...”
Suzie Sheehy (born 1984) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So there's some really interesting applications of accelerators, way outside of the realm of particle physics, that we're starting to get a handle on.”
Suzie Sheehy (born 1984) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The only problem is [that] the accelerator for this is about 10 times more powerful... than we can currently make. So there's lots of challenges for people like me who design accelerators, to try and come up with ways of making them more and more powerful, for very good reason.”
Suzie Sheehy (born 1984) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Suzie Sheehy (born 1984) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There's this guy called Monsier Mangetout... a Frenchman who, according to Wikipedia ate all of these crazy things. Even he, though, wouldn't eat a particle accelerator because parts of the machine become radioactive, and while he seems to be fairly stupid, given the things he ate, even he wouldn't go that far.”
Suzie Sheehy (born 1984) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Suzie Sheehy (born 1984) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Y]ou can have two... main types of radiation, which are ionizing, or non-ionizing.”
Suzie Sheehy (born 1984) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 .”
Suzie Sheehy (born 1984) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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...”
Suzie Sheehy (born 1984) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That thing... is radioactive. They're called thoriated rods, and they're used in welding. You can... just buy them.”
Suzie Sheehy (born 1984) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Suzie Sheehy (born 1984) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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...”
Suzie Sheehy (born 1984) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the U.S. if you see this green symbol on your food, that doesn't mean it's organic. It means it's been irradiated, which is a little bit misleading...”
Suzie Sheehy (born 1984) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This is not a dangerous process. In fact it's a really really useful process to kill the bacteria in our food and make it healthy for human consumption, and just because we've irradiated it does not mean that it becomes radioactive. So there's a distinct difference here between a naturally radioactive food, or something [like a thoriated rod] which would be genuinely harmful to me if I ate it, and food which has been irradiated, because it's only gone through that process to treat it to make it fit for human consumption.”
Suzie Sheehy (born 1984) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A lot of s' food is irradiated before they send it up so that they... aren't going to get sick from it.”
Suzie Sheehy (born 1984) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So yes, you probably have eaten something that's been through a ...”
Suzie Sheehy (born 1984) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[I]f we start creating things like mini black holes, which we may or may not, they will pop out of existence so quickly that they wouldn't have time to suck any matter in... [T]he interesting message that I take from this is that these machines are built so infrequently... 25-30 years between these big accelerators. Every time it happens, I'm told by my... retired colleagues... It happens every time, this scare story that we're going to destroy the earth with it, because it's so long between them that people actually forget the media hype that happened the last time around.”
Suzie Sheehy (born 1984) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Suzie Sheehy (born 1984) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[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...”
Suzie Sheehy (born 1984) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[D]on't be afraid to challenge yourself. Don't shy off doing something just because you think that it's hard. It's when we're doing something hard that we really make a difference. So dig deep and don't be afraid to dream.”
Suzie Sheehy (born 1984) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I will leave you with some photographs of some of the places that my career in physics has taken me so far, and I hope to add many more to this list in the future.”
Suzie Sheehy (born 1984) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So that's 5 things you should never do with a particle accelerator. Thank you.”
Suzie Sheehy (born 1984) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source