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1:00

and Betty and the Nancys and

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richer, more rewarding life.

1:11

Hey, welcome to Inquiring Minds. I'm

1:13

Indra Viscontis. This is a podcast

1:15

that explores the space where science and society

1:18

collide. We want to find out what's true, what's

1:20

left to discover, and why it matters.

1:28

Right in the intersection

1:32

of all of that are physics experiments, especially theoretical physics

1:35

experiments, where the application of those massive

1:37

projects is not immediately clear

1:40

when the scientists themselves go

1:42

out to begin finding those solutions. So

1:44

this week we're talking to Susie Sheehy.

1:47

She is a physicist, an academic, and a science

1:49

communicator who divides her time between

1:52

the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge.

3:59

at the flea market. And this sets

4:02

him off on this journey

4:04

of trying to figure out if it's authentic

4:06

or not. And he

4:09

tells his PhD advisor, and they work in

4:11

nuclear physics at Rochester, and

4:13

together they're trying to figure

4:15

out how on earth they could measure this. And they're like, okay,

4:17

well, we could use carbon dating. But

4:20

carbon dating means you have to take a sample

4:23

of the wood, and it has to

4:25

sort of decay away, and you have to count how

4:27

many radioactive decays there are to

4:29

figure out how much carbon there is,

4:31

and therefore, when the tree was cut down

4:34

to make it. But they realized that to do that, they're

4:36

going to have to destroy the violin, and then it's going to be

4:38

worthless. So if it is like a priceless antique,

4:41

they're kind of stuck. And almost

4:44

serendipitously, these collaborators

4:46

come in to the lab and

4:48

ask whether they can use

4:51

the particle accelerator, which existed

4:53

at that time in the 70s, to put very small samples

4:55

in and use it to do

5:00

a more precise form of carbon dating.

5:02

And that experiment was kind

5:05

of the start of what we now call accelerated

5:07

mass spectrometry, or accelerated

5:10

mass spectroscopy, subtly

5:13

different.

5:13

But they're both

5:15

used as like precise forms of

5:18

carbon dating. And so that's started

5:20

in the 70s. But then in the book, I'm like,

5:22

okay, so

5:23

what is this behemoth in the lab? And why

5:25

do they have it? And what's it actually

5:28

used for? And that takes us all the way back

5:30

to about 1927. So like 50 years earlier,

5:37

and this race to understand what's

5:39

inside the nucleus and the structure of

5:42

the nucleus of the atom. So at that

5:44

point, by 1927, we

5:46

sort of knew about the rough structure

5:49

of atoms and that we knew that there was a dense

5:51

nucleus at the center, electrons around the outside.

5:53

The proton had been discovered,

5:56

the neutron had been discovered in 1932. But

6:00

really understanding how the nucleus

6:03

itself was put together seemed to be

6:05

the next sort of big

6:07

port of call of

6:09

understanding in physics. And

6:12

so there were numerous labs around the

6:14

world who were trying to create

6:17

beams of particles that they could use

6:19

to do these investigations and get

6:22

deeper into the nucleus. And what they realized

6:24

they needed was A, a reliable source

6:27

of particles and not

6:29

just they were considering not just electrons,

6:31

but also say protons,

6:34

the nuclei of hydrogen.

6:37

And they were like, okay, so how are we

6:39

going to create these particles, give them energy

6:41

and control them so that we can sort

6:43

of bombard them onto a target of

6:45

a metal and using that

6:48

sort of bombarding technique, figure

6:50

out what's going on deep inside the nucleus

6:52

of those materials. And so they were competing

6:55

technologies. And you'll

6:57

remember from the book that some of them are what

6:59

you'd expect. So transformers,

7:03

so to get up to high voltages. So that was the key

7:05

thing. They needed high voltages. And

7:07

when you put a charged particle through

7:10

a high voltage or through

7:11

a potential, it gains energy.

7:14

So that was like the key trick, right? So

7:16

transformers, they were using

7:18

things like Tesla coils, which were pretty unreliable

7:21

and were never really successful as a power source.

7:25

Robert van der Graaf invented his technique in 1927

7:27

as well. Twenty seven

7:29

was a big year. And then there

7:31

were some researchers also in Germany who

7:33

even tried to harness lightning to get

7:36

that very high voltage. And

7:38

sadly, their experiments came to an end when one of the researchers

7:41

actually fell

7:41

down the ravine and died. He wasn't

7:43

struck by lightning, but there was a bad accident.

7:47

And so that, yeah, the harnessing

7:49

of lightning, we may never know whether that could have worked

7:51

as a particle accelerator. They did

7:53

have some success in harnessing the voltage.

7:57

But the big,

7:58

I think the biggest breakthrough really came up.

7:59

came in Cambridge in England in 1932,

8:04

when two researchers, Cockroft and Walton, John

8:06

Cockroft and Ernest Walton, working

8:08

under Ernest Rutherford, who's this eponymous

8:11

New Zealand character who ends up working

8:14

mostly in the UK, big loud personality.

8:17

And he has all his researchers working

8:19

under him, and Cockroft and Walton

8:22

ended up building the first particle

8:25

accelerator, which was really used

8:28

to split the atom for the first

8:29

time in April 1932. And

8:32

it's a really lovely adventure

8:35

that they go on, because none of the technology

8:37

exists, as you just said before. It

8:39

feels like they don't really know what they're building when they start

8:41

building it, which is true. And they have

8:43

to figure out as they go along, okay,

8:46

well,

8:47

if there's this nucleus and there's

8:49

also, you know, there's charges going

8:51

on, what's the force between those? And therefore,

8:54

how much energy are we going to need to overcome those

8:56

forces? And when

8:58

they first calculated, they're like, oh my goodness, we're

9:00

going to need like 10

9:01

million volts to overcome

9:04

the Coulomb repulsion, the electrical

9:06

repulsion from the nucleus. And

9:09

that scared them with this, right? Because

9:11

in the late 1920s, most homes didn't even

9:13

have electricity.

9:14

So the fact that they're trying to even

9:17

think about hundreds of thousands,

9:19

let alone millions of volts in the lab,

9:23

you know, their management of those

9:25

high voltages was not established.

9:27

So they sort of had to figure out how

9:29

to

9:30

work with high voltages safely

9:33

through the same period. So that included

9:35

things like putting glass shields

9:37

around things, corona shields to stop sparking

9:40

and breaking down, how to

9:42

seal different components together. And

9:44

they even used, they started out using

9:46

bankavings on sealing wax, and eventually

9:49

they used what we would now call plasticine

9:52

to actually connect the joints

9:54

together. And they had to

9:56

have

9:57

brand new things manufactured, so they had to

9:59

go to... suppliers of transformers

10:01

and say, hey, we need one that's more

10:04

powerful, but actually like way smaller

10:06

because it can't fit through the door of our lab. So some

10:10

real practical challenges there. And then just

10:12

lots and lots of problem solving

10:14

to try and create these

10:17

beams of particles. And they had many

10:19

false starts, which I won't go through all the details,

10:22

but it's there in the story. And eventually,

10:25

in 1932, they sort of had

10:27

this

10:28

beam, they warmed up the machine and

10:31

realized almost immediately that

10:34

what they were seeing on this screen

10:36

in front of them, and here

10:39

to get a visual, imagine

10:41

there's a big tube above your head

10:43

in this sort of industrial space surrounded

10:46

by wires and electrical apparatus

10:49

and big, if you've ever seen

10:51

a Cofor-Forton machine, it's often

10:53

these big copper, zigzag, tubes, things

10:55

like that. So you're surrounded by all

10:57

this apparatus. And to do the experiment,

11:00

you, the researcher, Ernest Walton

11:02

in this case, has to crawl across the lab

11:05

and into a wooden box that's underneath

11:07

all of this, where

11:09

the beam is coming down above his

11:11

head. And he sits in this box and pulls

11:13

a little curtain across. And he's looking

11:15

in the dark at a zinc sulfide

11:17

screen. And those screens light

11:20

up with flashes when they're hit

11:22

by alpha particles, so helium nuclei.

11:25

Now, there were no alpha particles going into the

11:27

experiment.

11:29

There was particles coming down from the accelerator,

11:31

and there was a lithium target. And

11:33

as soon as he ramped it up and switched

11:36

on and made this reaction happen, he

11:38

was seeing these alpha particles

11:41

lighting up the screen in front of him. And

11:44

even as a young student, he knew that this was

11:47

an incredible

11:48

moment, because to create those

11:51

alpha particles meant that the nucleus

11:53

of the lithium nucleus itself had

11:55

been split, and the nucleus

11:58

of the atom had been split for the first time.

11:59

time. And it just gives

12:02

me shivers every time I think about a student

12:05

sitting underneath a particle accelerator watching

12:07

a screen, watching such

12:09

a momentous thing that we now

12:11

sort of look back at

12:13

as this big event in the history of physics. But to him,

12:15

it was almost just another workday where this

12:18

weird thing happened and then he had to figure out

12:20

what it meant. Yeah, I mean, especially

12:22

like, you know, picturing the cardboard box with a little

12:24

curtain and it almost sounds like a puppet

12:26

theater that a child has made in order to, you

12:29

know, play, right? And

12:32

I love those details. Yeah.

12:34

And that, you know, it was like the first time that,

12:37

you know, this kind of scene building in your

12:39

book, I think is really powerful to give

12:41

us this visual sense of being there and the

12:43

kind of just the scrappiness of

12:46

the way these things got put together, you know, trying

12:48

different solutions. Yes. And I love

12:50

that. I love that word scrappiness.

12:52

It is like, that feels like real

12:54

science to me when it's scrappy. Exactly.

12:57

Like who's got some duct tape, you know, who's got

12:59

like, so, you know, there's all these like little tools around the lab

13:02

that you can just pick up and use as you

13:04

need. But also the fact

13:06

that so

13:07

often these kinds of discoveries

13:09

or, you know, a lot of this work happens

13:12

for purposes that that are not even necessarily

13:15

to do science. So this

13:17

idea that like maybe there's this stratovirus

13:20

sort of various violin and we need to test how it

13:22

is. And I've got some tools in the lab. It reminds

13:24

me of, you know, some of the work

13:26

of my of my friend who's a

13:29

ear surgeon and who studies the neuroscience

13:31

of jazz improvisation and who's just an aficionado

13:34

of jazz and instruments.

13:36

And that's amazing. I want to read all about

13:39

that. Yeah. Well, his name is Charles

13:41

Lim. He's really

13:42

interesting. It's a great TED talk. And he

13:45

so, you know, he was just curious to see what was

13:47

happening in the brains and some of these jazz grades.

13:49

And so he was like, well, you know,

13:51

how do I look inside their brains? I got to put them in

13:54

a brain scanner.

13:54

But there's no, you know, how do you

13:56

play? How do you improvise music in an

13:59

MRI machine where

13:59

there's this big magnet and you need

14:02

to reduce all kinds of electrical noise. Like this

14:04

is a real problem. So, you know, he had

14:06

this this piano

14:07

built for the, you know,

14:09

you know, to solve this this particular problem and it

14:11

just seems like, you know, and

14:14

now that that particular piano

14:16

is lost. And so to rebuild it is

14:18

like you need a you need a special engineer. And this

14:20

is like just all these kind of weird, practical,

14:23

both problems and solutions that happen

14:25

in just like the nitty gritty work of science.

14:28

And it comes from, hey, I wonder

14:30

what my friend's brain looks like

14:32

when they're, you know, improvising

14:34

a jazz riff or I wonder if this violin

14:36

really is worth a million dollars.

14:39

Yeah, I think you've nailed it there in terms of someone

14:42

following their curiosity and that

14:44

like jazz jazz improv in

14:46

an MRI is like such a great example of that.

14:49

And then it's like, OK, well, I'm curious about this thing.

14:51

I feel like there could be something really interesting

14:53

if I can get answers to my questions,

14:56

but nothing exists for me to

14:59

be able to measure that or, you know, this thing

15:01

doesn't exist. And it's really that whole,

15:03

you know, necessity is the mother of invention.

15:05

And in, you know, my era

15:07

of physics and sort of particle physics,

15:10

it really has been over

15:12

the

15:12

last hundred years, this journey of like,

15:14

well, you know, a device

15:17

doesn't exist that can generate particles

15:19

at those energies. So we're going to have to figure

15:21

out how to invent it. And then, oh,

15:23

then it's a deep dive into engineering

15:26

and into craftsmanship and into,

15:28

you know, all these technical areas that

15:31

you'd almost never expect. I mean,

15:33

I've had so many people comment on how

15:36

they didn't realize that, you know, in the 1910,

15:40

1920s as a research scientist, and this

15:42

persisted through to like the 1940s and 50s,

15:45

you had to learn how to blow glass as

15:47

a science research student

15:50

because you had to build your own apparatus.

15:52

And, you know, there were no CNC milling machines

15:54

back then. So

15:57

so you had to you had to make it out of

15:59

glass. with your own hands. Oh, if you were

16:01

really lucky and had good support, maybe the

16:03

lab glassblower would do it for you.

16:06

But that blew my mind. I

16:08

even, in writing the book, I went to visit a

16:10

scientific glassblower who worked in my university

16:13

because I was so intrigued by what

16:15

that process looked like. And I was like,

16:17

surely this is like a really specialized

16:19

skill. And the only thing that convinced me by

16:22

watching him blow glass, that yes, it absolutely is a

16:24

specialized skill. And just like

16:26

we have to learn how to code, how to do CAD drawings and

16:29

understand electronics.

16:33

Back then, there was just a whole different set of skills

16:35

that you needed to build an experiment.

16:38

And I really think for

16:40

a lot of people, that's where that curiosity

16:43

combined with those practical

16:45

hands-on skills, that's just,

16:46

to me, there's so much joy in that and being able to build

16:49

something with your own hands, which can answer big

16:51

scientific questions.

16:53

Yeah, and I remember when

16:55

I was a graduate student, I was dating a postdoc

16:57

at Stanford who had to make these

16:59

little electrical coils

17:01

that he was using in an experiment. And he would go

17:04

down to the machinist's office in the

17:06

basement, and there'd be a machinist. And you'd

17:08

say, I'm doing this electrophysiological

17:10

experiment. I need this, that,

17:12

and that tool. And you need to put it together.

17:15

It certainly was very

17:17

hand-on. I'm sure that's still the case in a

17:19

lot of labs where you go down

17:22

into the basement and

17:23

you have some help from an engineer. That particular

17:25

machinist, his name was Bob, and he

17:28

was really into Burning Man, which is this festival

17:31

in the desert. It

17:34

was early Burning Man when nobody knew about

17:36

it. He'd be a great Burning Man attendee

17:39

as well, because he could just make anything. Exactly.

17:41

Yeah, and so when he wasn't making

17:43

things for the lab, he'd be working on his Burning Man

17:46

constructions. It was

17:48

just this real combination

17:51

of art and geeky

17:53

science with just this passion

17:56

for life and curiosity. And a lot of the stories

17:58

in your book really get back to the that.

18:00

But now, of course, we have these massive

18:03

teams, you know, at CERN, etc.

18:05

And like, and you know, Slack, and

18:07

you've got like these just, you

18:10

know, 1000 people that are required to like,

18:12

you know, get an experiment going. And I wonder if

18:14

you could comment on that big change, like

18:16

in 100 years, we've gone from somebody in a cardboard

18:19

box with a little curtain, like,

18:22

you know, a multi billion dollar

18:24

project that crosses borders in,

18:27

you know, underneath the mountains of Switzerland,

18:29

like, Yeah, it

18:30

has been such an enormous shift.

18:33

And I think, partly out of necessity,

18:35

so at least in my field, with

18:37

particle accelerators, as we

18:40

started to understand more and more particles in

18:42

nature, and, you know, at first,

18:44

that was going sort of deeper and deeper inside the atom,

18:46

but then over time, all these other particles

18:49

started cropping up and experiments that

18:51

didn't exist in our everyday matter.

18:54

And then to find those because they were rare,

18:57

and required energy to produce them

18:59

in sort of collision processes, then

19:01

we had to build these machines with sufficient

19:04

energy to be able to do that and sufficient

19:06

intensity of the beam I'll say as well. And

19:08

so to a certain extent, sort of the

19:11

progression of these machines getting physically

19:13

larger and larger, was just down

19:16

to this push to higher and higher energy.

19:18

And that persists all the way, all the way

19:20

through up till today, you see this, you know,

19:22

this progression larger and larger and larger. And that's

19:25

not to say it's taking the same technology and making

19:27

it bigger and bigger,

19:28

they would be, you know, at least 10 times

19:31

larger if we hadn't also improved the engineering

19:33

and using things like superconducting magnets

19:35

along the way. So there's this huge

19:38

push toward these large laboratories,

19:41

because the experiments themselves, the

19:43

technology to produce the beams to

19:45

get the data becomes necessarily

19:49

so large that one individual group, and

19:51

eventually one individual country can't

19:54

afford to build them and maintain

19:56

them, etc, etc. And

19:58

this really

20:00

sort of boomed after World War II when

20:02

there was, at least in the US, a proliferation

20:05

of sort of big labs and big accelerators,

20:08

somewhat because

20:10

of the success of success, and I

20:12

say that with hesitation, of

20:15

the Manhattan Project and Los Alamos in

20:17

bringing together many, many physicists and engineers

20:19

and people and setting them a really

20:22

difficult, potentially intractable problem

20:25

and having them succeed.

20:27

Now, of course, the sentiment towards what people

20:29

wanted to put that energy toward

20:31

was toward very different questions post

20:34

World War II. And

20:36

we could have a whole other conversation about that.

20:38

But in general, there was a shifting

20:41

in the sort of moral position of a lot of

20:43

the scientists post World War II toward either

20:45

trying to use

20:47

their knowledge to the benefit of humanity.

20:49

So we get medical technologies, we get

20:51

energy technologies, things like that, or

20:53

just to the benefit of humanity through seeking

20:56

fundamental knowledge. And that

21:00

desire to work together toward

21:03

something greater than themselves

21:05

individually, but with the idea that it's

21:07

a positive contribution to humanity,

21:10

has pretty much pervaded the field ever

21:12

since. I know a lot of people in the field

21:14

who are very pacifistic,

21:16

I think would be the right word for

21:18

it. And when CERN

21:20

was created post World War II in 1954, it was

21:22

ratified with 12 member

21:24

states, some of whom had been

21:26

at war just a few years earlier. And

21:28

it was actually written into the statutes

21:31

of CERN that CERN is for science for

21:33

peace. So they're not allowed to accept

21:35

money from countries for defense funding. They're

21:38

not allowed to produce research that's relevant

21:41

to, you know, sort of defense and things

21:43

like that. It actually has a

21:45

very specific

21:47

role to play. And personally,

21:49

I think that's one of the reasons that CERN has been so successful,

21:52

because it's allowed these thousands of

21:54

people, as you say, to contribute to something

21:57

without fear that one of

21:59

the parties is

23:59

international sort of organizations

24:02

and collaborations could learn from. I know that, for

24:05

example, the UN have worked with CERN in understanding

24:08

the impacts of just things like that on

24:11

how they collaborate worldwide. So

24:13

yeah, so today, you know, scientists

24:15

in particle physics, especially, might be working,

24:19

you know, there are Russian and Ukraine scientists both

24:21

working at CERN,

24:22

for example. Right. Right.

24:25

Yeah. There's something

24:27

to that spirit of collaboration

24:30

which can overcome the political

24:32

divides, to an extent anyway,

24:35

to the extent that it's allowed.

24:37

But with that many people working and

24:39

that much money involved, and, you know, I know you have to

24:42

you have to be very clear about

24:44

reserving time on the accelerator.

24:47

You have to you know, you get this little tiny

24:49

sliver of time. It costs

24:51

a lot of money. So, you know, you have to you just

24:53

have to use that very wisely. It made me wonder

24:55

about the,

24:57

you know, the kind of experimentation,

24:59

the kind of serendipitous findings

25:01

that come out of when you

25:03

just have access to the lab 24 seven and

25:06

you can pop in there and

25:07

carbon date your violin. Yeah.

25:09

What do you think about like, you

25:13

know, yeah, I've been asked this quite a bit,

25:15

like, you know, it does the way we do science

25:17

down these big science experiments, does that hamper

25:19

that kind of more serendipitous discovery?

25:23

And so I've had some time to kind of think

25:25

about that and I think, oh, I

25:27

know where that

25:28

feeling is coming from, because from the outside,

25:31

all you see, for example, at CERN is there's

25:33

this big 27 kilometer collider. And

25:35

I will say on at CERN anyway, like,

25:37

all the machine is run, you know, almost 24 seven

25:40

when it's actually running, and then all

25:42

that data is collected and then it's accessible to everybody.

25:45

So it's it's not even I mean, you'll

25:47

be a member of one of the main collaborations usually,

25:49

each have a few thousand people in them, but all the data

25:52

from that collaboration is available to everyone in

25:54

that collaboration. So we have shifted

25:56

even beyond that go in and use a

25:58

small bit of being time.

25:59

time and gather your data. So now

26:02

it's like all the data for everybody all the time.

26:07

I think there is still space

26:09

even within those large collaborations. If you have

26:11

a good idea of

26:12

something to look at,

26:13

there is a sort of fair and transparent process

26:16

of, you know, if you want to propose, actually, we should run

26:18

this specific energy for some time

26:21

because there's this really compelling reason

26:23

why I think I'm going to find something if

26:25

we run in that specific way that

26:27

may make a successful campaign if others come

26:30

on board and be like, yes, actually, let's do this.

26:32

So it's not,

26:34

it is a behemoth of the collaboration,

26:37

but there are structures to try and stay a bit

26:39

nimble. The other thing that's really

26:41

relevant to this is the Large Hadron

26:43

Collider is just one of the accelerators

26:46

at CERN. There is a whole chain

26:48

of injection accelerators that used

26:51

to be the largest accelerator in the world, often

26:53

in their time. And then there's test facilities

26:56

all around the site. So building toward the next

26:58

generation of colliders, there's test machines.

27:00

So there's lots of other beings available.

27:03

And it's on those other accelerators

27:05

and beams in lots of different labs around the world

27:08

that typically those more high risk

27:10

experiments can take

27:12

place. So I still

27:14

think that within, and actually,

27:16

that's probably a key point, which is that

27:19

without

27:20

that amazing wealth of expertise

27:23

and all of those collaborators and everyone working

27:25

together on that and just having all

27:27

these facilities and all these different minds in

27:29

one place,

27:30

I think that makes it more likely

27:33

that you're going to end up having a serendipitous sort

27:35

of discovery or, as you say, you

27:37

know, someone thinks, what if I did this with this thing?

27:39

Well, it's available to me, so I'll go

27:42

and test that. Having the facilities

27:44

makes those kind of serendipitous ideas

27:47

possible. But

27:48

if we, yeah, if we sort of didn't have the

27:51

facilities, then, you know, definitely

27:53

not. There's a lot of evidence, too, that

27:56

diversity of a team is a big

27:58

driver of creativity and of

28:01

actually really good science, that the more diverse the

28:03

team is, the more those papers get cited,

28:06

which I think is really interesting. Yes, 100%.

28:09

This is something now you're talking

28:11

straight to my heart here, this is something I include in

28:14

a lot of my presentations is this idea

28:17

that more diverse teams are either more

28:19

creative or more productive. And there's one

28:21

particular study, if people haven't heard about

28:23

it, there's a study done by MIT

28:26

on problem solving, difficult problem

28:28

solving by teams.

28:29

And they set

28:32

these groups of people,

28:34

they were students, so it's like a particular

28:36

demographic, but they set them some difficult problems

28:39

to solve as a team, including mathematical problems.

28:42

So it wasn't like, you know, fake problems. And

28:45

then they left them to solve

28:47

the problem and then they sort of analyze what the social

28:49

components and the aspects

28:52

of the group were that made them

28:54

more successful at problem solving. Now,

28:57

I can feel it coming up even in me,

28:59

this idea that, oh, the smart teams will have

29:01

performed better, right? So there's this

29:03

preconception that we have that, okay, if

29:06

you just take the IQs of the people in the group

29:08

for these sort of difficult mathematical type problems,

29:11

either it will be the average IQ or the peak IQ

29:13

in the group, right? Either the one really smart person

29:16

will have helped everyone along, we've all

29:18

been in groups like that, or, you

29:21

know, or maybe if everyone on average is smarter,

29:23

then they'll have been better at solving the problems.

29:26

That is not what they found at all. What

29:28

they found was that the groups that had

29:30

a higher factor of social

29:34

intelligence, and there's, they have ways of measuring

29:36

that, that the groups with the highest social intelligence

29:38

performed better, the groups that gave

29:40

equal time to everyone in the group

29:43

performed better, and the

29:45

groups with more women performed better.

29:47

And I don't mean up to 50%. I

29:50

mean across the board. And

29:53

of course, that third factor in our

29:55

society at the moment is correlated with

29:57

the first factor. And, possibly,

29:59

that's the first factor. with the second. So you

30:01

can't quite tease those apart as completely independent

30:03

variables, but I find that a really

30:07

interesting study. That it's not

30:09

IQ

30:10

on average or peak IQ that led to that

30:12

performing team performance. It

30:15

is much more about diversity and

30:18

social

30:19

values of the team, and learning

30:21

about that study changed the way that I run my research

30:24

group. And yet, you've written this

30:26

book that has all of these historical discoveries,

30:29

and it's very heavily

30:31

skewed towards stories of white men.

30:36

That's our history. We can't get away from

30:40

it. So I

30:42

wonder if you could talk a little bit about some

30:44

of the discoveries that you made. Was it that

30:46

just women weren't involved because they weren't allowed

30:48

to be, or they weren't encouraged to be, or we

30:51

can speculate? Or is it just that they weren't

30:53

acknowledged?

30:55

And did you find stories in which

30:57

we've all heard now of these kinds of stories, like

31:00

the discovery of the shape of DNA, etc., where there were

31:02

female scientists who were given

31:07

the short end of the stick when it came to

31:09

acknowledging their work? So

31:12

there were fewer women. I will

31:14

admit that. Our society through

31:16

that period made it very, very difficult for

31:18

women to do science, but

31:21

they weren't non-existent. And

31:23

that came as a surprise in some

31:25

places, even to me, even as a

31:28

woman working in physics. I thought I knew these stories,

31:30

and I thought I knew who was there in the room and

31:32

who contributed. And it turned

31:35

out in a number of instances that I

31:37

didn't know that, and that there were women

31:40

who'd made incredible contributions

31:41

who had gone more

31:44

or less ignored or unacknowledged

31:47

or at least under-acknowledged for

31:49

their contributions. So just a couple

31:51

of examples. I

31:53

discovered Harriet Brooks,

31:55

who is well known to Canadians, but not so much outside

31:58

of Canada.

31:59

She was Ernest

32:02

Rutherford's first research student in Montreal.

32:04

She made some really important contributions

32:06

to our understanding of radioactivity

32:09

and radioactive decay that led eventually

32:11

between

32:12

Rutherford and Frederick

32:14

Soddy to our understanding of half-life.

32:17

She made some awesome contributions. Rutherford

32:20

later would describe her as the most prominent

32:22

woman in radioactivity outside

32:25

of Marie Curie. She was

32:27

clearly really, really bright. Someone

32:29

proposed to marry her and she

32:31

found out she'd

32:34

have to quit her job in physics if she

32:36

got married. So she broke off the engagement. I

32:38

mean, can you imagine in the

32:40

early, early, early 1900s, this is like 1905, the guts

32:42

of a woman

32:45

to break off an engagement

32:48

to pursue physics. I'm just

32:50

like, I want to know, I want to

32:52

meet this woman. So

32:58

she went on with physics and later on

33:00

in her career, she gets to about the age of 30 and

33:02

the same thing happens again. Someone caught her and

33:06

Rutherford at that point is offering her a position

33:08

in Manchester. So she really has that career

33:10

versus family decision

33:13

to make. And at that point, she chooses

33:15

to get married because I think

33:17

she realizes that

33:18

she's having to support herself throughout

33:21

all of this with scholarships. And I think she realizes

33:23

that she's going to have a very insecure

33:25

future if she stays in physics. Of course, that's

33:27

my supposition because it's

33:29

not really written down. There's no, none of her letters or,

33:31

you know, there's no memoir. There's no, there's

33:35

no interview with her that I could find. So

33:37

if anyone's a thing that knows more about it,

33:40

do send it my way. So we miss out

33:42

on her contributions because she leaves

33:44

physics and raises a family and

33:46

it was not possible to combine those things at that

33:48

point in time. So she was a,

33:51

she was such a great example because I started

33:54

in a lot of places just looking at the photographs,

33:56

you know, getting a feel for the places

33:58

people worked, the table.

33:59

they worked with. And I remember seeing

34:02

Rutherford's research group photograph in Montreal,

34:05

and I'd never heard of Harriet Brooks. And

34:07

in the middle of the photograph, there's this woman

34:09

in, you know, winter, all this winter gear with

34:11

her fur hat on, and she's staring like

34:14

straight out at the camera. You can't miss her. She's

34:16

enigmatic in the centre of the photograph.

34:18

And I sort of thought,

34:20

there she is just staring at us and yet

34:22

nobody ever acknowledges her existence.

34:24

Like, this is clearly a bias.

34:26

How can we, how can we ignore

34:29

this woman or these women? And

34:32

so there are a number of other examples. Marietta

34:34

Blau invented a photographic technique

34:36

as a particle detector, was nominated

34:40

for the Nobel but never won it.

34:42

And Beba Chowdhury was an Indian physicist

34:45

who used that same technique to

34:48

discover not one but two new particles.

34:51

But because the quality of her

34:53

nuclear emotions wasn't the highest

34:55

available quality, it wasn't quite

34:57

the clinching measurement. And so Cecil

34:59

Powell in Bristol in 1950 was

35:02

awarded the Nobel Prize for basically

35:05

the same thing with better equipment, with

35:07

no acknowledgement of either Marietta Blau or

35:09

Beba Chowdhury from the Nobel Committee. He

35:11

was awarded it solo.

35:12

There was plenty of space in the three people

35:15

limit, you know. Not that

35:17

I'm arguing that they should have been, it should have been him

35:20

and the two

35:20

women, but you know, that's not my argument, but

35:23

just that they were overlooked. And there

35:26

were many stories of that. And I included

35:28

probably five or six

35:29

of those stories in the book. And

35:32

eventually I decided I had to include a little

35:34

bit that gave this effect a name

35:36

because it's not

35:38

just a few unfortunate stories. It

35:41

is a sort of systematic

35:42

under-acknowledgement and under-representation

35:45

of women's contributions, which happens not just

35:47

in science, but also in other fields.

35:50

And the name that's been given by

35:53

a historian named Margaret Rosseter, she

35:55

named it the Matilda Effect after Matilda

35:57

Gage, who was a suffragist who firstly

36:00

noted this sort of systematic

36:02

effects of the under-acknowledgement of women's contributions.

36:05

And I think it's really important that we have

36:08

a word to describe it. I was very happy

36:10

when I was like, oh, now I can refer to it as the

36:12

Matilda effect, you know, where women's

36:14

contributions in particular get overlooked.

36:17

And she really encouraged people to

36:21

do that work, to find those stories

36:23

of the women's contributions in particular,

36:27

because they are going to be harder to find.

36:29

That's the thing, like

36:30

when something is so systematic, you

36:33

realise you haven't heard about them because

36:36

you go into the history

36:38

of science book section in the library

36:40

and there's 10 books on Ernest Rutherford,

36:42

but zero books on

36:44

Harriet Brooks. And you realise that

36:46

this recording of history and who

36:48

we deem to be important

36:50

is a compounding effect.

36:52

You know, if they're deemed less important in

36:55

their own time, so their stories

36:57

aren't written down, their letters aren't kept, they're never interviewed,

36:59

nobody ever writes a book about them, they're never awarded

37:01

the prizes, their names might even be left

37:03

off the research papers, although in the case of

37:06

the women that I'm quoting, they were like first author

37:08

nature papers, they're not even obscure. And

37:12

so now, you know, it gets to today, it gets to 100 years

37:14

later, and of course I haven't heard of them because

37:17

all of those effects compounded over time.

37:19

And we just simplify and retell

37:21

the story with the main characters

37:22

because, and I

37:24

mean, I found this in writing the book,

37:27

it's hard to have so many characters all at once,

37:29

our brains don't manage well in a story

37:31

with too many characters. So you'll leave

37:33

out the ones that seem less important, which is

37:35

the women. I mean, you know,

37:38

there's a kind of, there's a subtle but

37:40

profound effect of that this

37:42

acknowledgement can have, you

37:44

know, even on current students. So I work

37:47

at the University of San Francisco and in the psychology department,

37:49

we have created a psychology

37:52

students association,

37:52

and they've been really proactive

37:55

this past year to highlight the work

37:57

of BIPOC psychologists.

37:59

of their efforts recently has been to essentially

38:03

find pictures of

38:05

black, former, you know, psychologist

38:08

or current psychologists, and just like create

38:11

two little sentence descriptions of their work

38:13

and paste them around the department. And

38:15

so every day now as we walk, you

38:17

know, along our offices, we see these pictures

38:20

and we see these images and you think, well, that might

38:22

be kind of odd, but it's not odd because before

38:24

that there were pictures of lots of white people

38:26

on those walls, right? And

38:29

just like the difference

38:29

of this like

38:31

daily reminder of these

38:33

individuals who have been under acknowledged,

38:35

but who exist,

38:37

I have to say, has a profound effect.

38:39

It's like, yeah, we really actually have to

38:42

retrain our brains, because we've

38:44

spent so many years assuming that

38:47

these contributions didn't exist.

38:50

And so when we're presented with evidence

38:52

to the contrary, we try and ignore

38:54

it at first, because with, you know, our

38:56

brains just want to keep the status quo.

38:59

So I love that intervention of just like,

39:02

you know, almost like bombing the department

39:04

with all this information, you know, like with just

39:07

like,

39:07

you know, so you can't, you can't

39:09

miss it. And eventually, you know, you'll

39:11

have that connection in your brain, oh, who

39:14

made this, you know, discovery or contribution

39:16

to psychology? Oh, was this person? Yeah,

39:18

exactly.

39:19

And you'll overcome it that way. But it's, it's,

39:22

it's the work that we, especially as

39:24

white people need to do.

39:25

Exactly right. So I want to

39:27

remind our listeners that Susie Sheehy's book, The

39:30

Matter of Everything, How Curiosity, Physics

39:32

and Improbable Experiments Change the

39:34

World is Available at Booksellers Everywhere. This is a great

39:37

sort of documentation of several

39:40

really important experiments and the,

39:42

you know, nitty gritty, not

39:45

dirty, but

39:46

almost haphazard science

39:49

that underscores or underlies

39:51

some of these really major discoveries. I'd

39:54

like to end with having you describe

39:55

one of the other one of your sort of

39:58

favorite serendipitous discoveries.

39:59

I mean, I personally like the X-ray

40:02

story, but is there another one or

40:04

is that the one that you

40:06

feel is just great storytelling?

40:09

I think the X-ray one is fairly

40:11

well known, so I'm going to leave that because

40:14

I think one of the ones that jumps

40:16

out to me a lot is

40:17

the Cloud Tomb of Story.

40:19

So this

40:22

happens again in the very early 1900s, so until

40:24

about 1912. And

40:27

again in Cambridge actually, I've really highlighted Cambridge

40:30

here, have I not? UK Cambridge.

40:32

There's this physicist named

40:35

CTL or Charles Wilson, and

40:37

he actually is really interested in meteorology,

40:40

so he's not right into the nuclear physics

40:42

and radioactivity that the other members

40:44

of his department were keen on. And

40:47

so he spends some time up the top

40:49

of Ben Nevis in Scotland, where he

40:52

grew up in Scotland. And if anyone's

40:54

ever climbed that mountain or attempted to climb

40:56

that mountain, you know that

40:59

it's a really cloudy part of the world.

41:02

I've never managed to climb Ben Nevis because despite

41:04

being up there a few times, it's always been such

41:06

horrible weather, but I've never been able to climb the mountain.

41:09

But he managed to get up there in beautiful

41:11

blue sky weather, where the clouds

41:13

were either below him or floating around.

41:16

And he observed some of these really interesting meteorological

41:19

phenomena like the Broken Specter

41:22

is one, and glories

41:24

are others, where there's really interesting sort of

41:26

refractive effects of light that produce

41:29

either sort of a shadow

41:31

person or weird colours

41:33

and shapes. And so he decided

41:35

to go back to his lab, and

41:38

he was a good glassblower,

41:39

and he decided to develop an apparatus

41:42

to make clouds in the lab. And

41:44

he was interested in how clouds

41:46

form, and he thought that it might be to do with

41:49

the electrical charges in the air.

41:52

So that was one thing that he was trying to

41:54

investigate. But he was also interested in the

41:56

attraction of light with the clouds

41:58

and all these visual effects.

41:59

that he'd seen. So

42:02

he builds this device called a cloud

42:04

chamber. And he notices

42:07

that even when the air is really,

42:09

really clean inside there, so he doesn't expect

42:11

any clouds to be forming,

42:14

there's still clouds forming in it. There's

42:17

still little bits of cloud that form.

42:19

And so this confuses him

42:21

a bit. But eventually, whether

42:24

it was him or someone else, I'm not entirely sure, someone

42:27

came up with the idea that, well, if

42:29

it is the electrical charges inside the

42:31

chamber, why don't you fire

42:33

an X-ray device at

42:35

the chamber and see if you can see the effect

42:38

of the ionization

42:41

of the X-rays? Because X-rays interact

42:43

with the air or with things around

42:46

them. And ionize, so

42:48

throw off electrons from

42:50

the gases around them. And so if it

42:53

was to do with that

42:54

electrical effect, then he should be able to see something.

42:56

And they hold up a X-ray

43:00

device next to his cloud chamber when it

43:02

was working. And it would sort of pump and expand.

43:04

And there'd only be a certain time point when it

43:06

was in a cloud producing

43:09

mode. And it produces these

43:11

showers of visualization

43:13

of the X-rays, of the ionization.

43:17

And that must have just been such a beautiful

43:19

moment to realize that he'd sort

43:21

of accidentally built an apparatus which

43:24

could visualize the

43:26

effects of radiation.

43:28

And so he goes back and he perfects it

43:30

until it becomes this

43:33

device where people can leave

43:35

the cloud chamber sort of expanding, photograph

43:37

it at a particular point in its cycle, and

43:40

see the interactions of

43:42

charged particles in nature coming through

43:45

it. And this was how they made a whole

43:47

lot of the

43:47

early discoveries of particles like

43:50

the muon. So that was one of the first ones

43:52

that was discovered that's

43:54

beyond the atom that's just existing in

43:57

nature. And even the positron,

43:59

so the first

44:00

evidence of antimatter, which

44:03

an experimenter who found antimatter didn't

44:05

even know it had been predicted three years earlier. He

44:07

just sort of saw this weird trail

44:10

in his cloud chamber photographs and managed

44:12

to figure out from the curvature of the track

44:14

and so on, that it must be the

44:16

same as an electron, but the opposite charge.

44:19

And that was a pretty mind

44:21

blowing thing. So I love

44:23

that story. It's sort of a longer story of serendipity

44:25

because it's again, it's that having

44:27

the right skills and the right people and applying

44:30

something to a new

44:32

question,

44:33

just because you're in the right, almost the right

44:36

place at the right time with the right equipment.

44:38

Yeah. And it also underscores how someone from outside

44:40

the field can be instrumental in

44:42

like making this kind of a serendipitous discovery.

44:46

Yeah, if not more so than the people in

44:48

the field, because they have different

44:50

ways of thinking and different techniques. Yeah.

44:53

And different questions too, ultimately about what they think

44:55

might be interesting. Well, Suzy Shi,

44:57

thank you so much for being on Inquiring Minds. It's

44:59

been such a joy to talk to you. Thank you.

45:05

So that's it for another episode. Thanks

45:07

for listening. If you want to hear more, don't forget

45:10

to subscribe. If you'd like to get an ad

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45:17

minds. We'd like to especially thank

45:19

David Noel, Haring Chang, Sean Johnson,

45:22

Jordan Miller, Kyle Ryhala, Michael

45:24

Galkool, Eric Clark, Yushi

45:26

Lin, Clark Lindgren, Joelle, Stephen

45:28

Meyer-Awal, Dale Amaster, and Charles

45:30

Bile. Inquiring Minds is produced by

45:32

Adam Isaac, and I'm your host, Indra

45:35

Vaskontas.

45:35

See you next time.

45:45

It feels like there's a fee for everything. Like

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since when do you have to pay to park at

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a restaurant where you're paying to eat? It

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even costs money to take out money.

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Who's got money for that? And don't

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even think about bringing clothes on your vacation. That'll

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be $100.

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Thank you for buying it. Yeah, you're welcome. We've

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got more than enough to pay for. That's

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why with a Walmart Plus membership, you'll never pay

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more for delivery. Get all your groceries

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