318. Suzie Sheehy The Matter of Everything: How Curiosity, Physics, and Improbable Experiments Changed the World

Published: Jan. 24, 2023, 8 a.m.

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Physics has always sought to deepen our understanding of the nature of matter and the world around us. But how do you conduct experiments with the fundamental building blocks of existence? How do you manipulate a particle a trillion times smaller than a grain of sand? How do you cause a proton to sail around a twenty-seven-kilometer-long loop 11,000 times per second? And, crucially, why is all this important? In The Matter of Everything, accelerator physicist Suzie Sheehy introduces us to the people who, through a combination of genius, persistence and luck, staged the experiments that changed the course of history.

Shermer and Sheehy discuss: what it\\u2019s like being a female physicist in a mostly male field \\u2022 Does science progress through falsification, confirmation, consensus, or Bayesian reasoning? \\u2022 atoms, light, Higgs Boson, time, gravity, dark energy, dark matter, string theory, radioactivity \\u2022 Gold Foil Experiment \\u2022 cloud chambers \\u2022 particle accelerators \\u2022 splitting the atom \\u2022 Is there a place for God in scientific epistemology? \\u2022 Is math all there is? Is math universal? \\u2022 other universes, dimensions, and the multiverse.

Suzie Sheehy is a physicist, science communicator and academic who divides her time between research groups at the University of Oxford and University of Melbourne. She is currently focused on developing new particle accelerators for applications in medicine. The Matter of Everything is her first book.

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