The Effect of Radiation on the Universe

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The atom itself is mostly empty space just blue people's minds including you know famous artists and people like that. But also this idea that nothing in the world is stable and unchanging right basically everything in our entire universe changes. Rutherford famously when he was at Montreal he had this rock in his pocket and he walks up to the geology professor who's called Frank Dawson Adams. He says I can prove beyond you know beyond doubt that the earth is at least I think he said 700 million years old. It was a piece of pitch blend which contains uranium and he invented the uranium lead radio carbon dating process, one of the first radiometric dating processes.

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’s like being a female physicist in a mostly male field • Does science progress through falsification, confirmation, consensus, or Bayesian reasoning? • atoms, light, Higgs Boson, time, gravity, dark energy, dark matter, string theory, radioactivity • Gold Foil Experiment • cloud chambers • particle accelerators • splitting the atom • Is there a place for God in scientific epistemology? • Is math all there is? Is math universal? • 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.