Women in Physics - Harriet Brooks

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Harriet Brooks was Ernest Rutherford's first graduate student in Montreal in the early 1900s. She did some of the underpinning experiments understanding decays of sort of thorium and radium and things like this. Her precursor experiments were really important to Rutherford and Frederick D who was the radio chemist that he worked within Montreal to understand this concept of half life. And so she was approached by a man that she knew and asked yeah he asked her to marry him. So she broke off her engagement and she fought the college as well. But on the flip side I do think it's important to recognize and write back into the story people even if their careers didn't end up in Nobel prizes or fellows

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.