• Question: How will your work affect the lives of future generations?

    Asked by to Becky, Clara, Daniel, Simon, Thomas on 12 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Becky Martin

      Becky Martin answered on 12 Mar 2014:

      I hope that it will keep them safer, by reducing the likelihood of their accidental exposure to ionising radiation! 🙂

    • Photo: Daniel Roach

      Daniel Roach answered on 12 Mar 2014:

      The history of mankind’s technological progress is the history of the materials we used in shaping our world around us – The stone age, we learned to shape stone and build with it (we don’t talk about the ‘wood age’ or the ‘bone age’, but prehistoric man might be best described in that way). Bronze age, we used simple alloys of copper and tin (bronze), iron age, we learned to use iron and steel (iron with small amounts of carbon in it). The industrial age was all about the mass-use and mass production of steels – making engines and machines from this strong stuff.

      And now… The information age is all based on silicon chips, wafers of precision grown crystalline silicon. With the advent of graphene (single layers of graphite), we hope to create atom-level computers. With nanotechnology, buckballs and nanotubes, we hope to be able to create tiny machines that could go into your body and deliver drugs or repair/destroy individual cells (like cancer cells or faulty organs). Or we could repair blood vessels using nanotubes.

      But in order to do this, we need to be able to understand how the atoms behave – and sometimes they do unpredicable things unless you study these crystals very carefully – then you get to understand how things work.

      Microscopic computers. Targetted drugs. New ways of storing energy. New, clever materials ten times stronger than steel and as light as a feather.

      As someone who studies the basic properties of these new materials, I am helping to build this new technology, because the science of understanding the materials is important in predicting and designing new, clever materials.

    • Photo: Clara Nellist

      Clara Nellist answered on 12 Mar 2014:

      Hi @poppyo

      I don’t know for sure how my work will affect the lives of future generations because it’s all brand new. We’re looking at the building blocks of the universe and trying to understand how they work, which at the moment doesn’t have any direct applications, *but* that certainly doesn’t mean that there won’t be any. Because there are thousands of people all working on this huge project and trying make the impossible become possible, tonnes of new stuff gets made while we do it.

      I know you are asking about the future, but as an example, the World Wide Web (which is how web pages connect on the internet) was invented at CERN as a way for scientists to share information more easily. This wasn’t directly their research, but it made their research easier and now almost everyone uses the internet in this way! Also the first webcam was used by scientists in Cambridge to see if the coffee machine had coffee in it without having to walk to the other side of the building. I’ve gone a little off topic, but the point I’m trying to make is that when you put a lot of smart people in the same place, you never know what will be made!

      But back to your questions. My work on making more advanced pixel detectors for the ATLAS detector can be shared with other areas of science research. For example, we can pass on what we learn to people who are building detectors for PET (particle emission tomography) scanners in hospitals to help them to take more accurate images of the inside if someone’s body. Also, people are working on making a smaller version of the particle accelerator I work on (the Large Hadron Collider) to be about the size of a large room. If you build one of these in a hospital you can use the protons from this to kill cancer tumours. This is very interesting because strong x-rays normally used for cancer therapy will damage normal human tissue about the same amount as the cancer tumour. But a proton can be targeted to concentrate on only the cancerous part, which mean less damage for the person and they can recover faster!

      I’m also hoping that the more we know about how particles work, then we can start changing it and make antigravity. This could lead to hover boards and flying cars! We just don’t know until we try 😉

    • Photo: Thomas Elias Cocolios

      Thomas Elias Cocolios answered on 12 Mar 2014:

      It is always hard to say whether your work will save the world. One day, it might.

      Little did Einstein knew, when he came up with General Relativity, that it would day be used in every car with GPS! Or what to say about the World Wide Web (well… Actually, @claranellist beat me to that one!). The invention of the lasers is another cool one: someone needed coherent light for his experiment, so he made a laser: now, everyone has them all over the place!

      In performing physics research at the frontier of what is possible, we always demand more from our instruments, we always need new tools and new developments. Then comes someone who flips it all over its head and turns it into something useful. There are actually people at universities and in laboratories who are professionally working on ‘Technology Transfer’ for that very purpose.

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