Science Authors

"The s were acquired by a eukaryotic cell that was already a fully fledged eukaryotic cell."

"We all share this basic machinery in cells, and it's not related to whether you're photosynthetic or whether you're phagocytes or whether you are a fungus or whether you're an animal cell. We all share the same machinery. Why? The possibility is that it's not about adaptation to the external world, it's about adaptation to these s. These pesky bacteria that went on to become a mitochondria. Maybe this conflict of interest... [that] had to be resolved somehow was what was driving a lot the elaboration of cellular machinery. It's a kind of local... intimate conflict."

"I would say that if there's a probability of life being cellular, which I think there is. Life being based, which I think there is. Life starting out with CO2 because it's so common in planetary atmospheres, and , which is very common, from the kind of s which I'm talking about... and liquid water. They need liquid water for , but we know of it on ... on Europa... [Serpentinization] is giving rise to alkaline fluids with hydrogen gas. Most hydrogen gas you find in planetary atmosphere are coming from serpentinization. , which is the mineral required for that... is ubiquitous in interstellar dust... So all of this pushes you down a certain avenue, and if that's correct it gives you bacteria... and if that's correct then bacteria have a structural problem, and they're not going to get beyond bacteria except with an endosymbiosis, and that in itself is improbable, unlikely... because it only happened once, to our knowledge, on earth."

"To me it [we] means life as a whole, so I would include bacteria in we. ...Life on earth is a whole, yes I think so. We share the . We share the same cell structures. I feel quite a strong fellow feeling with bacteria."

"I'm... interested in the principles of what governs the emergence of life on the planet, with a certain set of resources. Can we understand it? We'll never know what happened, so we'll never know how life started on earth. ...[I]f those principles are enormously difficult, if it turns out that it's a freak statistical accident, then there's little point in studying it and we will gain... very little. If, on the other hand, those principles are reasonable, intelligible, that we can study them in the lab and demonstrate that the steps that we propose are plausible and... we can demonstrate it, then I think that's as close to understanding the origin of life [as] we can get. ...[I]f those principles are generalizable, then as a scientist, that's... a pleasing thing. I'm not sure there's any more that's more pleasing to me, personally as a scientist."

"I wouldn't expect populations of bacteria to give rise, without endosymbiosis, to complex morphology and the kind of intelligence that we have, elsewhere. I think that it would require (I'm going out on a limb here)... an endosymbiosis for the reasons I've been saying, and... that endosymbiosis is a) rare and b) likely to go wrong. So I can't put a number on how improbable it is. It's just that I would say that it's a factor that a lot of people would rather not think about. If you have an agenda where you'd like to find complex life out there, the SETI people for example... probably don't want to hear this kind of stuff. It says that it's less likely... it's not an inevitable outcome of physics."

"In Transformer, Lane indulges in a great many of the banes of popular science writing... These kinds of over-earnest attempts to defang a complicated subject are an enduring mystery; the people who need them won't read the book, and the people who'll read the book don't need them. ...Fortunately, Lane’s discussion ...is itself very winningly animated, and that saves it ...Lane’s personal excitement ...goes a long way toward making ...biochemistry comprehensible ...[T]his is done through personalities; Transformer is as much about the people investigating the Krebs cycle as it is about the cycle ...That kind of personality pervades the book and makes it ...consistently fascinating reading."

"They [bacteria] haven't used it [their more complex metabolism]... to give rise to more complex morphologies beyond the kind of stromatolite type structures, beyond s. That seems to be a limit. Some multicellularity, some degree of differentiation and complexity, but nothing... to compare with the flea."

"I read a book called The Vital Question. ...A few months later... I had also ordered Nick’s three other books, read two of them, and arranged to meet him in New York City. ...He is one of those original thinkers who makes you say: More people should know about this guy’s work. ...Nick is talking about how getting energy right at the cellular level explains how life began, and how it got so complex. ...I'm intrigued by the practical applications of Nick’s work. Mitochondria could play a role in diseases like cancer. ...[O]ur foundation’s global health team is talking to Nick about the potential implications for the fight against malnutrition. ...[T]here’s no telling whether his specific arguments will turn out to be right. But even if they don’t, I suspect his focus on energy will be seen as an important contribution to our understanding of where we come from, and where are we going."

"What does life do then? ...it seems reasonable that the earliest forms of life were ic... [i.e.,] they grew from gases... found in normal geological environments through an energy flux which is equivalent to cells which we see today, which is to say, what all life does today. There's a very simple phrase from Mike Russell... "hydrogenate CO2"... [i.e.,] add onto to make organic molecules. That is the structure of in cells, and different cells can get hydrogen from all kinds places. They can strip it out of water. They can get it from , but it also comes bubbling out of the ground as hydrogen gas, and that seems to be the simplest form of life imaginable as... life on earth. It's reacting hydrogen and CO2, and they don't react easily. The way that cells make them react... is to effectively use an electrical charge on a ... [T]here are environments like deep sea s that provide... for free with an equivalent electrical charge across a barrier, and I think... that's the way to see the question."

"In this book, I will take you through twelve key experiments that marked... a discovery... we now see as essential to our understanding of the world... [T]hese experiments embody the spirit of enquiry that stems from human curiosity. ...[T]hey have changed our lives in almost every aspect, from computing to medicine, from energy to communications and from art to archaeology."

"Beginning with the discovery of s, Sheehy... continues... through a series of experiments that led to the discoveries of the electron (1897), atomic nucleus (1911), and measurement of the (1923). By the end of the first third of the book the theory that the atom is the smallest piece of matter is in tatters and the remaining chapters of the book describe the fascinating experiments physicists designed to better understand the particles that make up an atom."

"Physics will always be, at its core, about understanding our place in the Universe..."

"Later sections... describe the gargantuan instruments that enabled scientists to detect... elusive particles at the heart of the standard model... as the and... Higgs boson. Through each tale, The Matter of Everything explores how the pursuit of basic science has led to unexpected discoveries... These findings now underpin cancer treatments, personal electronics, and... how scientists investigate the way lava flows deep below Earth’s surface. Sheehy carefully considers each of these breakthroughs through the lens of the people who defied the odds to uncover the mysteries of our universe."

"[E]xperiments take us to that frightening frontier of vulnerability: the real world."

"While a theoretical physicist's ideas must take into account the results of experiments, an experimental physicist has a more nuanced job. She is not simply testing out the ideas of theoretical physicists; she is asking her own questions and designing and physically building equipment she can use to test those ideas. ...[H]er practical knowledge ranges from to chemistry, from to ."

"The reason we can say today that we know all this stuff, that we think our theoretical models represent reality, is not because we have pretty mathematics but because we have done experiments."

"I suppose I was trying to figure out the meaning of my own existence. ...I went about it in a more indirect way: I set about trying to understand the entire Universe."

"The Standard Model of particle physics classifies all known particles in nature and the forces through which they interact. ...[O]ur current version came about in the 1970s. This theory is an absolute triumph: it is mathematically elegant and unbelievably precise, yet it fits on the side of a mug."

"Our view of the smallest constituents in nature has changed rapidly in the last 120 years... Some way into the twentieth century this work became known as "high-energy physics,"... Today the study of all the many particles and how they formed, behave and transform is simply called particle physics."

"Over the last century the experiments... have gone from single-room setups led by one person to the largest machines on Earth. The era of "Big Science," which began in the 1950s... now... involve collaborations of over a hundred countries and tens of thousands of scientists. ...[N]o individual country can achieve these feats alone."

"Five years earlier... [a]s my eyes adjusted to the darkness, the true wonder of this designated "dark sky site" revealed itself. ...The stars and planets weren't up there and I wasn't down here: it was all part of one enormous physical system called the Universe. I was a part of it too. ...I'd never really felt my place in it until that moment."

"Suddenly, nothing else mattered. I wanted to know... about gravity and particles and and relativity. About stars and atoms and light and energy. Above all, I wanted to know how it was all connected and how I was connected to it. ...[I]t mattered to me as a human ...if I managed it even a little bit, I'd not have wasted this little blip of time as a conscious being. I decided to become a physicist."

"[A]s I studied more physics the question... at the core... was: "What is matter, and how does it interact to create everything around us—including ourselves?""

"The Standard Model tells us that all the matter that makes up our everyday existence is composed of just three particles. ...[T]wo types of s called "up" and "down" which forms our s and s. These... with the electrons make up atoms, held together by forces: electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces."

"I'd just been asked by four particle physics professors... my PhD interview was conducted over an unstable internet connection... "what do you find fascinating about particle physics?" ...I told them of my wonder at the way physics seemed to be able to describe everything: from the smallest s to the atoms that make up our bodies, up to the largest scales of the Universe, and how all of this was connected. Particle physics, I said, was the foundation of it all."

"Accelerator physicists constantly discover new ways of creating beams to help learn... about particle physics. ...[T]he nearest hospital almost certainly houses a particle accelerator. ...We build particle accelerators to study viruses, chocolate and ancient scrolls."

"So we still use a few cyclotrons, but most of the machines that people talk about, especially in the media, are a different type of machine which we call a , and we have two of these types of machines at the Rutherford lab at Harwell. One is the ISIS Neutron Source that I'm associated with, and there's also the ..."

"So that's one example of how a wave can be used to accelerate particles, but... I brought along some scale model protons [large beach balls] and I thought what I'd get you to do is for you guys to be the wave and the scale model protons are going to accelerate across the wave [beach balls moved by audience hand wave]... Eleven-year-olds do this really well, I'm warning you. You've got competition."

"[S]ynchrotrons are fascinating machines. The original idea was actually from an Aussie... called Marcus Oliphant and the idea here... instead of them having particles that start in the center and spiral outwards... you keep the particles confined to one , one , and as the particles gain energy you increase the field in the magnets, the magnetic field, in time with the energy gained, in order to keep them going around in the same path."

"In physics I use this energy range of s which means the energy an electron would gain if I put it through a potential of 1 . So MeV is million electronvolts. And that's the scale of that... [cyclotron] they're standing next to..."

"If you look at a real one... the ISIS synchrotron. There are 10 sections that look almost identical... and you have these big yellow magnets... They're... s. They bend the beam around, and then there's two other main components. There are ... and... a radiofrequency cavity. Now this is basically a big box like your microwave, into which we pump electromagnetic waves, and this sets up a inside there, and you have to time the voltage of that standing wave with the passage of the particles in order to get them to accelerate."

"I want to go back to about the late 1920s and 1930s when a new type of was invented, called the . These are still in operation today, but the original ones... This is a patent from... and this is 2 Ds as we call them... electrical cavities which would sit inside a whopping great ... [W]e start in the center with some particles, and they always have to be charged particles. So either electrons, s... s, charged atoms. Things like that, and we give them a bit of a kick, because there is a voltage between these two [Ds] halves, and each time the particle moves between those two halves they get a little bit of a kick, a little bit of energy. Now because they're sitting in a whopping great magnetic field, the effect... that has on a charged particle is to actually bend it around a corner. So it bends around a corner and it comes back again crossing this gap, gaining a little bit more energy and... as it continues to gain energy it spirals out... So the limit in the energy in this machine is mostly how big you can build your magnet, and how much iron you're willing to afford. Now this really was the original type of... high energy particle accelerator, and this is a photograph of Ernest Lawrence and his student Milton Stanley Livingston, who I should say, actually built the thing... [T]his machine got up to about 1 million s."

"I mean you guys are a rubbish accelerator, but we do that very very precisely. ...So what happens in a synchrotron... is that you have to time that wave very very precisely with the increase in the magnetic field in order to get the particles all synchronized, and that's why we call it a synchrotron."

"It's really hard to convey in a few minutes, how amazing it is that we know this about the universe, and the predictive power that it has... [T]hat is the reason why we really built the Large Hadron Collider."

"[A]... Large Hadron Collider radiofrequency cavity... is one of the devices, and... operates at... superconducting temperature at 400 MHz... [T]his is one of the devices into which we pump a large amount of RF energy, send the particles through and as they go through, as you demonstrated very nicely, they gain a little bit of energy..."

"Now it's not obvious to most people how this acceleration mechanism of using a wave to accelerate particles actually works. So I have a little demonstration... of an everyday example where I can use a wave to accelerate some particles. This is just an ordinary fluorescent tube that you have in the ceiling... Over here I have a plasma ball which has a 30 kHz oscillating AC voltage supply. So there's a voltage, it's a couple of kilovolts that's going up and down, up and down, up and down in the center of that thing, 30,000 times a second. And because of that, out of the plasma ball... comes an electromagnetic wave that's traveling... through space. So move towards the plasma ball and point the fluorescent tube toward the plasma ball. [It lights up] ...So actually if you move it away, notice that it's still on. Now a lot of people show this demonstration with the fluorescent tube touching the plasma ball and say that it's something about completing a circuit... It's not. It's the electromagnetic wave that's coming out... which is traveling through the fluorescent tube, exciting the electrons inside. ...you know how a fluorescent tube works."

"But I'm not, anymore, a particle physicist. I'm a particle accelerator physicist, and so it's my job to understand how to build the machines that we use in this field. And so I briefly want to run down... how these amazing machines actally operate."

"Try something for me. ...Hold [the tube] halfway down. [Half of the lamp goes out] ...You're grounding any of the electrons which are... moving inside there..."

"[Y]ou may have seen... when the LHC was in the news, diagrams that look a little bit like this. These are called s after the famous physicist, Richard Feynman... [W]hat... most of my colleagues in particle physics do, is they take this [full Standard Model] equation, they figure out which particle's interacting and how: what's coming in, what coming out. They do twenty-one pages of calculations, and they come out with a number that is the probability of that interaction happening... [D]epending on which particles go in, you choose a different term that corresponds to those, and which particle comes out, you choose a different term that corresponds to those. Turn the handle and you get your result out the other end. I just taught you quantum field theory in about 2 seconds."

"This is actually a real one. ...This is ...the smallest radiofrequency accelerating cavity in the world... This one is from a project called the which is one idea of the next generation of colliders to reach even more precise measurements in particle physics, and the inside of this thing is machined to a sub-micron precision... [T]here's a hole at the end. ...This one's for electrons, which are a very small beam, so it can be very small hole, and they travel through there. ...These are the RF ports. These are the vacuum ports. ...[T]his thing would give an electron an energy gain of ...probably 10 million electron volts. This is also a very very high gradient cavity so it gives a lot of energy in a very small space. ...The higher the frequency the smaller they get. ...That one operates at 30 GHz. It was actually so small and the machining tolerances were so tight that they've actually decided to go for 12 GHz instead... because it makes the engineering slightly easier."

"The amazing thing about this collection of particles, which admittedly looks arbitrary until you learn it in more detail, is that you can take the entire description of every known particle and interaction, other than gravity, in the universe, and write it down on a mug."

"[T]his is called the Standard Model Lagrangian, that curly \mathcal{L} at the start is for Lagrangian... and there's lots of different components of that. Now if I write it out in full, I get what is the most egotistical physics teacher in the entire world. So if I wrote it out in full... really you don't need to read it, I promise, all of the different terms in that equation describe an interaction between different types of particles and force carriers..."

"The reason the Large Hadron Collider was built was... to... investigate the fundamental constituents of matter..."

"[I]f you take Einstein's equation E=mc2, E is energy, m is the mass and c is 299,792,458 meters per second, so that squared, I'd have to get to tell me what that is, but that's a very big number. So it takes an enormous amount of energy to create even a tiny tiny amount of matter. So that's why, over the years, our machines have gotten bigger and bigger and bigger, and reached up to higher and higher energies in order to create particles of higher and higher masses. Now that might seem slightly counterintuitive, but if we look down at the low energy scale, we get our... everyday objects, and in fact up here at sort of 10 MeV, which is like a sort of everyday energy scale, are the up and s where our s and s are created from. And if we go up in energy scale, we slowly... over time discovered all these other types of s and s, and all these other things that seem to play no role in our everyday lives."

"[I]nside the atom there are only... three different types of particles, which are the up and s, they're the constituents of s and s inside the atom, and the electron. Everything else there plays very little role in our day-to-day lives. But over about the last century we've discovered that all of these particles fit together in a neat theory that describes our universe to something like 9 or 10 decimal places. It is an incredible amount of discovery and work that's gone into it, and I cannot do it justice in... two minutes. But the latest piece that we've discovered using the Large Hadron Collider, and one of the reasons, but not the only reason that it was built, was to discover... the Higgs boson."

"[T]he way that we've learned all of this stuff about the universe is by taking the particles... smashing them into each other, and literally seeing what comes out."

"So why was that particular one built? ...I don't have time to give you a crash course in particle physics. Are there any particle physicist in the room..? No, I'm safe. It's fine, okay. No, I used to be one, and then I switched fields."

"And if you go up and up and up and up, we understand how the different forces in the universe work, from electromagnetism to the strong and weak nuclear force, and then finally right at the top we get to this Higgs thing, which is the theory behind why all of the other particles in the Standard Model have a ."

"So my name's Suzie. I'm a physicist... an accelerator physicist, and I work at the University of Oxford. I run a research group there in... high intensity s... I... spend half my time at Harwell campus... I'm also a member of the , not the other ISIS, just to be clear."