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hello and welcome to Technically Speaking where scientists and engineers come together to chat about a common interest share knowledge and satisfy some curiosity i'm Ellie and I'm joined by Laura and Antonia to talk about how technology has changed including particle accelerators we used to have in our homes so Laura you used to work with particle accelerators what are they doing in our houses i used to work in a radiation science laboratory that ended up with two fairly sizable particle
accelerators much bigger than you'd normally fit in your house and we were using those to look at the effect of radiation on various materials and chemical systems like all good researchers do but they work in quite a similar way to the way that old school TVs used to work and I never really appreciated that until I started working with the research ones that's cool so you mean cathode ray tubes they're like things in the back of old telly's this is what you're talking about yeah we
tend to just refer to them as CRTs for those of us that are old to know and Antonia I know that you haven't worked with particle accelerators but you have been up to something related yeah the closest I can say is I've been to CERN which has the large Hydron collider at the time it was the largest particle accelerator in the world and I was just really impressed cuz there was so much involved engineering you know scientists come together and it's to understand the
fundamentals of the universe so I was like "Yeah this is a this is a pretty cool i'm glad I I came on this school
trip." That's a pretty cool school trip I think to go all the way to Switzerland isn't it that's what I said yes and I think the circumference is like big enough to actually be like a city wow that is seriously impressive so at CERN they're like firing this is like the ultimate particle acceleration right like they're firing them super fast in a ring round and round i think you can probably all tell immediately that I know idea what particle accelerators are what they do so Laura and Antonio are
going to teach me some physics it's particles right so let's start with something we know so how small are we talking here so it was called hydron glider because it that was the type of particles it was accelerating and they are the things that make up an atom right with you so far the accelerator itself had a circumference of 27 km and so it would use a bunch of magnets cuz they're charged particles and they could speed them up and then when they got to the speed that they wanted which was as
close to the speed of light as they could they would collide them and they got about 1 millionth off the percentage of the speed of light the obvious question or maybe not the obvious question is why like what for for fundamental physics for fundamental physics okay Laura tell me more i mean to be fair I never worked with the Large Hadron Collider and I've not visited it so I assume Antonia does actually know more than I do about that but they're essentially trying to
uncover things like once we get past atoms what are those atoms made of and how do those things interact and I guess what are the forces that help mediate things that go on in the atoms that was my understanding oh good basically it's to mimic the processes that would have happened during the big bang so how did the universe actually form and that would have started you know supposedly with an explosion of energy so they have particles doing that hitting into each
other causing all sorts of kathuffle yeah and it would generate different particles like the Higs Bzon was discovered in one of the experiments and that was sort of the aim cuz they knew theoretically this should happen but they didn't have the technology to prove it and then detect it did they ever find the Higs Bzon that's what I remember because obviously my last name is Higs so I got a lot of that came up multiple times uh whether I was related to that researcher and scientist but I I
remember vaguely way back when CERN was like first opened or whatever that that was potentially what they were looking for but whether they found it I'm not in the physics realm enough to know they do a bunch of different things that's just like one of the things they've been doing they do other stuff that isn't quite as niche I imagine cuz you can do lots of different things with particle accelerators and I think they have more than one there is that right Antonia i
think they have different detectors doing different jobs but ultimately they have Oh no they have like the big ring and then they have a smaller one within it which do different jobs yeah cuz I've worked on much smaller versions of these so there's diamond light source in the UK that starts off with a linear accelerator accelerating electrons and then that is then put into the storage ring similar to what CERN does I guess and that just kind of whizzes around and
around and as it goes around in this circle it gives off X-rays breathing radiation and you can do lots of different things with those X-rays they have all these pipes that guide the X-rays and you can do different things depending on how it's set up it's quite cool that is cool i didn't know that they were giving off X-rays and I need to now remember that X-rays are not just used for looking at people's bones that is but one application so how do we get from giant wizzy particles going around
and around in Switzerland to having a particle accelerator in your house oh so going back to cathode ray tubes or CROT TVs they essentially use the same principle where you've got a charged particle your electrons they're in a vacuum in your tube and you're accelerating them towards a positive charge and then Antonia said you have magnets that help control where the particle goes so you basically got two sets of magnets that mean that electron can scan really really quickly across
the TV screen and uh hit pixels which activates and makes them glow and then you get color that's fun oh I like that a lot it's amazing how what I think is quite a complicated piece of technology is like outdated today yeah like we don't use those anymore do we it's all like flat panel liquid crystal things and organic LEDs yeah oleds very expensive yeah we bought a new TV about five years ago and we did not buy an OLED because that is a pricey purchase but they do take up a lot less space
that is true they are flat yeah you don't need to fit in a glass vacuum behind the screen true true exactly it has got me wondering though cuz we're talking about when you slow down a particle it gives off X-rays whether our old school TVs were giving them off and I assume not otherwise we wouldn't have had them well not giving off enough yeah to cause a problem but the electrons are still going pretty fast so I looked it up as I was curious about this it's 15%
speed of light so it's still no certain wow but in your house though that seems very impressive yeah and when that slows down when it hits um the pixels at the front it's got to be giving off some sort of energy other than just exciting those pixels but I didn't really look into it too much beyond that cuz I was going down weird rabbit holes i thought I should stop we love a weird rabbit hole i'm going to guess that there wasn't enough power to do anything like generate an X-ray or or or other
electromagnetic radiation i'm not entirely sure power would make a difference you've got your electron going at a really fast speed when it slows down it gives off an amount of energy and you could work out what that would correspond to in terms of the spectrum of X-rays if that is what it's giving off were there loads this is what I'm imagining because presumably there were however many pixels on an old TV you had to have loads of electrons hitting them all at the same time
otherwise you wouldn't be able to see anything yeah I think you had one beam of electrons for each of the three different pixel colors so you just have three beams going continuously and scanning across i'd be like Antony's looking at what I just said as we're talking now to fact check whether 50% the speed of light is actually fast enough for electron to go off X-rays well that was a rabbit hole I wanted to look at but just to get back into the conversation I'm not sure it was was it
three rays that are different because I was like how do they generate the rays in the same tube yeah or or were they sort of like filtered or did they have different things that would activate based on the energy and they were just like different colors do you know do you know like how LED TVs have all three colors but it's just whether they turn on which pixel to give you the the color mix yeah now I have so many things I want to look up about how a CRT works
and no one even uses them anymore yeah this is why I stopped cuz I thought I'm just going to keep going and I'll just lose sight of what I'm trying to achieve here which is the general understanding i guess they were in a vacuum the whole time so they like didn't die i'm thinking too much like a biologist i need to think more physics because like if you put your TV on then the power in the TV heats up the electrons in the tube and then they hit the pixels and
then that makes color but and then if you turn your TV off then they all just cool down and go back to chilling in the tube they would essentially hit phosphorus which would glow right and that's how you got the color okay but then that wasn't like a one time use situation the electrons then stayed in the tube for the next time that you turned it on or you got more yeah you produce more every time you turn it on so I guess you produced more yeah if you look at like TV programs from like the
40s and 50s where they have to wait for it to warm up and the picture to begin to appear on the screen when it was in black and white oh okay that makes sense so and I guess you you would start off with a source where you need to get the electrons off somehow which is often by heating yeah I was going to say where did they come from yeah in modern technology like so we have electron microscopes and they use a beam of electrons rather than light to look at really small things that you can't see
with light cuz light has too long a wavelength yeah they have electron gungs that I think are used as some sort of tungsten filament so you heat the tungsten off electrons come off it and you accelerate them towards a charge right or away from a charge so there is some sort of source of the electrons that you need in the first place to do whatever you're doing but that's cool that you know there's still tech that uses these principles that's still going on yeah it's the same for radiation
therapy as well they start off with electrons smack them into a target and that gives off X-rays and they can use that X-ray beam and do really complicated things with it to direct it at very specific parts of a human body and treat them for cancer so radiation therapy is then electrons is still this principle of like focusing a beam of something very small at something else exactly yeah and smack him into something in this case a person or a tumor eventually i wonder if
anyone was ever like scared of these things because you mentioned about this X-ray radiation and people get very confused I feel sometimes about radiation and then that confusion and lack of understanding leads to fear were people scared of their telly's it's a good question i'm I mean not all although I'm aware of using a CRT TV when I was a kid but not of any worry about whether it might cause any health problems i'm not that old i don't know if back in the day people were concerned
or if they were just so excited to be able to see pictures moving yeah i was going to say where did this it started with cinema right and then telly's became more and more common and then we got color for the queen's coronation or the wedding or one of those like big coronation I believe it was when people started to really get TVs in their houses but I don't remember people were having a panic but then I wasn't there exactly if you were there and you're listening
let us know if people were panicking yeah about x-ray specifically not about the train coming out of the screen well the thing is you mentioned trains i'm pretty sure I'd heard that in the Victorian era people were actually scared of trains because they were new technology that went faster than the older technology so horses i understand that though like that to me makes sense because they go quite fast in the Victorian era they would have been steam powered so they would have stunk and had
great big plumes of smoke coming out of them and if you've never seen a train I can imagine it's quite loud quite terrifying they are i've experienced them they come through near me occasionally cuz we have an historic railway they are all incredibly loud painfully loud and huge yeah and they can set things on fire quite easily which they did a few weeks ago around here when uh we were in the middle of a drought but that I don't think is what people were scared of what they were
scared of was because it was going so fast they might age more quickly wow and this is what I remember from going to a museum so I might be misremembering it to be fair but doesn't that seem odd that going on a train traveling over like 40 60 m hour was scary because you're my age yeah because you're going faster so therefore it's taking less time so why why would you be aging that doesn't make any sense because you've got you've got there quicker if anything
you should be getting younger yeah is that how relativity works cuz anyone remembered is isn't it yeah cuz in Flight of the Navigator when he went into the future he was still the same age and all his family had aged oh I see what you mean yeah yeah i don't know if Victorians were thinking along those lines and going "Yeah relativity trains
same thing." I think Victorian times might predate relativity so it was very much you know we have no idea how the world works so yeah trains going that fast maybe could be aging people or maybe they just got confused with how you know centrifugal forces made their skin flap hanging out the edge of the passenger window and getting G forces and wind straight into your face but I mean people are scared of some tech like even microwaves made people panic initially
but to be fair they did have a point didn't they end up having to shield them i don't know the history of this but I mean they give off waves that can make water boil so if you're not managing them correctly I can see how they could be pretty dangerous initially they didn't have the like dotty thing that they have now i don't know what you would call that you know if you look at a microwave door it's got like a screen of dots yes in front of it and that protects you from the microwaves
themselves or a different kind of radiation i think it's to protect you from the microwave radiation itself because it's like this is my logic the holes are smaller than the wavelength so they can't get out oh cool so it's it's literally trapped i think like logically I don't think the size of the hole I think this is a madeup explanation i think it must be something else but people have told me that's the reason why it's that size you can see those holes though and aren't microwaves a
smaller wavelength than you can see they're micron length aren't they so like a micrometer hence the name am I misremembering that i feel like we should have done more research before this episode there's so many questions that you don't think of necessarily at the time it can range from meter to 1 nanometer nope not nanometer millimeter i don't know why I said nano oh so the whole micron thing is just smaller than something that's bigger in that case not what I was
thinking of the literal micrometer no maybe that was done for public opinion rather than necessarily scientific accuracy yeah but I mean there was mobile phones as well people were scared that they would give off radiation that would fry their brains i think people are still scared of like things like 5G there's a lot of people campaigning against that it's not an argument I've ever listened to though cuz it just sounds like fearongering i remember not necessarily being told but being aware
when I first got a mobile phone that you shouldn't put it in your pocket because whatever was coming off the phone in terms of radiation or phone vibes I suppose was like damaging to your organs and it would give you cancer of your like ovaries or uterus because of having your phone close to your pelvic region but I don't know where that came from and why people thought that at the time why I was aware of that it sounds like just a general radiation it's bad but
radiation is lots of different things it's light that we see it's electromagnetic radiation right which is light um you could be talking about radio waves as well if you wanted which I assume is how phones used to operate on radio wave signals that's exactly what I was thinking was people had radio station radio stations and little the radio player what do you call that radio a radio radio yeah and that would be taking radio waves and emitting sound waves to you so how is that any
different if it's in a in a mobile phone yeah I think maybe because people don't understand how it works like I couldn't tell you how 5G works or like Wi-Fi in general other than the fact that if it's on and the light is green my laptop will connect that's literally all I need to know so I don't understand it therefore I fear it is what some people say yes I think that's probably true so what's interesting is because obviously since we first heard that old wives tale or
whatever you want to call it about don't putting a phone in your pocket I decided to look it up there was an NHS website that explained all the dangers related to mobile phones and the research that had been undertaken and essentially the only observable difference they had was it might heat your body up by 0.2° C okay which presumably you could do more by just being in a warm room or exercising or sitting in the sun that seems like a weird thing for our National Health Service to have to
explain to people but I guess there was a reason they like investigated a lot of different things and it just had no observable difference except for temperature and the fact that using a mobile phone whilst driving is your biggest danger because it distracts you from the road yes not because it's emitting harmful X Y and Z not because it messes with the GPS or anything no suddenly emitting more radiation cuz it's in motion and doing things faster oh my god it can time travel oh could
you imagine if that was a thing oh my word you've crossed the streams they're going to do something stupid why do you have to turn your phone off on a plane does that mess with stuff i remember looking at this and there was like an incident where lots of people's phones started pinging a cell tower at the same time and it was on a small aircraft and it did mess with some navigation system I think it was i think it also causes just more pe more issues for people on
the ground right they just can't bother to deal with 300 people on an easy jet flight to Spain texting their mates well it will happen as they try and connect to each cell tower as they fly over it right because I always wonder if it's just [ __ ] or if it's just a thing that they say so that they don't have to deal with loads of people on calls on flights for ages no I think there wasn't a limit of truth to it but I'm not too sure it applies now cuz all the electrics on planes are insulated so
unless as Antonia says cell companies really are bothered about people suddenly pinging a load of towers at the same time they even have Wi-Fi on planes now so presumably we've moved on from that and I guess we've moved on from a lot of things because we're not scared of our microwaves we're not scared of our mobile phones we're not scared of trains other than the fact that you know you could potentially be crushed by one periodically there's a level crossing
near me and you have to stop obviously the barriers come down you have to wait in the car and then you can go on and oh that is a real fear even though I know that I have seen the train pass at any moment a train could come and crush me as I cross the level crossing in my car we have footpaths that go over the train tracks around here so you have to look very carefully both ways but kids these days are never going to experience that they're not going to be scared of their
microwave we're not scared of our microwave so what are they going to be scared of in the future like is it going to be blooming AI or whatever Elon Musk's up to next always be scared of Elon Musk i mean AI does have all sorts of things going on but maybe the issue that we're worried about isn't AI taking over like Skynet but maybe just loss of jobs and massive environmental issues from using all the energy for the servers all that or knowing whether something is really true or not or is a
deep fake oh yeah we've come back round to the deep fakes recently i did see this completely AI generated video they interviewed different people on their opinion of a fictional car show and apart from a few foils it was pretty convincing it looked like random generic public chatting about stuff and they had accents they had funny speech patterns that weren't just computer speech pattern but actually you know how people trail off and don't explain themselves fully it was weird wow that is quite
scary i think I was thinking more in terms of like physical tech like a teleportation device like if you're the first person in the Victorian era to see a train and go on a train I can understand that you would be pretty scared but if you're the first person testing out a teleportation device you're going to be legging it to the back of the queue you know no one wants to be first do they i guess it would depend what it would be tested on i You wouldn't just start with humans would
you you'd build up yeah no you got to go straight into the deep end Laura don't they do it in um Willy Wonka what do they start with in Willy Wonka like an apple or a piece of candy or something oh yeah this the mic TV thing where he beamed himself onto the TV but he was tiny yes and that had to be stretched did that use Did he turn him into his constituent particles and have a beam of particles going across the room allah Star Trek i I don't think Willy Wonka
went into that much physics that's what I remember from the visualization but I just think that sounds to me like a really inefficient way cuz you have to transport those particles and then reconstitute them and make sure they're exactly the same so if you were going to do it you'd use a wormhole or some sort of maybe quantum entanglement i like the wormhole idea because I like the idea of like stepping through and like still being me rather than the like Star Trek
beam me into nothing and re rebeam me in a alien planet at the other end like would you still be you would you you know if you've been rebuilt would everything be where it was when you started like Thesius's ship yeah and there's a lot of research at the minute into what consciousness actually is and it involves from what I'd read it was something like quantum entanglement of things in your brain so it's another physics thing oh god not more physics entanglement in the brain wow i might be
misremembering that again i am quite tired but my point is if you still want to be you at the other end you also need to replicate that quantum entanglement which we don't understand yet maybe we won't try teleporting anyone anytime soon what about tech that could give you like a skill what about the other way instead of like messing with your own consciousness you could download something into your brain that would be quite fun yeah like what if VR was so convincing you thought you were there
that you've kind of like tricked your brain into believing that you're somewhere else that's potentially quite worrying but I was thinking more like having like a menu of stuff let's say I wanted to learn Spanish and then I like plug my brain into the computer and download Spanish but then I could like unknowingly give myself some junk or like spam or like a brain virus oh no that's what I would be scared of as a consequence i feel like that would be painful because your brain has to go
through a lot of biological processes to make neurons or whatever it is that encodes having that other language in your brain right yeah I guess so there must be some sort of extra connections that you have to make how do you how do you physically learn at a brain level yeah so she surely rapidly developing all of those memories or whatever you want to call them would involve an awful lot of effort on the part of your body so it would be painful and tiring i
hadn't thought of that i just assumed if we understood the brain structure well enough we could just apply that knowledge and boom new skills just restructure someone's brain this isn't better than the transportation at this point i feel like we're just teleporting bits of someone else's brain into your own brain now oh a brain transplant but in many bits oh dear it could be Kio surgery for the brain could you make a new new neuron stick it in the right place and then I don't know how neurons
even work it's electrical signals though right it's all comes back to electrical signals tiny particle accelerators in your brain in your brain i feel like I'm being kind of pessimistic and sort of shooting down all of your fancy ideas for things you want in the future with "Yeah but you need to figure these things out first."
Oh stop being logical yeah i suppose this is why we don't know what we fear cuz we literally have no idea how we're going to get there no and the thing is although I've done a lot of research with a lot of really fancy cool advanced things I'm also now going back to nature so I don't really want a lot of tech in my life however I did come across some research from my freelance work where someone wants to give plants their own humanmade control systems so they can moderate things like
how much water they have and what nutrients they're getting which will put the plants in control to an extent of their own destiny they're farmed so they're still going to get eaten but until then they're not going to do a chicken run wow no but could you imagine yeah this is going to be day of the tripffids meets what you call ginger from chicken run but if they're controlling what like how much water they get how are they doing that it sounds it from the interview that I did
they're using an ion pump which apparently is specifically designed and it needs just a very small electrical current to power it so they came up with this idea of using something called a tribbo electric nanogenerator or an artificial leaf that's a great name though well done it's a bit of a mouthful isn't it so it's an artificial leaf that's attached to the leaf of the plant and it's made of something that honestly sounds a little bit like a solar panel but not quite as complicated
and it's got an electrode going into the stem of the plant to harvest charge from it and the waxy surface of the leaf acts as an insulator so when wind makes these things blow they occasionally come into contact with each other and that generates an alternating current and that's what drives the ion pump so they can use it to deliver various different chemicals right okay how does the like cuz I'm imagining it's like a plant with a button for call for water or call for
fertilizer yeah that's what I was thinking but how do we know that it's pressing the invert inverted commas button for water or other things and also if it's wind wind powered surely it's like involuntary then right so then it's like getting water when it's had enough well I guess this is like step one of what will probably be quite a long development process this is just a proof of concept which they did in the lab using a fan okay I see i imagine the ultimate aim is
to couple that with various different sensors that monitor the plant's health so they're just harvesting power from the plant and combining it with these sensors to give the plant what it needs so is that really control the plant controlling it cuz it's like "Oh the
wind's blown i'm thirsty." Yeah I'm going no I'm going that's just f fancy engineering well it's not as if the plant necessarily knows but it will still be acting on some sort of uh signals from the plant won't it in order to know that it needs certain nutrients or is it just sensing from around it but it's not sensing the moisture level within the plant is it but it could sense that if you set it up that way there was that thing that turned up in the news ages ago that allegedly plants
scream oh I remember that yeah some scientists had developed something that could sense was it water moving through the stem and it sounded differently when the plant was drying out a and when you converted it into an audible sound it was just deemed as screaming people got the wrong end of the stick with that one similar to trains making you age i don't think we need screaming plants i don't think we need to listen maybe let's just let them be they're doing
fine they've been here millions of years we should just leave them alone well if you want to eat you need something yeah i'm not saying I don't care for the plants i'm just saying I'm not sure they are screaming if you've done so many steps to interpret it into screaming also I'm not sure we need the double leaf plant in control taking what it needs system i feel like whatever we've got so far has been working maybe we don't need to overengineer this i'm intrigued maybe that's a feature episode
about global food production or something because I remember reading when I was looking into what even is meat and looking at corn that corn was invented in response to a worry in the 70s that we were going to have a global food shortage because populations were increasing oh and we just run out of resources so you need to be more efficient with your resources so maybe that's where this is going yeah I I am all for having a bit more of a tailored approach rather than just put a bunch of
stuff down and hope for the best that is my gardening technique and I always feel sorry for my plants when they start to look a bit pathetic i don't know what's wrong with you but if you could speak if you could tell me if you could tell me I'll give you some nitrogen whatever you need okay despite the sorry states of our garden I think we have covered quite a lot we started with particle accelerators both big and small in your house and in Switzerland i've attempted
to learn some physics today thank you Laura and Antonia and then we moved on to all sorts of scary things and what tech we're still using and why people were scared about it in the first place and what even we might be scared of in the future so if you've enjoyed this episode stick around and we'll see you in the next one the views expressed in this podcast belong entirely to the person that said them they do not represent any industry or organization if you enjoyed listening to these views
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