• Question: Does your work help space exploration?

    Asked by anon-201754 to Andy on 7 Mar 2019.
    • Photo: Andy Buckley

      Andy Buckley answered on 7 Mar 2019:

      Not in the short term, but I think if we ever want to be a Star-Trek-style exploring-the-cosmos kind of species, then we’re going to have to know how deep subatomic things work. Maybe some day we’ll figure out how to turn them into machines for power (like we did for nuclear fission, and are doing with fusion), or for playing games with spacetime itself… only one way to find out!

      (Actually, some of my past work may help a little. I worked on modelling of the ATLAS detector’s interactions with particles, which led to improvements in the codes that are used to model space devices, and also medical scanning. Humans are largely modelled as the interaction of particles with water! And work I’ve done on relatively low-energy collisions of the stuff inside protons is used to improve modelling of cosmic rays.)

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