• Question: what is your greatest discovery?

    Asked by charlie to Jackie, Michele, Oliver, Vicky, Yelong on 9 Mar 2015. This question was also asked by Samuel Hill.
    • Photo: Jaclyn Bell

      Jaclyn Bell answered on 9 Mar 2015:

      Its difficult for me to answer this as a theorist… I work on high-energy particle physics which studies the particles that make up protons and neutrons – these are called quarks and gluons. But they are never seen as separate particles unless you are at really really high energies and then you can treat them as two separate things, quarks on one side, gluons on the other. Otherwise at all other energies you can think of them as being stuck together. I look at these particles and the way they can interact, using Feynman diagrams (you should Google Feynman – he’s a pretty cool guy) and my research looks at these interactions in different gauges (where we can think of each gauge as being a different set of mathematical conditions we have to satisfy). I have published a couple of papers on this research, where I compare these interactions in different gauges and these results are used by other people in their research. So although it might seem like I haven’t made a big discovery, somewhere down the line my little puzzle piece will help in completing the jigsaw and hopefully one day lead to an amazing discovery 🙂 It is really hard these days to make discoveries by yourself, but don’t let that put you off research – in particle physics especially it is all about scientists from all over the world working together 🙂

    • Photo: Oliver Brown

      Oliver Brown answered on 9 Mar 2015:

      I’d like to second Jaclyn! Science is all about working together and for any one person to discover one particular thing is extremely rare these days.

      I’m also only near the start of my PhD, so I haven’t discovered anything at all! Even if I had though, it would be hard to claim the discovery was really mine. Isaac Newton once said “If I have seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”, and he meant that although his insights in to the world around him were revolutionary, he had only built upon the work of those who came before him.

      I didn’t invent the transistor, or the logic gate, or the computer. I didn’t develop quantum theory, or pioneer the use of multi-dimensional boxes of numbers to describe quantum physics, and I didn’t even discover how to make those boxes small enough to store on a computer. What am I doing is taking all of that amazing work, and pushing it to its current limits in the hope of finding something new. I’m doing my little bit to expand human knowledge out in to the unknown, and one day I hope someone will stand on my shoulders and see a little further!

    • Photo: Vicky Bayliss

      Vicky Bayliss answered on 10 Mar 2015:

      nothing ground breaking either I’m afraid. I mean, when I went to uni and had to wash my clothes for the first time, I discovered that I should not put a new black pair of jeans in the wash with everything else, because almost all your clothes get turned grey in the process. But that is not really a discovery that will move mankind forwards…

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