The Matter of Everything, Dr Suzie Sheehy
Twelve ground-breaking experiments from the twentieth century that changed the course of history.
Asking questions has always been at the heart of physics, our unending quest to understand the Universe and how everything in it behaves. How do we know all that we know about the world today? It’s not simply because we have the maths – it’s because we have done the experiments.
In The Matter of Everything, accelerator physicist Suzie Sheehy introduces us to the people who, through a combination of genius, persistence and luck, staged the ground-breaking experiments of the twentieth century that changed the course of history. From the serendipitous discovery of X-rays in a German laboratory, to the scientists trying to prove Einstein wrong (and inadvertently proving him right), to the race to split open the atom, Sheehy shows how our most brilliant, practical physicists have shaped innumerable aspects of how we live today. Radio, TV, the chips in our smartphones, MRI scanners, radar equipment and microwaves, to name a few: these were all made possible by their determination to understand, and control, the microscopic.
Pulling physics down from the theoretical and putting it in the hands of the people, The Matter of Everything is a fascinating expedition through the surprising, and occasionally accidental, experiments that transformed our world, and a celebration of the creative and curious people behind them.
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About the Author
Dr Suzie Sheehy is a physicist, science communicator and academic who divides her time between her research groups at the University of Oxford and University of Melbourne. Her research addresses both curiosity-driven and applied areas and is currently focused on developing new particle accelerators for applications in medicine. She was awarded a Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 fellowship and was a Royal Society University Research Fellow at the University of Oxford.
An award-winning public speaker, presenter and science communicator, Suzie is dedicated to sharing science beyond the academic community. Her 2018 TED talk has been viewed over 1.8M times and she has been an expert TV presenter for a number of Discovery Channel shows including four seasons of Impossible Engineering. In her talks and shows, Sheehy loves to bring real-life demonstrations and experiments, and has shared these with hundreds of thousands of audience members. She also designed Accelerate! a particle physics showed aimed at children, which ran in the UK and Germany.
You can follow her work here:
Twitter: @suziesheehy
Instagram: @drsuziesheeh
Website: suziesheehy.com