From the cosmos to consumers

This event was part of the RSE’s summer events programme, Curious.
Find out more on the Curious website.

How ‘Big Science’ discoveries drive technological innovation

2019 marked 30 years since the birth of the World Wide Web, when CERN scientist Tim Berners-Lee sparked an internet revolution that would transform our modern consumer society – not least during the extraordinary global lockdown of the past 18 months!

The profound impact of fields like particle physics and astronomy extends far beyond the internet, however.  Join our expert panel as we discuss how “Big Science” research is powering innovations and technology that are shaping and improving every aspect of our lives – from medicine and security to environmental sensing and global communications.

Please note transcripts are automatically generated, so may feature errors.

Professor Martin Hendry FRSE 

Good afternoon, every one a very warm welcome to Curious. My name is Martin Hendry. I’m a professor of gravitational astrophysics and cosmology at the University of Glasgow, and I’m the convener of the Royal Society of Edinburgh public engagement programme. So I’m delighted to be here to welcome you to our panel discussion. And I’m very glad that you’ve joined us on our theme today from the cosmos to consumers. Well, I think that will give us a theme, which will prompt a very lively discussion. I’m looking forward to that in just a moment, or welcome our panellists, and then I’ll introduce our topic, we will all introduce our topic through a series of very short presentations. But there will be lots of time for questions and discussion after that. We’re using the webinar format, there are people still joining, and I think as I speak, that means that you can post questions via the Q&A box. So you should be able to see that at the bottom of your zoom screen. And by all means, you can start doing that during the presentations. If you wish. I’ll keep a close eye on the questions as they come in. And then throughout the remainder of the session, I’ll do my very best to bring everyone into the conversation. But given our limited time today, I hope you’ll forgive us if we’re not able to answer all our questions, but we will do our best. So without further due, let me invite our panellists to introduce themselves. And I think Giles is going to go first.

Professor Giles Hammond FRSE 

I think that’s all good afternoon, everybody. My name is Giles Hammond. I’m a professor of gravitational physics at the University of Glasgow. I’ve been working on a sort of measurement of gravity since around 1998. When I do my PhD. I’ve also spent some time in the US working on the Advanced LIGO gravitational wave detector, and seismic isolation systems. I’ve been in Glasgow since 2007. And though I lead an activity to build the mirror suspensions for advanced LIGO, they also have a second research group, which is looking at spin-off technologies, and we’re developing microelectromechanical sensors as precision gravity devices. Thanks.

Professor Martin Hendry FRSE 

Thanks very much, Giles. I now welcome Victoria.

Professor Victoria Martin 

Hi, there. Sorry, I’ve got a bit of noise. My laptop’s not happy right now. But I’m Victoria Martin. I’m a professor of collider physics as my official title at the University of Edinburgh. And I work research-wise, primarily on two projects, both big collaborative experiments at CERN. So the first one is the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. And the second one is CLICK DP. And I’m not going to talk very much about that, because we’ve actually got the spokesperson as one of the panellists as well. So and what do I do with these things? Well, personally, I’m very interested in the Higgs boson. So I’m sure people have heard about the Higgs boson. It was discovered nine years ago at CERN. But although we discover something that’s not enough, of course, we always want to know more, and there’s a lot more still to learn about the Higgs boson. So I’m using these colliders, Atlas, which is running at the moment and click DP, which may or may not happen in the future to learn more about the Higgs boson.

Professor Martin Hendry FRSE 

Thank you very much, Victoria. Next is Stuart.

Professor Stuart Reid FRSE 

Good afternoon, everyone. A pleasure to be here. So similar to Giles Hammond. I work in astrophysics like yourself, I’m sure read I’m head of Biomedical Engineering at Strathclyde. So I originally started my research career with people like Martin Henry and Giles Hammond, in gravitational wave detection, but been using some of these precision measurement technologies and Giles was describing some aspects of that to transfer into other fields. And actually, we’re involved in stem cell research and applying vibration to stem cells to convert them into bone cells, which can then be used for the surgical bone graft. And so at the moment, in my research group about half work on laser miracle things or gravitational wave observatories, other half work on stem cell technologies. So yeah, that’s my short introduction that I’ll describe a little bit more in a few moments.

Professor Martin Hendry FRSE 

Thank you. Um, so our final panellist is Edie.

Professor Aidan Robson FRSE 

Yes, good afternoon, everyone. I’m Aiden Robson. I’m a professor of particle physics at the University of Glasgow. Like Victoria, I’ve worked for years searching for no measuring the Higgs boson. More recently, I’ve been focusing in particular on planning our next-generation particle collider to come after the Large Hadron Collider. And so I’m the leader of the Compact Linear Collider detector and physics collaboration at CERN, and also co-convener for physics for the International Linear Collider proposed for Japan. And I’ll say a bit more about this thing et cetera.

Professor Martin Hendry FRSE 

Excellent. So a very warm welcome to everyone we’re going to do a very short series of presentations to set the theme of our topic today. And I’m going to go first, and I’m principally here just as chair, and we want to hear mainly from our panellists. But I wanted to just share a few thoughts with you about this topic and going with the theme of from the cosmos to consumers. Well, that’s taking us all the way from the subatomic world to colliding black holes billions of light-years away. But fields like Particle Physics and Astronomy in gravitational-wave astronomy, in particular, are unlocking the fundamental secrets of the universe through decades-long efforts by 1000s of scientists across the globe, including, as you’ve just heard, leading researchers at several of our Scottish universities. So the breakthroughs that have come in these fields have been recognised in a conventional way by the academic distinctions, for example, two recent Nobel prizes with strong Scottish connections. Firstly, in 2013, for the discovery of the Higgs boson, where the prize was awarded to Peter Higgs himself first, and no doubt you will be aware. And then in 2017, for the discovery of gravitational waves, the Nobel laureates were three senior members of the LIGO collaboration, but they explicitly acknowledged in their prize-winning lectures, the contributions made by, for example, the scientists in Glasgow. But these fields are also driving innovation and technology. And that’s what we’re here to discuss today. They’re shaping and improving every aspect of our lives from medicine and security, to environmental sensing and global communications. And the purpose of our discussion today is to share with you the stories of some of that technology. Now, cutting edge innovation like that from the world of physics isn’t new, because in the late 19th century, William Thompson, later Lord Kelvin, was a pioneer in how translating fundamental research on foundational concepts like energy and heat and electricity into commercially useful inventions. And in fact, his peerage was as much in recognition of his commercial and innovation success, what nowadays the research councils would refer to as his impact, as it was recognising his more fundamental work. So Kelvin’s work on the electrical theory of telegraph wires, for example, allowed him to devise a method for successfully sending telegraph signals along with undersea cables. And in 1858, Kelvin was on board, the steamship SS Great Eastern, when it laid the first transatlantic telegraph cable that was a quantum leap for global communication, every bit as important as the creation of the internet and the more recent past, and Kelvins breakthroughs in our understanding of thermodynamics. Well, those will ultimately underpin the technology of things as every day as refrigeration. You see that in his advert for fridges from the 1920s. Where they were referred to as “Kelvinator”. So who are the modern Kelvins? And what are the technological breakthroughs that physics is bringing to the 21st century to medicine, communications and to commerce? So over now to our panellists, and again, we’re going to hear from them individually first, before we open up the discussion to all of you to ask questions about this fascinating topic. So we’re going, to begin with, Giles.

Professor Giles Hammond FRSE 

Thank you very much, Martin. Well, of course, it’s a real pleasure to be talking about my work here in gravitational waves. So as I said, I’m from the Institute for gravitational research at the University of Glasgow. And so this slide here shows some of the work that we do in what would I’d call the fundamental physics aspect of the research group. And that is building the most sensitive length measuring devices in the world, which allow us to probe the most extreme astrophysical events. So we’re looking at colliding black holes colliding neutron stars, but we’re looking at that with terrestrial observatories at the moment. So what you can see here, on the left-hand side of my screen, is one of the mirror suspensions that we build. And this is where with Glasgow, we lead the activities and we build these suspensions for advanced LIGO, which is a US-based detector. And we hang these mirrors at the bottom these 40-kilogramme chunks are a few silica, we hang them with scintillating fibres. So we pioneering that technology that was essential to lower the noise level of the detectors to allow us to see these tiny ripples in space-time, which are due to these cosmic events. Of course, we don’t stop there, we’re developing a new field. So we’re looking at building these detectors, improving the detectors, really turning the field into an astronomical observation tool. So just like you use electromagnetic telescopes, we’re now sort of laying the foundation and with our first sort of 5060 detections We starting to develop the field of gravitational-wave astronomy. So using gravity to actually probe the universe. And of course, coming online in the next few years, we’re always sort of innovating and developing technology. And so we’re looking at the top left, right there, you can see this is a detector that’s going to go into LIGO. And it’s gonna be a LIGO-India detector. So I lead a UK effort to put a third LIGO detector in Maharashtra. And that’s in collaboration with our Indian colleagues. And then on the European stage, we’re working on putting detectors underground. And that’s what we call the Einstein Telescope. And this is a triangular detector of 10-kilometre arm length. And that will allow us to sort of probe the entire universe of binary black hole systems, for example. And of course, pushing these fundamental technological limits allows you to develop new spin-off technologies.  I got a couple of slides just to show you some examples. So when we build mirror suspensions, we have to bond and joint together glassy materials. So fused silica, for example, has applications in the development of telescope mirrors, so you can see here in the top left, this is a low expansion, glass top plate and bottom plate bonded to a heavily light-weighted telescope structure. So we can bond (unclear) to those mirrors to allow us to flex a mirror to take account of aberrations in the upper atmosphere. And that’s working with a company down south called (‘butch and house co’ unclear), we develop the sort of extremely sort of stable and robust optical setups, which can be launched on satellites. So this is in collaboration with Astrium, and this is a detector that’s a gravitational wave detector going to space, probably 2035. And then we also bond together Sapphire, and that’s got applications in areas where you need high thermal conductivity. So laser applications. And of course, we do a lot of sort of hunting for signals in noise. And on the right there. Some of our collaborators on the data analysis side, use some of the algorithms that we in the statistical techniques that we’re using gravitational wave astronomy, to improve retinal scanners. So working with a company called “Optos”, whichever over on the East of Scotland, to sort of stitch together and understand some of the artefacts in these images. So for example, if you blink your eye, you can use machine learning techniques to throw away the bad frames and keep the good ones. And that allows you to improve the efficiency of the sensors. And then finally, an activity that I’m leading in my second research group in Glasgow is we’re building precision microelectromechanical sensors. And that’s in collaboration with a company called ‘Kelvin nanotechnology’, in Glasgow, and this is a little cell here just to give you a scale. Across here is about 10 millimetres. So these are sensors that can be used in a number of areas:  environmental monitoring, defence and security.

And just as we speak, one of my PhD students, you can see him sitting here, this is on Mount Etna at the moment and he’s just installing our first MEMS sensors onto the side of Mount Etna. And we’re going to use these sensors to be probing inside the volcano using gravity to understand the magma plumbing in the Mount Etna system and use that potentially as an early warning system for predicting your options.

Professor Martin Hendry FRSE 

Thank you jail. So I think Victoria is going to take over next. Over to you now, Victoria.

Professor Victoria Martin 

What I have here, is a picture of the Large Hadron Collider. So obviously, this is not really the Large Hadron Collider. This is a picture taken from an aeroplane looking down over Geneva. And what you can see there, that’s Lac Léman – Lake Geneva. And then imprinted in this yellow line here is where the LHC (the Large Hadron Collider) is. So the Large Hadron Collider is an atom smasher. And what we do is we take protons, so protons are the centre of hydrogen atoms, and we speed them up almost to the speed of light, we can’t get faster than the speed of light, the almost the speed of light, and we have one set of protons going around the loop one way and another set going around the loop the other way. And then at four points during the ring, instead of the kind of going past each other. We steer them, so they hit head-on. And essentially the ATLAS experiment and the other experiments at the LHC. They just observe what happens when we hit these two protons together at incredibly high energies and I mean, that sounds simple to say, but it has taken years of building and constructing and understanding what’s going on. So to do that we’ve had to develop a lot of technology. So this other picture that I’m sharing now is, well, it’s a kind of portmanteau picture of what actually happens in the LHC. So the LHC is 100 metres underground. So this is a tunnel 100 metres underground. And what you can see is what we call the beam pipe. And that’s where the beam of protons, so we don’t just get one proton at a time, we have them in a beam one after each other, where they are accelerated to the speed of light. And then it’s cutaway, it’s not cut away in real life. But in this picture, it’s cutaway, so you can have an idea of what’s going in there. And then these little lines here are supposed to represent the two proton beams, one going clockwise and one going anti-clockwise. So how do you even do that? In the area where the protons go, we have to have an excellent vacuum. And to make a vacuum it’s fairly simple, in principle, you just suck out all the air. And so you have a vacuum. And the reason you need a vacuum is those protons going along, they could bump into the air molecules, and that would upset our situation. So we take out as much air as we can. In fact, we have the best vacuum, the best large scale vacuum that we know about because it’s a 27-kilometre circular vacuum. So we’ve had to develop a really excellent vacuum technology for that. The other thing is, those protons are really energetic, they’re going almost at the speed of light. And momentum tells us that if you’re going very fast in one direction, you really want to stay in that direction. Now, that’s not very good if you want a collider, at least a collider like the LHC, we don’t want the protons to keep going straight, we actually want to turn them around. So they go round and round the loop, which you can maybe just see in my background now. So we have to stop them from going straight. And for that we use magnets. So we use magnets to just deflect them very, very slightly to go all the way around the 27-kilometre loop. So they can come back, and we can accelerate them a little bit more. And then eventually we can collide them. So these are two of the real driving technologies that we’ve developed at CERN.

They are used not just at CERN, we do share them with other labs, I’d say they were definitely one of the leaders in this vacuum technology and this magnet technology. But they do have more practical spin-offs. So for example, solar panels need a vacuum unit to act efficiently. And the same technology that was developed for the LHC to take the air out and create a really good vacuum has been applied to solar panels. And those solar panels now are installed on the roof of Geneva airport. So that the energy the electricity that runs Geneva airport, uses CERN technology. And that’s one example of something that was developed for CERN, for high energy physics, that now is in everyday use. Another one that I’ll just mention that maybe we’ll come back to talk about a bit more in the discussion session is computing and data.

So in the LHC, the protons collide 40 million times a second. And our detector is essentially like a digital camera – 100-megapixel digital camera. So we’re taking 100-megapixel digital images 40 million times a second. And that’s just Atlas, my experiment, there are another three experiments as well. So that creates a huge amount of data. And so CERN has had to develop its own data management policies, and also data sharing policies to send the information out, not just at CERN, it’s not just people at CERN that want to see it. It is people like me and Edinburgh and Aidan and Glasgow and our colleagues in Paris and Berlin and Istanbul and New York and Johannesburg. So we have very good distributed computing. And a lot of this has formed some of the basis for the current cloud computing models that are out on the market as well. That is just a couple of examples of what we do at the LHC, and how it has come out slowly to consumers.

Professor Martin Hendry FRSE 

Thanks very much, Victoria. So we’ll pass it on now to Stuart.

Professor Stuart Reid FRSE 

Really pleased to have the opportunity to come along and chat. And also always good to go after Giles Hammond and some of the themes for us. But my original field of research is in gravitational-wave astronomy. So as Giles described, as shown in the top middle picture there, we build these very large observatories. They’re not observatories for light, the electromagnetic spectrum, but for detecting the gravitational signals from astrophysical events, which are just black holes colliding. And inside this facility, we have these four-kilometre arms, we send lasers down, we reflect the lasers of mirrors and you see a picture there, Giles had also shown a mirror, these are 40-kilogramme mirrors reflect the light back. And we use the lasers to measure the position of these mirrors. And so the challenge that Giles Harmon, myself, many others, you know, across the UK, and the US and other countries, spend a lot of time trying to make these mirrors the quietest place on Earth. But the technology that I am involved in is actually making these mirrors very reflective for the laser light. So not only the quietest place but also the shiniest place on Earth. So we use a coating technology. And the analogy might be if you see oil and water and see the thin layer of oil, and then you see the rainbow colours. That’s because when the oil becomes very thin, interferes with the light. And then depending on the thickness of the oil reflects different colours, and you see the rainbow pattern. And we basically make these mirrors reflective by placing many thin layers of materials, which are very carefully tuned so that they reflect one colour of light, and that’s the colour that the laser operates at. And that’s because we need the laser to hit off these mirrors all the light to be reflected because we use that light as the signal, Giles had mentioned, trying to suppress the noise. As part of that, we also want to increase the signal. So we want to use all of that light to measure the position of these mirrors. And so although these are very thin coatings directly above my head there you can see one of the systems and construction just near a Glasgow airport, which will build the coat 60-centimetre diameter mirrors 200 kilogrammes each. And so these are some of the mirrors required for future observatories like the Einstein Telescope that Giles had mentioned. So there’s lots of technology again, as we’re hearing about today, going into these large scale experiments when we think about applications, you know, other applications of this technology. Of course, laser mirror coatings, you might imagine other laser applications and the biggest industrial driver, commercialization driver for optical coatings, just now for laser applications is the laser damage performance. So that’s how much laser power you can either reflect or transmit through your optical coating before the optical coating breaks down because of heat deposited or some other effect. Now, you might think, okay, these are just large power laser obligations. But actually, that’s not the driver, consumer products drive, you know, the miniaturisation of laser devices. And even if you think of the pixels on your phone, which project laser spots in your face or the facial recognition, I mean, you don’t see that because it operates an infrared but you know, this technology, you know, people want to be miniaturised, because they want massive phones with big optical systems, imaging your face. And we also, you know, work with a Scottish company called Helia photonics in Livingston. They make very, very small laser diodes, which go into the (‘IDEE’ unclear) for pedestrian sensors. And so, the big consumer drive, the drive for consumer products using laser technology is laser damage performance. And so actually the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow and West of Scotland, where we’re creating this, what we call a testbed is just the centre really near Glasgow airport as part of the National Manufacturing Institute, Scotland, which is a Scottish Government Initiative, where we’re actually taking the coating technology that we have developed for the astrophysics projects, placing it within this centre, and allowing photonics companies and local industry across Scotland and the UK to come and to see whether this technology might be useful within their production lines. And so laser products is the one which might seem a little bit more strange as an application coming out from the astrophysics work. But as we’ve been describing gravitational wave detectors require very sensitive displacement measurements of our mirrors to see how these mirrors move due to the disturbance and gravity caused by astrophysical events. And so we use some of this precision measurement technology to look at trying to apply vibration to stem cells, and back in 2013, we over the other side of the slide to me, the BBC covered our discovery where we find that you could shake stem cells taken from adult patients. These are medicine (‘chemo’ unclear) stem cells that form connective tissue in our bodies. So bone tendon, cartilage muscle, and probably, not what patients are crying out for, also (‘conform fat’ unclear). And we find that if you shake them at 30-nanometer amplitude. So if you scale the cell up to the size of a football, it’s about the same as sliding in one sheet of paper underneath the cell and out again, by 1000 times a second, that really strongly persuades the stem cells to turn into bone cells. And so it’s drug-free, scalable, technically, it’s cheap. And therefore, it’s safe and practical to use as a way of generating surgical bone graft tissue that can be reintroduced by patients in the Sir Bobby Charlton Foundation. The famous ex-Manchester United football player has been using his funding within his charity to help translate this for people who have been injured by a landmine and so civilian landmine injuries and trying to change the outcome for these patients, by basically implanting enough bone to maintain enough bone within their legs so that they’re not confined to a wheelchair, but can have a prosthetic fitted or something. And that will have clinical trials in Glasgow next year. Another application is rather than taking stem cells out from the body and reintroducing them to the patient, we’ve also been looking at trying to create wearable devices that physically apply this vibration, I mean, similar to wearing headphones. But this has been with the spinal unit and the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital. And so trying to see whether we can use this type of nanoscale vibration to promote bone health and bone healing. And so we’ve been looking at osteoporosis, which is something that many people suffer from. But in the case of people who’ve had severe spinal cord injury, the rate at which a bone loss occurs is very rapid. And so we’ve been looking at trying to use this to slow that down or potentially reverse and improve bone health. And so we’ve been looking at not just the lease applications, but also some of these healthcare applications as well. And I will stop there.

Professor Martin Hendry FRSE 

Thank you, Stuart. So over now, to Aidan to round off our journey through lots of examples from these two fields.

Professor Aidan Robson FRSE 

Thanks for asking. So I’ve brought along two examples relating to my research work. Technologies that we’ve been developing, and have found really interesting other applications, one of them in accelerator technology, and wanting to protect your technology. So as I said, at the start, my main research interest just now is in building a very high energy collider to come after the Large Hadron Collider. And it will be a Higgs factory to produce millions of Higgs bosons. And the fundamental physics motivation for that is that the Higgs particle is entirely new. It’s not like the material particles and any other particles that we’ve known before. It interacts completely differently and so understanding those interactions gives us a really new window into fundamental physics. And one way of building a Higgs factory is to collide electrons and positrons at very high energies. And that’s what I’m interested in doing. So to get to very high energies, you need a very high accelerating gradient. And a lot of work is being done in our collaboration, the ‘click’ collaboration at CERN to increase these gradients. So, in other words, to get higher energy and a smaller length of the accelerator, and also what to do it at room temperature rather than at very low temperatures. And we’re now achieving gradients of millions of volts per metre. Now, for a collider, you need 10s of kilometres of this thing. But these recent advances mean that you can reach electron energies that are interesting for radiation therapy, for cancer treatment, in just a few metres. And this is one of these structures, I hope you can see behind me one of these accelerating structures, which supports really high frequency and radio frequency power, and can let us get to very high accelerating voltages for electrons. And so a few metres of the accelerator is something that you can build in the hospital, you can maintain it on a gantry, you can swing it around the patient, you know, especially when this is all operating at room temperature. And in a way that’s just not possible for longer accelerators. And so this accelerating technology breakthrough has enabled a whole new class of treatments or is enabling a whole new class of treatments. Reaching tumours that are quite deep, but that could not be reached by electrons before, because lower energy electrons are just less penetrating. And so teams are using our test facility at CERN to understand the behaviour of the beam in material that resembles our bodies. And also investigating the use of high very short doses every seems to be more effective. This is called FLASH therapy and then in this case with electrons, so a prototype facility has been announced with the Lausanne University Hospital and the aim is to deliver a highly targeted beam capable of reaching deep inside the patient’s body but with much fewer side effects. So this is a direct consequence of advances in linear acceleration technology achieved by the ‘click’ collaboration at CERN. We’re trying to build a Higgs factory. And but I think a particularly interesting aspect of this example is the timeline. Because the use of these accelerating structures in a collider is at least a decade away. But there’ll be used much sooner than that in hospitals.

So then the second example, on my other side here, is from the detectors that we use to measure particles originating from collisions, for example, at the Large Hadron Collider, and in particular silicon detectors, which are a speciality of both Glasgow and Edinburgh universities. And what you see here is a chip from the Medipix, the family of electronic chips. They were originally developed for the Large Hadron Collider to redirect detectors, and it works a bit like a camera. So it detects and counts individual particles and hits the pixels when an electronic shutter is open. And so this allows for really high resolution, high contrast, and very reliable images. And it was realised that that’s also very useful for imaging applications in medicine. So this has been going on for a while, Glasgow was one of the founding members of the collaboration. But as the technology has got more and more advanced, the chips can now separately record different energies of X-ray photons hitting the detectors. And that means that it can identify different components of body parts, like fat, water, calcium, and markers for diseases. And so if you think of a traditional X-ray image, it’s kind of shades of grey. But this technology extracts much more information from the X rays that are going through your body leading essentially to a kind of colour X-ray image, where for example, blood vessels can be seen really clearly in addition to the bone. And so this is really exciting.

And there are many other diverse applications of this Medipix family of chips. These devices were recently used to prove the authenticity of a painting by a Rafael through detailed analysis of the composition of the paints, and they’re installed in the International Space Station as radiation monitors. And schools in the UK can borrow them as part of the research and schools programme to do some experiments on cosmic rays and on nuclear and particle physics. And actually, one of my students has just completed her PhD are characterising and new prototype Medipix family detector for use in our future collider ‘click’. Maybe just to sum up, I think that you’re both particle physics and gravitational wave astronomy, really necessarily sit at the interface between fundamental science and technological breakthroughs. And so hope that these examples just give a sense of some of the ongoing, maybe slightly surprising, tangential outcomes of our work. Thanks.

Professor Martin Hendry FRSE 

Thank you very much, Aidan and thanks to everyone for giving us that great overview. So it’s now in the second part of our session, and really over to an audience to pitch in with some questions and comments of their own. I have one from Jack Martin, that’s very interesting. It’s sort of picking up, perhaps, and some of the things that Victoria was mentioning about computing and cloud computing, and the vast number of collisions and all of that huge amount of data that the LHC generates. So Jack is asking, as with Galaxy ‘Zoo’, can citizen scientists analyse the data? So there’s a way to answer that in the context of gravitational waves, which I’m happy to pick up or Stuart may want to? I honestly don’t know myself what citizen science opportunities there are in particle physics. I wonder if Victoria has any thoughts on that?

Professor Victoria Martin 

That’s kind of the spot question, Martin. Yes, we do have some citizen science projects where you can come along and look at the data. But at the top of my head, I cannot remember the name of them. So maybe I’ll try and find that out during the session. And I can put the link in the chat or let people know. But yes, there are opportunities.

Professor Martin Hendry FRSE 

Absolutely, not a problem. And it’s interesting to contrast the desire to involve citizen scientists in our research. Now, perhaps with how things were done back in Lord Kelvin’s time when it was somewhat more esoteric, and in the domain of a small number of individuals to carry out research, it’s really good. So much of it is known and shared. So again, this falls a little bit more in the data analysis side of gravitational waves. But let me just see whether Stuart or Giles would like to comment on this first, or if not, then I’ll be happy to talk about gravity spires, as you will know, is the relevant theme here.

Professor Giles Hammond FRSE 

I don’t mind, happy to say so. I would have said exactly the same thing, Martin. So yeah, absolutely, we do have absolute citizen science projects ongoing. And we have a lot of public outreach within the gravitational wave community. And one of the things that have come out is a real need to characterise these detectors. And we’ve shown you some beautiful pictures of how the detectors work. But when you really dig into them, there’s always sort of little sort of comps and glitches and niggles that we’re always trying to understand. And this is a perfect type of application where we kind of classify all of these different effects that can cause our mirrors to fluctuate at 1000 per damage to the photon, which is where our gravitational-wave signatures come from. So what we’d like to do is we try now to utilise sort of machine learning techniques to sort of look at these effects and start to understand, you know, is it due to a bird pecking on the vacuum pipe, which we’ve seen before, let’s say. Or is it due to a helicopter? Or is it due to one of our RF amplifiers, that sort of blown one is resistors, all of these structures that we see in the gravitational wave signature can all be a little bit different? So we have to sort of classify and understand, if you like, the training set of data with which we’re going to then apply our sort of machine learning algorithms. So there is a project ongoing, and it’s Sue Zooniverse. So you great, a great question to pose. But Zooniverse is one of these ones, where you might be classifying galaxies, but we have one called ‘gravity Spy’. So if you do search for ‘gravity Spy’ and ‘Zooniverse’, then that should take you to a link, where you can start going through some gravitational wave data and start identifying these different sort of glitches that we might see in the detector. And then that directly helps us in sort of then, characterising how the detectors perform, ultimately, to try and improve the signal to noise of these instruments.

Professor Martin Hendry FRSE 

Thanks very much, Giles. So Victoria having a look for some further details on the particle physics side.

Professor Victoria Martin 

Martin, I do I did already find one, I just learned. So I put it in the chat answer. But if you search for ‘Atlas at home’, or ‘LHC at home’, you will find where you can help with generating some of the simulated data, we need to understand the actual data that we take as well.

Professor Martin Hendry FRSE 

That’s terrific, thank you, Victoria. Another aspect of this, I think is the potential use of real data from the detectors and the educational context. So not necessarily to be your discoveries that haven’t been made before, but to allow high school students to experience what it’s like to analyse real data. And I know that is something Aidan has been deeply involved in. Would you like to talk briefly about that, Aidan?

Professor Aidan Robson FRSE 

Yeah, thanks, Martin. So again, this is in the context of the ATLAS experiment and previous similar collider experiments, where we’ve tried to capture this idea of discovering a process and something that can be done in a classroom on the timescale of about half an hour, 45 minutes. And so I agree, it’s not quite the same as you know,  harnessing the brainpower of the general public to look for anomalies in the data. It’s more like you’re repeating things that we’ve done before, but I think it’s exciting for school pupils, to know that they’re looking at real data, and making selections and seeing a peak appear over falling backgrounds. And so we try to encourage people to show discovery when they get their significance signal. Yeah, so there are a few examples of that.

Professor Martin Hendry FRSE 

Thanks, Aidan. So we have a question from Allison. And I’m maybe direct this one to Stuart because I think what Allison is highlighting is the need to ensure that more people understand and value the real and direct benefits of fundamental physics to their day to day lives. And I think some of the examples that you cited Stewart are very good examples of that, you know, where, as you said, yourself and the applications can be in quite different fields. So so how can you think we can do that better?

Professor Stuart Reid FRSE 

It’s kind of, it’s difficult to give a holistic answer to all, I mean, it all comes down to communication, at some level, because you know, how we, we communicate that. And obviously, there’s some mention of, you know, working with schools, and Aiden and others are very much involved in that. And that’s one key area is to make sure that at the early levels, that that people are going through the school system and learning about physics, and all the processes realise that, you know, there there is this a lot of worth in doing fundamental research because it almost always generates impact down the line because, you know, technologies are progressed. And we see that as examples in our field. And I guess one of the things that we need to explain to people is that they can’t always predict what those are. I mean, I don’t think really many of the technologies and the spin-offs of those technologies that we’ve all been describing could have been predicted 20 years ago, very easily, but yet they’ve happened and I think that’s always the case and I think it has to be communicated. And I guess the other thing is to try and communicate with the wider public. Schools are obviously one key area. But we’ve all been involved in big science exhibitions. I mean, there’s one of the biggest public science exhibitions is held each year in the Royal Society in London, and all of us have been involved in that. And obviously, there are activities that often happen in Dynamic Earth in Edinburgh; at the Glasgow Science Centre. And so I think we, there’s an activity in those areas. But I think it’s a challenge for all of us who still work in fundamental science, to find better ways to explain its benefits to people and also to make make it understood by the taxpayer, how much we appreciate, you know, the opportunity to progress these research areas, because, you know, it’s a real privilege for us. And I think it’s not always communicated back, you know, exactly, you know, how fortunate we are to be able to do work in these fields to see the impact. And obviously, it’s our desire that others would see that impact and understand the benefits that come.

Professor Martin Hendry FRSE 

Thank you. Sure. So we have a question from Carolyn. And I think it’s appropriate to put that to everyone really, and currents asking what applications do the presenters feel most excited about in terms of not just consumers, but of wider society in Scotland? So James, do you want to go first, for what excites you most of all of these applications?

Professor Giles Hammond FRSE 

Yeah. I will sit slightly on the fence here, because I would say that, all of the applications and technologies that we’ve heard about today are just really exciting.  I don’t always sort of know what’s always going on, you know, the detailed level from different areas of physics. But actually, one thing that really excited me was this development of the technology for these sort of smaller, better accelerators. I’m currently sort of,  trawling through a number of grant proposals, where we’re looking about sort of commercialization of technology through one of the different funding councils in the UK. And this is a magical kind of call, and just a sort of drive for, for making, you know, things like proton beam therapy more available to allow better, sort of treatment, more throughput of patients, I see this is a, you know, these can be real game changes, you know, there are very few centres in the UK and worldwide, where we can do this kind of treatments. And, you know, there are really remarkable things, these therapy centres, because they’re sort of maybe 100 or countries that have to move around a patient, if you can do this, and change this and make it into sort of metre scale accelerator technology, that has a huge sort of benefit, and game-changing application. So in a way, for me, it depends on the stakeholder who I’m working with. So if I was thinking about the sort of, let’s say, sort of 40 to 60-year-olds, I think, you know, accelerated technology and cancer therapy, cancer treatment is really a sort of exciting area.

 It’s gonna sound awful, but of course, my own technology, I think the really exciting thing for me, is actually making that transition of getting devices from the lab, out into the field. And that should never be underestimated. Because, you know, I work on it, for example, which I find really exciting taking gravitational wave science, but applying it to things like, you know, volcano monitoring, but also water table monitoring. So we are working with a number of partners in Africa, to actually do gravity surveys to look at how to manage resources and water. We working with civil infrastructure in Brazil, learning how to use gravity sensors to understand what caused these tailing dams. And of course, we’ve seen in the media before these awful catastrophes, where one of these dams has failed and flooded the village. So you can actually use technology to actually understand when things are going to fail. So I think that’s quite exciting. From a Scottish perspective, with COP26. Gravity sensors can also be utilised to understand how do you better understand carbon capture and storage? So I think that’s naturally one that sort of applies to really brought to the stakeholder engagement, both from schoolchildren, all the way to society. So maybe I haven’t really answered your question, but depends on who you really talk to.

Professor Martin Hendry FRSE 

it’s a good point, Jason, and I guess everyone, personally will be excited by different things. But as you see, it will be the stakeholders that will be excited by different things as well. Indeed, Carlin had also referred to how we excite the next generation of scientists who are currently going through our school system, and how they can see that technology shaping the world of the future. So as you say, things like COP26 provide a great lens for that, in terms of what is seen as the global challenges that those generations will face.

If you don’t want to hear from me, but want to hear from the others, I wonder if I may maybe just keep that idea of what excites us about innovation. In the mandible, we’ll get into some other questions given that we have limited time. I mean, one question that you picked up on Giles, I would like to ask a bit more about is about the Lo San Hospital trials. So that struck me as a little different. If you alluded to this yourself Aiden, from the traditional approach where the innovation happens, and then perhaps years or even decades later it’s commercialised, so does that create any tensions in terms of your scientists trying to crack on with getting CLICK going, while simultaneously you might see be distracted by the applications?

Professor Aidan Robson FRSE 

No, I mean, I think it works amazingly well, synergistically. And because we’re talking about a really fundamental acceleration technology, there are actually other applications of that as well to make free-electron lasers, which would be a much smaller scale than the collider that we want to build, but we’d be kind of intermediate between the hospital size thing and what we would ultimately like to do for particle physics. So I think having that wide interest, just helps move the field forward, you know, we need to work out how to manufacture increasingly long components. And essentially, it’s the, to support the sort of gradients of 100 megawatts per metre, you need extraordinarily, flat, smooth surfaces. And you need an industry to do that for you, you need industry to be interested in doing that. And so the more applications that you can find for it, really the better. So I agree, Martin, naturally in this particular example. And I think that the very close involvement of the hospital comes at a particularly early stage. But in a way, I think referring back to the previous question, what we’re most excited about, and I think it’s really hard to know, what is going to have a big effect on you, other people and wider society. And that’s certainly true of fundamental physics. But I would say even now, at the sort of stage that we’ve all been talking about, where you’re just beginning to transfer something out from fundamental research into applications, we still don’t really know, you know, what will come of those things. Five, five or 10 years down the line. But yeah, I think trying to get people involved as early as possible, is really helpful.

Professor Martin Hendry FRSE 

Thank you, Aiden. I’m going to quickly go back to Giles, he promised to be brief. And there’s a question, a follow up to one of the things that just been talked about, and Giles, over to you.

Professor Giles Hammond FRSE 

Yeah, thanks. No, I see the question from Susan. And I tried to type an answer in but I think I clicked the wrong button. So it said answer live. And regarding blue carbon. Absolutely. So this is about putting, I guess, you know, co2 into marine ecosystems. So there is a big push to put sort of gravity sensors onto submersible vehicles, where you can actually sort of go into the water and actually monitor where you’re sort of pumping the carbon. And what you need to do is make smaller, lighter, cheaper gravity sensors. And that’s really where we’re trying to push the technology because currently gravity sensor costs upwards of 100,000 pounds. And we’re trying to reduce that cost by about a factor of 10. This means you can have a raise gravity sensors, make them small, put them onto submersible vehicles, and then actually do the monitoring, so you understand where you’re putting the carbon into the ecosystem.

Professor Martin Hendry FRSE 

Thank you very much, Giles. Okay, so I’m going to turn out to Victoria. So Victoria, what excites you about some of the innovations that you just shared with us.

Professor Victoria Martin 

So what I find really exciting is actually the CERN’s approach to knowledge sharing. So  CERN develops a lot of its own software, and indeed, a lot of its own hardware. And a lot of that most of it, in fact, is shared. So you can, for example, if you felt like you could download and use the code that we use to analyse all of the Atlas data that is public and available for everyone, but that’s probably not very useful to most people, but something else CERN has had to do, as an example, is manage all the papers that we produce, and all the documents we produce, the photos and the reports and indeed the data and the software that we have to manage that kind of library management software, if you like, has been released to the public and you can go to the CERN webpage, and you can download it and you can use it. It’s not just software where CERN has been sharing hardware, they have an open hardware licence whereby some things that they design, you can find the blueprints again on the CERN webpage, and you can download them. And you can make them yourself. So it’s had a very open policy towards sharing things. I mean, actually, the best example of this, the one that’s probably familiar to everyone in the World Wide Web. I mean, that was developed at CERN. Not so we could read the news, it so initially, so CERN scientists who were, again, in different countries could have a look at the same information at the same time to see what was happening with their experiments. And now, it was released to the public. And now, you know, we all use it every day. So I think that’s the most exciting thing for me, just the very openness of the approach that CERN has. And the reason it’s like that is because it is a lab that is funded by many countries. So it is not a French lab. It’s not a Swiss lab, as I like to tell people, it’s Scotland’s laboratory for particle physics, as well as the French laboratory for particle physics and the Dutch laboratory for particle physics exits for everyone. And that’s why we share the things with people that want them.

Professor Martin Hendry FRSE 

Thank you, Victoria, I think is a theme that one season, the gravitational wave astrophysics seem to very firmly the great strength that comes from the whole world basically working together on these sorts of projects. Stuart, over to, you know, what would you think of as exciting, most exciting from the various projects that you shared with us?

Professor Stuart Reid FRSE 

I mean, I think the thing which excites me the most about ignoring my own particular research, because is, as has been described, it’s always exciting to see at work that you’ve been involved at actually reaching, you know, some kind of impact and benefit for others in society. But even just hearing about, you know, Victoria’s mention of technology, which is helping with, you know, the solar panels and photovoltaics. And I mean, clearly, when it comes to impact from fundamental science, the main area that we need in the coming years is related to the climate. And obviously, some of the questions and comments have been related to that.

I mean, this is always kind of tricky balance, which we face, I think that the funders, you know, associated with the government, and also the researchers are, you know, how much do you allow fundamental research just to freely go about doing its thing? And how much do you try to say, you have to justify yourself by also generating impact. But, you know, it excites me to see that there are areas of technology that could be used for helping to address the climate issue.

But although that’s also very exciting, it’s challenging that, you know, there’s a lot to be done in relation to the climate, and, you know, would be good to see a further, you know, technologies that could generate clean energy. Technologies that can help transform our food industry so that, the burden from that on the environment is significantly decreased. And so, so yeah, it’s exciting seeing the technologies, but also a little bit challenging just to see, like, what needs to be addressed in the coming years really, for the benefit of society. And I guess, you know, from my own research, and the bone health-related stuff, you know, it’s really good when you know, we have an ageing society and more people are living to an older age. Isn’t it nice to also see technologies that can help assist and improve people’s quality of life, you know, later, particularly in life, that excites me, too.

Professor Martin Hendry FRSE 

Thank you, Stuart. I think that’s frankly, a good point to move towards our conclusion. Again, what I’m hearing from all of you, and it echoes very much with my own thoughts on this, is that I think the way in which we do make physics our international collaborative endeavour, you know, gives me confidence that if we can tackle these big fundamental physics problems, by working together across the world, you know, gives me confidence, not just that we’ve got the skills to tackle other societal challenges. But we’ve also got the right mindset and approach to do that we will achieve more by working together. And again, you know, it’s good to reflect on how at least in the last year and a half, there’s been a great deal of global cooperation to do with the vaccine programmes, for example. And indeed, even fundamental physics had its role to play within that using some of that cloud computing we heard about from Victoria, to do many of the calculations involved. We hope that we’ve given you a sense of the rich variety of applications that there are in fundamental physics and how those are affecting so many different aspects of our world. And, well, we wish you all a pleasant afternoon and thanks again for joining us today. Bye-bye.