in the late 19th century scientists were
trying to solve a mystery and they found
that if they had a vacuum tube like this
one and apply the high voltage across it
they called them cathode rays but the
question was what were they made of in
England the 19th century physicist JJ
Thompson conducted experiments using
magnets and electricity like this and he
came to an incredible revelation these
rays were made of negatively charged
particles around 2,000 times lighter
than the hydrogen atom the smallest
thing they knew so Thompson had
discovered the first subatomic particle
which we now call electrons now at the
time this seemed to be a completely
impractical discovery
I mean Thompson didn’t think there were
any applications of electrons and around
his lab in Cambridge he used to lie to
propose a toast to the electron may it
never be of use to anybody he was
strongly in favor of doing research out
of sheer curiosity to arrive at a deeper
understanding of the world and what he
found did cause a revolution in science
but it also caused a second unexpected
revolution in technology and today I’d
like to make a case for curiosity-driven
research because without it none of the
technologies I’ll talk about today would
have been possible now what Thompson
found here has actually changed our view
of reality I mean I think I’m standing
on a stage and you think you’re sitting
in a seat but that’s just the electrons
in your body pushing back against the
electrons in the seat opposing the force
of gravity you’re not even really
touching the seat you’re hovering ever
so slightly above it but in many ways
our modern society was actually built on
this discovery I mean these tubes were
the start of electronics and then for
many years most of us actually had one
of these if you remember in your living
room in cathode ray tube televisions but
I mean how impoverished would her lives
be of the only invention that had come
from here was the television
thankfully this she was just the start
but if something else happens when the
electrons here hit the piece of metal
so as the electron screeched to a hole
inside the metal their energy gets
thrown out again in a form of
and within 15 years of discovering the
electron these x-rays were being used to
make images inside the human body
helping soldiers lives being saved by
surgeons who could then find pieces of
bullets and shrapnel inside their bodies
but there’s no way we could have come up
with that technology by asking
scientists to build better surgical
probes only research done out of sheer
curiosity with no application in mind
could have given us the discovery of the
electron and x-rays now this tube also
threw open the gates for our
understanding of the universe and the
field of particle physics because it’s
also the first very simple particle
accelerator
now I’m an accelerator physicist so I
design particle accelerators and I try
and understand how beams behave my
fields a bit unusual because it crosses
between curiosity driven research and
technology with real-world applications
but it’s the combination of those two
things it gets me really excited about
what I do now over the last hundred
years they’ve been far too many examples
for me to list them all but I want to
share with you just a few in 1928 a
physicist named Paul Dirac found
something strange in his equations and
he predicted based purely on
mathematical insight that there ought to
be a second kind of matter the opposite
to normal matter that literally
annihilates when it comes in contact
antimatter I mean the idea sounded
ridiculous but within four years they’d
found it and
nowadays we use it everyday in hospitals
in positron emission tomography or PET
scans used for detecting disease or take
these x-rays if you can get these
electrons up to a higher energy so about
a thousand times higher than this tube
the x-rays that those produce can
actually deliver enough ionizing
radiation to kill human cells and if you
can shape and direct those x-rays where
you want them to go that allows us to do
an incredible thing to treat cancer
without drugs or surgery which we call
radiotherapy and in countries like
Australia and the UK around half of all
cancer patients are treated using
radiotherapy and so electron
accelerators are actually standard
equipment in most hospitals or a little
closer to home
if you have a smartphone or a computer
and this is TEDx so you’ve got both with
you right now right
we’re inside those devices are chips
that are made by implanting single ions
into silicon in a process called ion
implantation and that uses a particle
accelerator
so without curiosity-driven research
though none of these things would exist
at all so over the years we we really
learnt to explore inside the atom and to
do that we had to learn to develop
particle accelerators and the first ones
we developed let us split the atom and
then we got to higher and higher
energies we created circular
accelerators that let us delve into the
nucleus and then create new new elements
even and at that point we were no longer
just exploring inside the atom we’d
actually learn how to control these
particles we’d learn how to interact
with our world on a scale that’s too
small for humans to see or touch or even
sense that it’s there and then we built
larger and larger accelerators because
we were curious about their nature of
the you
verse and as we went deeper and deeper
new particles started popping up and in
around 1946 a hero of mine named Robert
Wilson he came up with a new idea and he
realized that beams of particles protons
at the right energy could be used as a
precise form of radiotherapy and proton
therapy as we call it is now an
established technique and is growing
worldwide and it’s Sundari coming to
Australia so I encourage you to look it
up but Robert Wilson couldn’t have come
up with that if you’d asked him to
improve x-rays only genuinely new
knowledge has the power to expand our
imaginations and that gives us the power
to come up with really groundbreaking
new ideas so we’ve dug deeper we built
bigger and bigger machines and
eventually we got two huge ring-like
machines that take two beams of
particles in opposite directions
squeeze them down to less than a width
of a hair and smash them together and
then using Einsteins equals MC squared
you can take all of that energy and
convert it into new matter new particles
which we rip from the very fabric of the
universe and nowadays there are about
35,000 accelerators in the world not
including televisions and inside each
one of these incredible machines there
are hundreds and billions of tiny
particles dancing and swirling and
systems that are more complex than the
formation of galaxies it was Jonathan
Swift who once said vision is the art of
seeing the invisible and over a century
ago JJ Thompson did just that when he
pulled back the veil on the subatomic
world and now we need to invest in
curiosity-driven research because we
have so many challenges that we face and
we need patience we need to give
scientists the time the space and the
means to continue their quest because
history tells us that if we can remain
curious and open-minded
about the outcomes of research the more
world-changing our discoveries will be
thank you
[Applause] [Music]
trying to solve a mystery and they found
that if they had a vacuum tube like this
one and apply the high voltage across it
they called them cathode rays but the
question was what were they made of in
England the 19th century physicist JJ
Thompson conducted experiments using
magnets and electricity like this and he
came to an incredible revelation these
rays were made of negatively charged
particles around 2,000 times lighter
than the hydrogen atom the smallest
thing they knew so Thompson had
discovered the first subatomic particle
which we now call electrons now at the
time this seemed to be a completely
impractical discovery
I mean Thompson didn’t think there were
any applications of electrons and around
his lab in Cambridge he used to lie to
propose a toast to the electron may it
never be of use to anybody he was
strongly in favor of doing research out
of sheer curiosity to arrive at a deeper
understanding of the world and what he
found did cause a revolution in science
but it also caused a second unexpected
revolution in technology and today I’d
like to make a case for curiosity-driven
research because without it none of the
technologies I’ll talk about today would
have been possible now what Thompson
found here has actually changed our view
of reality I mean I think I’m standing
on a stage and you think you’re sitting
in a seat but that’s just the electrons
in your body pushing back against the
electrons in the seat opposing the force
of gravity you’re not even really
touching the seat you’re hovering ever
so slightly above it but in many ways
our modern society was actually built on
this discovery I mean these tubes were
the start of electronics and then for
many years most of us actually had one
of these if you remember in your living
room in cathode ray tube televisions but
I mean how impoverished would her lives
be of the only invention that had come
from here was the television
thankfully this she was just the start
but if something else happens when the
electrons here hit the piece of metal
so as the electron screeched to a hole
inside the metal their energy gets
thrown out again in a form of
and within 15 years of discovering the
electron these x-rays were being used to
make images inside the human body
helping soldiers lives being saved by
surgeons who could then find pieces of
bullets and shrapnel inside their bodies
but there’s no way we could have come up
with that technology by asking
scientists to build better surgical
probes only research done out of sheer
curiosity with no application in mind
could have given us the discovery of the
electron and x-rays now this tube also
threw open the gates for our
understanding of the universe and the
field of particle physics because it’s
also the first very simple particle
accelerator
now I’m an accelerator physicist so I
design particle accelerators and I try
and understand how beams behave my
fields a bit unusual because it crosses
between curiosity driven research and
technology with real-world applications
but it’s the combination of those two
things it gets me really excited about
what I do now over the last hundred
years they’ve been far too many examples
for me to list them all but I want to
share with you just a few in 1928 a
physicist named Paul Dirac found
something strange in his equations and
he predicted based purely on
mathematical insight that there ought to
be a second kind of matter the opposite
to normal matter that literally
annihilates when it comes in contact
antimatter I mean the idea sounded
ridiculous but within four years they’d
found it and
nowadays we use it everyday in hospitals
in positron emission tomography or PET
scans used for detecting disease or take
these x-rays if you can get these
electrons up to a higher energy so about
a thousand times higher than this tube
the x-rays that those produce can
actually deliver enough ionizing
radiation to kill human cells and if you
can shape and direct those x-rays where
you want them to go that allows us to do
an incredible thing to treat cancer
without drugs or surgery which we call
radiotherapy and in countries like
Australia and the UK around half of all
cancer patients are treated using
radiotherapy and so electron
accelerators are actually standard
equipment in most hospitals or a little
closer to home
if you have a smartphone or a computer
and this is TEDx so you’ve got both with
you right now right
we’re inside those devices are chips
that are made by implanting single ions
into silicon in a process called ion
implantation and that uses a particle
accelerator
so without curiosity-driven research
though none of these things would exist
at all so over the years we we really
learnt to explore inside the atom and to
do that we had to learn to develop
particle accelerators and the first ones
we developed let us split the atom and
then we got to higher and higher
energies we created circular
accelerators that let us delve into the
nucleus and then create new new elements
even and at that point we were no longer
just exploring inside the atom we’d
actually learn how to control these
particles we’d learn how to interact
with our world on a scale that’s too
small for humans to see or touch or even
sense that it’s there and then we built
larger and larger accelerators because
we were curious about their nature of
the you
verse and as we went deeper and deeper
new particles started popping up and in
around 1946 a hero of mine named Robert
Wilson he came up with a new idea and he
realized that beams of particles protons
at the right energy could be used as a
precise form of radiotherapy and proton
therapy as we call it is now an
established technique and is growing
worldwide and it’s Sundari coming to
Australia so I encourage you to look it
up but Robert Wilson couldn’t have come
up with that if you’d asked him to
improve x-rays only genuinely new
knowledge has the power to expand our
imaginations and that gives us the power
to come up with really groundbreaking
new ideas so we’ve dug deeper we built
bigger and bigger machines and
eventually we got two huge ring-like
machines that take two beams of
particles in opposite directions
squeeze them down to less than a width
of a hair and smash them together and
then using Einsteins equals MC squared
you can take all of that energy and
convert it into new matter new particles
which we rip from the very fabric of the
universe and nowadays there are about
35,000 accelerators in the world not
including televisions and inside each
one of these incredible machines there
are hundreds and billions of tiny
particles dancing and swirling and
systems that are more complex than the
formation of galaxies it was Jonathan
Swift who once said vision is the art of
seeing the invisible and over a century
ago JJ Thompson did just that when he
pulled back the veil on the subatomic
world and now we need to invest in
curiosity-driven research because we
have so many challenges that we face and
we need patience we need to give
scientists the time the space and the
means to continue their quest because
history tells us that if we can remain
curious and open-minded
about the outcomes of research the more
world-changing our discoveries will be
thank you
[Applause] [Music]
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