First up, do you have a telescope?
I have a very big telescope called the ATLAS detector. It looks at quarks, leptons and Higgs bosons – the debris from colliding protons accelerated by the Large Hadron Collider.
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As a child, what did you want to do when you grew up?
When I was around 10 years old I read Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time and fell in love with physics. As I finished the last page, I made a decision I never questioned again: that I wanted to study the universe and everything it is made of.
Explain what you doin one easy paragraph.
I work on the ATLAS experiment studying top quarks, and running the detector. I also work with UNESCO to promote particle physics worldwide, specifically in nations that have few science resources.
What does a typical day involve?
Sometimes I’m at CERN in Geneva, where I do my research. Other times I’m in places such as Afghanistan, Gaza or Kathmandu in Nepal, working to build physics research.
What do you love most about what you do?
Well, I simply love physics. It’s amazing how 25 years after reading A Brief History of Time, my love hasn’t faded one bit. I love that I am always learning, every day, exploring new ideas and concepts.
What’s the most exciting thing you’ve worked on recently?
The project. We hope to be a driving force in the expansion of physics research worldwide. At CERN, I am working on the , so that everyone can analyse the ATLAS data and see what a Higgs boson looks like.
Were you good at science at school?
Yes, but I was especially good at making things, and with computers. I was interested in the things they didn’t teach at school. Stuff I had to read in books and in New Scientist.
If you could send a message back to yourself as a kid, what would you say?
Have more confidence, and believe in yourself.
What’s the best piece of advice anyone ever gave you?
Stop messing around and focus! I still give myself that advice, daily.
If you could have a long conversation with any scientist, living or dead, who would it be?
I would love to talk with Emmy Noether, to discuss how she saw the connection between symmetry and conservation laws, something that still blows my mind. I’d want to know what she thinks it means about the universe, and what she thinks mathematics means: if it is something intrinsic to the universe or only for humans to use as a tool to understand.
What’s the best thing you’ve read or seen in the past 12 months?
I love the book Sapiens by Yuval Harari. He has not only understood our journey as humans, he has communicated it excellently to a very wide audience.
“We never really touch anything. Our whole interaction with the outside world is an illusion”
How useful will your skills be after the apocalypse?
Particle physics itself won’t help me much, but I like to think my skills in making things, fixing things and basic understanding of science will help me to survive.
OK, one last thing: tell us something that will blow our minds…
We never really touch anything. The atoms of our fingers exchange particles with the atoms of what we touch and we experience a force. Our whole interaction with the outside world is an illusion. Everything we experience is pictures made up by and inside our brains, using information from electrical signals from our totally numb bodies.
Kate Shaw is founder of the ICTP Physics Without Frontiers programme
