• Question: Have you personally been part of a team that has made a ground breaking scientific discovery, if so what was is and how did you come about it?

    Asked by anon-258058 on 26 Jun 2020.
    • Photo: Ry Cutter

      Ry Cutter answered on 26 Jun 2020:

      This is a super important question for modern science! Soooo, we’re getting to the point where a lot of science (particularly physics) can’t be done in a regular lab or with regular equipment. Fewer scientists can do ‘individual’ work. We have to work in big teams working on very specialised equipment (see: CERN, LIGO, LSST, Super-Kamiokande, CFETR as a few examples!)
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      I am a member of two big teams. The GOTO collaboration, which is a team of about 60 scientists working on a set of telescopes around the world doing big and fast surveys of the sky to find explosions. The other is ENGRAVE, another team looking at explosions. This time we’re looking at particular explosions that have been found in more detail to determine their properties in better detail.
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      The main discovery I’ve been a team on is the first detection of a counterpart to gravitational waves! There are over 5000 people who went in to making this discovery, from people designing the gravitational wave detectors, to all the people analysing the data the telescopes were collecting. It happened very early on in my PhD, but is the most important thing to happen for my PhD work!
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      Great Question,
      Ry 🙂

    • Photo: Joel Goldstein

      Joel Goldstein answered on 29 Jun 2020:

      I was part of one of the collaborations that discovered the Higgs boson, in 2012.

      There were two experiments at the LHC (ATLAS and CMS) that discovered the Higgs boson, and each had about 3000 scientists and engineers working on them. My role was mainly in managing the group from my own university working on CMS (about 20 people including students), but I also worked on keeping the experiment running (it runs 24 hours a day for about 200 days a year) and in checking that it was working properly.

      We had always hoped to discover the Higgs boson at the LHC, and CMS (and ATLAS) were primarily designed to find it as efficiently as possible. It was a bit of a surprise that our predictions of the Higgs boson were so accurate and things turned out as expected – that almost never happens in science!

    • Photo: Susan Cartwright

      Susan Cartwright answered on 29 Jun 2020:

      In particle physics we work in large international collaborations, so sometimes you can be part of a collaboration that makes a ground-breaking discovery without actually having has much to do with it!

      I’m a member of a neutrino experiment called T2K, which has made a couple of not-quite-discoveries (that is, we presented the first evidence, but our evidence wasn’t quite strong enough to be an unamiguous discovery). Neither one sounds very exciting (we saw the first evidence of a non-zero third mixing angle in neutrino oscillation, and we have recently presented the first evidence for differences in the behaviour of neutrinos and antineutrinos), but they are steps on the way to understanding why the universe is made of matter, and not a 50:50 matter-antimatter mixture. Both of these not-quite-discoveries came about because T2K was designed to make the right measurements: they were, in effect, what T2K was built to discover. And we were a little fortunate: it turned out that the effects are rather large, so we saw them before we might have expected to.

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