• Question: whats the best discovery you have found out

    Asked by bad man matt to Chris, Josh, Rebecca, Rob, Susan on 19 Jun 2015. This question was also asked by xxx_fenton_xxx.
    • Photo: Rebecca Dewey

      Rebecca Dewey answered on 19 Jun 2015:

      My favourite result so far has definitely been that there is a small area of the brain called the insula, that deals with emotions (happy, sad, etc) and it is very active when someone is looking at emotion inducing pictures (babies, chocolate cake, cute animals, knife crime, poverty, fighting). A drug called a beta-blocker that is usually used to lower blood pressure, also changes how people feel emotions, in that it makes them feel less intense. When someone has taken the drug, and they’re feeling less emotions than before, this area of the brain is working less hard! We could use this in medicine in the future to try to prevent things like post-traumatic stress disorder.

    • Photo: Susan Cartwright

      Susan Cartwright answered on 19 Jun 2015:

      Particle physics experiments nowadays are run by large teams of scientists, so discoveries are made by the team, not one individual. The best discoveries I’ve been involved in are the measurement of the Z width at LEP, which showed that there were only three types of neutrinos, and the discovery by T2K of evidence that all three types of neutrino can interchange with one another.

      I know these sound really boring, but they’re not. Counting the number of types of neutrino was really important in understanding how many different types of fundamental particle there are: before that measurement, we didn’t know if the three families of quarks and leptons we had discovered were all there were, or if there were yet more and heavier sets still to be discovered. So it helped us to put together the Standard Model, which is our best current understanding of the fundamental structure of matter. And discovering that all three types of neutrino are interchangeable is a key step in trying to understand how our universe came to be made of matter, not a 50/50 mix of matter and antimatter – if all three neutrinos interchange, the maths makes it possible for neutrinos to contribute to understanding this mystery, but if only two of them did, then neutrinos could not help. So maybe this discovery will be seen in 50 years’ time as the first critical step in understanding how our universe came to look the way it does.

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