• Question: have you ever made history

    Asked by anon-231757 to Mark, Liam, Laura, Kasia, Gina, Felix on 12 Nov 2019.
    • Photo: Mark Johnson

      Mark Johnson answered on 12 Nov 2019:

      Hey! I wouldn’t say that I’ve ever made history, but a few years ago I was lucky to play small part in a big discovery. In 2016, the team that I’m part of measured the ‘colour’ of an antimatter atom for the first time ever. It felt amazing that all our hard work had finally paid off, and we even made it to the front page of BBC news! šŸ™‚

    • Photo: Laura Sinclair

      Laura Sinclair answered on 13 Nov 2019:

      Not in a major way, for my PhD thesis experiment (as part of a team) I measured the half-lives of 73Sr and 76Y for the first time. We also observed 72Rb and 77Zr for the first time as well.

    • Photo: Liam Gaffney

      Liam Gaffney answered on 13 Nov 2019:

      I think we can only judge that in the future, but my PhD project was measuring the shape of the radium-224 nucleus, which turns out to be pear shaped. It’s only the second ever isotope to be discovered that has this shape and the first one that has a really short half life (it only lives for 3.6 days!).

      It was published on the front page of the journal Nature with a fancy picture and quite a few website reported on it as a story. It was fun to be involved in all the excitement of that, but that only comes around once in a while and the day job is usually much more ordinary, working towards those big discoveries!

Comments

  • Photo: anon-232592

    anon-232592 commented on :

    Iā€™m also a United supporter so who is your favourite youth player and who would you want to see play for United? šŸ‘¹

    • Photo: Liam

      Liam commented on :

      Brandon Williams is my favourite youth player. He plays the same position I used to play when I was younger and I dreamt of doing what he is doing now, breaking in to the first team. I’d love to get a new creative midfielder next at United, like Eriksen from Spurs maybe.