Bringing Light into a Dark Age
So, the BBC were here at Daresbury Laboratory today looking at one of the accelerator projects I designed - ALICE. ALICE has been chosen as a new name for ERLP now we are doing experiments and extending what we want to use it for. ALICE is really good for preparing tiny bunches of electrons for all sorts of experiments - making X-rays using Compton backscattering, driving a Free-Electron Laser, and injecting test bunches into our new EMMA ring (which we’re building right now), which we hope will eventually make radiotherapy treatment of cancer much better and cheaper. Brian Cox will be talking about this on NW BBC later I think, and also talking about how the North-West has contributed to physics and nuclear energy. Remember, without Manchester University (where I studied) and Mr. Rutherford, we would have unsplit atoms, and therefore no nuclear energy to keep the lights on or many other things that need an understanding of the atom, like basically all modern science. Also, without Manchester we would also not have had the first proper computer.
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