One of the 2015 Nobel Prize laureates in Physics, Arthur McDonald, recently spoke about the history of the universe at the George and Maureen Ewan Lecture series at Queen’s University.
Queen’s Professor Emeritus McDonald is known for the discovery that neutrinos—exponentially tiny subatomic particles—have mass. The laureate is currently active in research with SNO+, Neutrinos and Dark Matter, DEAP, and DarkSide experiments at the Arthur B. McDonald Institute.
McDonald titled his lecture “Knowing Our Universe from a Hole in the Ground,” a nod to his research in the underground Sudbury Neutrino Observatory Laboratory (SNOLAB), where these discoveries were made. His talk centered on the standard model of understanding elementary particles—minuscule particles that to form the more well-known protons and neutrons—and how research has contributed additions to this model over time.
Throughout the talk, he discussed the research journey and gave background on why SNOLAB was created in the first place—only an ultra-clean environment could capture measurements of neutrinos changing types.
The aim of the lecture series is to enrich a public audience on the scientific world of physics, so McDonald gave various examples and analogies, including comparing the oscillation of neutrinos between their three flavours, or types, to a particle changing outfits.
McDonald concluded his talk by discussing the future of physics in revolutionizing our understanding of anti-matter and dark matter. He highlighted the ongoing SNOLAB experiments and new detectors that are being made to research these projects.
He believes people should be interested in what the field has to offer because it furthers technological advancements and seeks to answer existential questions about the creation of the universe.
“We have to push technology to its extreme levels in order to accomplish the measurements we are doing. We push the technology; we push the engineering,” McDonald said in an interview with The Journal.
The importance of sharing research findings as a publicly funded research institute is crucial to McDonald. Technological advances in research carry over to other sectors—at the height of COVID-19, SNOLAB technologies were repurposed to help address the ventilator shortage.
Canada is a world leader in particle physics, with organizations such as the McDonald Institute promoting international collaboration. The institute has created 15 faculty positions across various universities.
“There are several faculty here at Queen’s, but many more associated with the Institute across the country and seven other universities, who are focused on this field of study and are attracting real-frontier experiments in this field in the future,” McDonald said.
“My hope is that this will continue because this is an area where Canada can be a leader in this field of science.”
The McDonald Institute provides Canadian universities the opportunity to accept responsibility for large fractions of the major experiments coming to SNOLAB—some of them being more costly than the facility itself. This requires substantial resources, both from an engineering perspective as well as university faculty.
Previously a tenured professor at Princeton University for seven years before coming to Queen’s, McDonald described Queen’s as a university that attracts the top students in Canada.
“All of my experiences here have been fun, but for the things I do around here, the greatest fun is interacting with students,” McDonald said.
When embarking on his research journey, McDonald never intended to become such a prominent figure in his field.
“You never do this to try and win a Nobel Prize,” McDonald said. “When you take responsibility for a project of this scale, right from the very beginning of it you realize not so much that I’m a big deal, but more [that] what I’m doing is a big deal, and you try very hard to be successful.”
McDonald strives to positively represent Canada and its scientific community, promoting it as a world leader in physics.
“Canada can do, and is doing extremely good [in] science, and that’s worthy of and to have young people inspired in this sort of science which really is fun to do.”
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