SINGAPORE - When she was a student at the University of Melbourne, accelerator physicist Suzie Sheehy, then 18, asked her physics lecturer a question about optics. He said he did not know - he was still researching it in his laboratory.
"Up until that point, I had assumed my lecturers would always have the answers to my questions. The fact that I could think of a question people did not know the answer to was a bit mind-blowing," says the 37-year-old British-Australian, who was studying engineering as well as science at the time.
"I got hooked on this idea that I could ask questions that might help us understand the world. I was always interested in the big-picture questions and how the universe works. Eventually, my brain cottoned on to the idea that if I could understand this at the fundamental level of particle physics, then that seemed an incredibly powerful tool. Everything stemmed from there."
Today, Dr Sheehy - who holds lectureships at the universities of Oxford and Melbourne - develops particle accelerators for applications in medicine. She has also written a book.
The Matter Of Everything takes readers through 12 experiments over 120 years that led to today's understanding of particle physics - from the discovery of X-rays in a German lab in 1895 to the discovery of the Higgs boson particle at the Large Hadron Collider in 2012.
While many people see physics as a theoretical subject, Dr Sheehy notes that it is inherently experimental and there are far more experimentalists than theorists.
She also wants to dispel the myth of the "lone genius white male" - by "writing back in" the stories of other people, such as women, who had been involved in the experiments.
One of those lesser-known women was Harriet Brooks (1876-1933), a Canadian nuclear physicist who worked with Ernest Rutherford – the "father of nuclear physics" - and made vital contributions to the field of radioactivity.
Being a woman in science had its challenges - Brooks' employer Barnard College told her she had to quit if she got married. So, she broke off her engagement. In her early 30s, however, she became Mrs Frank Pitcher and walked away from academia.
The world has come a long way since, although physics is still very male-dominated. Dr Sheehy had no direct female colleagues for the first seven years of her career.
She adds: "There are well-known issues with sexual harassment in the physics field. I'm grateful that's never happened to me in the institutions I've worked in, but I've experienced it at conferences. "To make sure I didn't feel 'othered' in my field, I started cultivating a group of female scientists - mostly physicists. That has made a huge difference, not only because they are amazing friends and scientists, but also because it made me feel less different."
Dr Sheehy hopes funding bodies and policymakers will not focus too much on short-term outcomes.
"The stories in this book show that sometimes it takes 50, 60, 70 years for the full realisation (of an experiment's impact). The discovery of X-rays and the electron did find immediate impact, but the full fruition of how we use them in CT scanners took a coalescing of technologies from different areas of research," she says.
"It would be misguided of us to ask every researcher, 'How is this going to find immediate societal impact?' because the answer in a lot of these cases is - we don't know."
Dr Sheehy, who did a summer student programme with the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern) years ago, cried happy tears when she tuned in to the launch of the Large Hadron Collider in 2008. The complex project was an example of how scientists around the world were united by a desire to understand the universe.
She adds that there is still a lot about the universe that mankind does not really understand, such as the nature of dark matter and dark energy.
"It would be a huge mistake to just walk away and go, okay, physics is pretty much done, it's just the details left. That's exactly the point they were at at the turn from the 1800s to the 1900s.
"We should be humble enough to expect that we could have another enormous revolution in our understanding of physics - it would surprise me if, within my lifetime, we didn't have a large shift again in how we think about it."
The Matter Of Everything: Twelve Experiments That Changed Our World (Bloomsbury, Paperback, $32.95, Buy here, Borrow here) is available at Books Kinokuniya.
