We recently cought up with three of our acacdemics who work on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN: Chris Parkes, Will Bertsche and Marco Gersabeck. Additionally, we spoke to recent University of Manchester graduate Jonathan Langford, who completed a PhD based on the experiments with which he was involved at CERN.

In this episode, you can hear Chris, Will, Marco and Johnno talk about their work. We also asked them about whether the experiments they do can have wider benefits for society as a whole, and whether the sometimes “tabloidy” nature of the reporting of their work frustrates them. You can also hear Johnno - who graduated in 2017 - talk about his academic journey, which led him from almost dropping Physics at A level, to obtaining his PhD with a thesis on “measuring the properties of the Higgs Boson.”

So if you’d like to discover which particular fruit is a good source of positrons, or what happened when an equipment supplier decided that the work being done at CERN was “evil,” then listen right here.