Physics World Stories Podcast

With the 2024 Paris Olympics just days away, sports fans are braced to see who will run, jump, row, fight and dance themselves into the history books. One of the most exciting moments will be the 100 m sprint finals, when athletes compete to become the fastest man or woman on Earth. Over the years we have seen jaw-dropping performances from the likes of Usain Bolt and Florence Griffith-Joyner. Scientists have been captivated by top sprinters – trying to understand how physique, technique and nutritional intake can help athletes push the limits of human ability. In this episode of the Physics World Stories podcast, we tackle the more speculative question: could an Olympic-level athlete ever run on water? Grappling with this question is our guest Nicole Sharp, engineer and science communicator specializing in fluid dynamics. She runs the fluid dynamics blog FYFD and authored the recent Physics World feature “Could athletes mimic basilisk lizards and turn water-running into an Olympic sport?“. Basilisk lizards are famed for their ability to skitter across water surfaces, usually to escape predators. It won’t surprise you to know that scientists have already grappled with this question. For instance, a team in Italy studied whether it was possible in reduced gravity conditions equivalent to the Moon. Sadly, a water race on the Moon is unlikely due to the absence of pools of liquid on the lunar surface. One place that could provide the setting for a liquid sprint are the ethane and methane lakes on Saturn’s moon Titan. These are the only large stable bodies of surface liquid in our solar system found outside Earth. If such an event were to happen tomorrow, perhaps the gold medal favourite would be US sprinter Sha’Carri Richardson – the current 100 m world champion who weighs just 45 kg. Listen to the podcast to discover whether Richardson would sprint or sink at the inaugural Titan Olympics.

For sports fans, the next few weeks will bring excitement and drama. The Euro 2024 football (soccer) tournament is under way in Germany and the Copa América is about to kick off in the US. Then at the end of July, the Olympics starts in Paris as athletes from across the world compete to run, jump, sail, cycle and dance themselves into the history books. In this episode of Physics World Stories, you will hear from two US physicists with a profound connection with sport. The first guest is John Eric Goff of the University of Lynchburg, author of Gold Medal Physics: the Science of Sports. After training as a condensed-matter theorist, Goff has focused his research career the physics of sport. In a wide-ranging conversation with podcast host Andrew Glester, Goff discusses everything from the flight of balls to the biodynamics of martial arts. He also considers how data and AI in sport are changing the practice and the spectacle of sport. Our second guest is Harvard University’s Jenny Hoffman, who recently set the record for the fastest woman to run across the US. In November 2023 Hoffman completed the 3000 mile (5000 km) journey in just 47 days, 12 hours and 35 minutes, running from San Francisco to New York City. Hoffman, who studies the electronic properties of exotic materials, speaks about the benefits of having hobbies and passions outside of work. For her, running plays an essential role in wellbeing during her successful career in academia.

Whether you’re a Swiftie, a devout metalhead, or a 1980s synth pop aficionado, there is something for every musical taste in this month’s Physics World Stories. In part one, podcast host Andrew Glester is joined by Jacqueline Caplan-Auerbach, a geophysicist at Western Washington University, US. She has analysed “Swift quakes”, a seismological phenomenon during Taylor Swift’s Eras tour, answering two important questions. Are the quakes triggered by the music or the crowd? And how does their magnitude compare with similar events like the 2011 “Beast quake” triggered by celebrations at an American Football game between the Seattle Seahawks and the New Orleans Saints. It turns out that Swifties (dedicated Taylor Swift fans) are queuing up to share data for geophysics research. Regular listeners will notice that this month’s episode has a new podcast jingle. In part two, Glester is joined by the song’s creator Philip Moriarty, a physicist and science communicator at the University of Nottingham, UK. Titled 137, the song is inspired by the fine-structure constant, and is packed with cheeky references to this dimensionless constant and the physicists closely associated with it. (Yes, you can expect bongos!) Moriarty reveals even more about the song in his article “H1dd3n variab7es: the fundamental constant on which the new Physics World podcast music is built“, where you can also listen to the tune in full.

This episode of Physics World Stories explores the science, politics and ethics in the Netflix series 3 Body Problem. Adapted from the celebrated Chinese novel The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin, the multi-layered story centres around humanity’s first contact with an alien civilization. As the drama unfolds, with physicists among its lead protagonists, the plot navigates the challenges of communicating with aliens across interstellar space – and the inevitable tensions that arise on Earth. To discuss 3 Body Problem, podcast host Andrew Glester is joined by three special guests: Matt Kenzie: the series’ science adviser, a particle physicist at the University of Cambridge. Kenzie’s role in informing the show’s scientific elements gives him unparalleled insight into the integration of physics into its narrative. Jennifer Ouellette: a renowned science writer who reviewed Cixin’s book The Three-Body Problem for Physics World back in 2015. Ouellette shares her thoughts on the book’s themes, and assesses the merits of the TV adaptation by the creators of Game of Thrones. Hannah Little: a linguist at the University of Liverpool who is also a member of the SETI Post-Detection Hub. That initiative, based at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, considers how we should communicate with aliens should we discover we are not alone in the cosmos. (Image courtesy: Ed Miller/Netflix)

This month’s episode of Physics World Stories features an interview with composer Amanda Lee Falkenberg with music from her The Moons Symphony. Her creation takes listeners on an epic journey through the science and stories of the moons of our solar system. The seven-movement symphony dramatizes the geophysical features of Io, Europa, Titan, Enceladus, Miranda and Ganymede, before turning to our own Moon for a two-part finale. In creating the work, Australian-born Falkenberg immersed herself in the scientific research and consulted many scientists and astronauts. The Moons Symphony performed by the London Symphony Orchestra is available now via Signum Records.

Coke or Pepsi? Messi or Ronaldo? Taylor Swift or…well, without wanting to set the Swifties against Physics World, let’s just say there’s often a tribal element to who we support or the choices we make. In the world of cosmology, one heated divide is whether you’re for dark matter or modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND). Both theories attempt to explain the discrepancies between the predicted gravitational effects in the universe and some of the actual observed motions of stars and galaxies. In the latest episode of Physics World Stories, Andrew Glester speaks to two cosmologists on opposing sides of this debate. Stacy McGaugh from Case Western Reserve University in the US is a former dark-matter researcher who switched sides overnight after MOND successfully predicted the rotation velocities of stars in galaxies. The other guest, Indranil Banik from the University of St Andrews in the UK, took the opposite journey. While working on a six-year project to measure MOND in wide binaries, he found no deviation from standard Newtonian gravity at all – a hammer blow for MOND. Now a dark matter advocate, Banik cites observations in our own solar system as further evidence against MOND. Naturally, others disagree. For more detailed insight into this debate, see the recent Physics World feature “Cosmic combat: delving into the battle between dark matter and modified gravity“.

In the latest Physics World Stories podcast, astrophysicist Emma Chapman is in conversation with host Andrew Glester about the history of radio astronomy. It’s a field that has always maintained a do-it-yourself ethic, with valuable contributions from people outside the established academic community. Chapman, an astrophysicist at the University of Nottingham in the UK is the author of the popular-science book First Light: Switching on Stars at the Dawn of Time. Alongside her research, Chapman regularly visits amateur radio astronomy clubs and admires the technical expertise she encounters among members. Cold War boom Using much of the same technology as radar, radio astronomy evolved rapidly in the post-war period and took on strategic importance during the Space Race. Indeed, the Lovell Telescope at the Jodrell Bank observatory in northern England was the only facility in the Western world that could track Sputnik 1, launched by the Soviet Union in 1957. One reason that radio astronomy attracts public interest is that its facilities are ground-based: they’re tangible and accessible. Sites such as the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico have iconic status in popular culture. That status looks set to grow thanks to the SKA Observatory being constructed at sites across Australia and South Africa – a truly global project, epic in scale. Chapman is the author of a Physics World feature about how the craft of doing radio astronomy has evolved since its origins.

Over the past half century, laser cooling has revolutionized atomic, molecular and optical physics. Laser cooling of atoms and ions has enabled dramatic leaps in the precision of atomic clocks, allowing new tests of fundamental physics and potential improvements in clock-based navigation via the Global Positioning System. Now it is also laying the foundations for quantum computing with atoms and ions. In this episode of Physics World Stories, you can enjoy a vibrant tour through the history of laser cooling with Chad Orzel, a popular-science author and researcher at Union College in the US, who is in conversation with Andrew Glester. Orzel describes the key research breakthroughs – which have led to several Nobel prizes – but also the personal stories behind the discoveries, involving physics titans such as Hal Metcalf, Bill Phillips and Steven Chu. You can learn more about this topic via a trilology of features that Chad Orzel has written for Physics World. The final instalment will be available in January and you can already read the first two articles: “Cold: how physicists learned to manipulate and move particles with laser cooling“ “Colder: how physicists beat the theoretical limit for laser cooling and laid the foundations for a quantum revolution“

This episode of the Physics World Stories podcast features an interview with Kai Bird, co-author of the book that inspired the recent blockbuster film Oppenheimer, directed by Christopher Nolan. Winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Biography, American Prometheus: the Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer is an exploration of the brilliant and enigmatic physicist who led the project to develop the world’s first atomic weapons. Oppenheimer is a fascinating but complicated character for a biographer to tackle. Despite excelling in his leadership of the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer’s conscience was torn by the power he had unleashed on the world. “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” is the line he infamously recalled from the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita, upon witnessing the Trinity Test fireball in 1945. Parallels between the nuclear dawn and AI today The physicist’s relationship with politics was also fraught and difficult to define. Oppenheimer held personal connections with Communist Party members prior to the Second World War, and spent the post-war years warning against nuclear proliferation – provoking the ire of McCarthy Era politicians and ultimately having his security clearance revoked in 1954. Unsurprisingly, American Prometheus is receiving a resurgence of interest following the success of Nolan’s film. Readers are fascinated once again with the dawn of the nuclear age, which Bird says has parallels with where we are today with AI and the threat of climate change. He also sees the political threads from McCarthyism to the post-truth tactics and populist playbook deployed in US politics today. As always, the podcast is presented by Andrew Glester and you can read his review of the film Oppenheimer, as well as a recent opinion piece by Robert P Crease “What the movie Oppenheimer can teach today’s politicians about scientific advice“.

This year, 2023, marks the half-way point to the 2030 deadline for achieving the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Recent global developments, including conflicts and the COVID-19 pandemic, make SDGs such as “Zero Hunger” and “Reduced Inequalities” seem more daunting than ever. The scale of the challenge is clear; but professionals working on the frontline of sustainable development are as committed as ever to enabling positive change. That includes physicists and engineers, and July 2022 – July 2023 was the International Year of Basic Sciences for Sustainable Development. In this episode of the Physics World Stories podcast you will hear from with two physical scientists whose careers enable them to apply their scientific knowledge to tackling inequities. As always, the episode is hosted by Andrew Glester. Ruhi Chitre is an intern at UNESCO, Paris, who was previously president of the International Association of Physics Students. Chitre believes that international policymaking can be strengthened by the contribution of more people with backgrounds in fundamental science, not least because they have a nuanced understanding of the concept of risk. Later in the episode, you will hear from Destenie Nock, a civil & environmental engineer at Carnegie Mellon University in the US. Nock’s research includes looking for patterns in energy usage that can reveal local inequalities, such as correlations between household incomes and use of heating in winter. In her teaching, Nock encourages her students to take engineering back to its fundamental purpose – to think about how innovation can improve livelihoods. Nock is among the invited speakers at Environmental Research 2023, a series of free-to-attend virtual events on 16 October – 23 November hosted by IOP Publishing (which publishes Physics World).