Physics World Stories Podcast

In keeping with our festive tradition, the December episode of Physics World Stories is all about physics books. Host Andrew Glester is joined by Physics World’s reviews and careers editor Laura Hiscott and the magazine’s editor-in-chief Matin Durrani to discuss a handpicked selection of popular-science books reviewed in 2021. One of the year’s most memorable titles is Hawking Hawking: the Selling of a Scientific Celebrity by Charles Seife. Stephen Hawking’s status as an exceptional scientist and human being are beyond question. But Seife takes a warts-and-all look at the role self-publicity played in the British cosmologist’s public persona as the smartest scientist since Einstein. Hawking Hawking is discussed in the first part of the podcast and there is a fun quiz for you to test your knowledge of Hawking’s life. In the second part, the Physics World journalists discuss these other books and the wider talking points that they raise: Flashes of Creation: George Gamow, Fred Hoyle, and the Great Big Bang Debate by Paul Halpern Helgoland by Carlo Rovelli Shell Beach: the Search for the Final Theory by Jesper Grimstrup Science Fiction by Sherryl Vint How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations with Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason by Lee McIntyre

The open hardware movement advocates the sharing of designs for material objects. For the global science community it means people can access instructions to 3D print increasingly sophisticated tools. Just as importantly, the movement is decentralizing knowledge and giving users the ability to customize scientific equipment then repair it when things go wrong. In the latest episode of Physics World Stories, Andrew Glester meets researchers at the University of Bath who are part of the open science community. First, social scientist Julieta Arancio discusses the open hardware movement’s origins and some impactful projects. Among them are: Open Science with Drones; GORGAS tracker for Malaria and Human Mobility in the Peruvian Amazon; and Mboa Lab, a makerspace community in Cameroon. Later, Richard Bowman and Julian Stirling describe the journey of developing a low-cost, laboratory-grade microscope. The OpenFlexure project, developed with the University of Cambridge and partners in Tanzania, can become an important tool in the fight against malaria.  

In this episode of the Physics World Stories podcast astronomers discuss the search for signs of extraterrestrial technologies. Fingerprints might include traces of pollution in exoplanet atmospheres, lights on the night sides of planets, and even the waste heat from megastructures such as Dyson spheres. Podcast host Andrew Glester meets the following guests: Jacob Haqq Misra, senior research investigator at Blue Marble Space Institute of Science; Thomas Beatty, an astronomer at the University of Arizona who is also part of the team for the NIRCam instrument on James Web Space Telescope – scheduled to launch in December; Amedeo Balbi, an asrophysicist at the Tor Vergata University of Rome. Find out more by reading ‘Scanning the cosmos for signs of technology,’ a feature article by science writer David Appell, originally published in the December issue of Physics World.

In this episode of the Physics World Stories podcast you will hear from scientists and software engineers at the vanguard of developing free and open-source software for physics research. Guests talk about the role of open software in astronomical imaging, the search for dark matter, medical physics and other fields. Software also plays a big role in the wider open-science movement but there are ongoing debates around how to provide suitable recognition to software developers who have contributed to scientific breakthroughs. Featuring the following guests: Kirstie Whitaker, director of the Tools, Practices and Systems research programme at the Alan Turing Institute in London Tim Smith, head of collaboration, devices and applications group at CERN Katie Bouman – computer scientist at Caltech, whose algorithms helped to transform data from the Event Horizon Telescope into the first ever image of a black hole Suchita Kulkarni, a particle physicist at the University of Graz, Austria Juanjo Bazán, an astrophysicist from the Center for Energy, Environmental and Technological Research in Madrid, Spain. Find out more by reading “Standing on the shoulders of programmers: the power of free and open-source software“, originally published in the September issue of Physics World.

Why lie on a beach when you could go to Chernobyl? In the past few years there has been a steady growth in alternative tourism, which includes people going to sites of scientific interest. In this episode of the Physics World Stories podcast, Andrew Glester meets three people who are unashamedly drawn to geeky destinations. Ruth Nichol is a yoga instructor who travels the world with her husband seeking eclipses. She describes the emotional impact of witnessing totality and her trip to see the Northern Lights from a plane. Tom Scott is a radiation researcher at the University of Bristol whose work regularly takes him to Chernobyl, Ukraine, the site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster. Scott talks about his research using robotics to track radiation levels in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, which he also described in the Physics World article “Glimpsing Chernobyl’s hidden hotspots“. Over the years Scott has witnessed the rise of Chernobyl tours, which had grown to attract around 100,000 visitors annually before the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, Glester catches up with Jeffrey Brunstrom, an experimental psychologist at the University of Bristol specializing in nutrition. As Brunstrom explains, there are tricky psychological barriers that make our post-holiday diets easier to speak about than actually stick to. Brunstrom also describes his love of the Marconi centre in Cornwall, which celebrates the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi who undertook groundbreaking telecommunications experiments in the region. Find out more about science-themed holidays in the August special issue of Physics World, which also has features on the physics of sandcastles and rollercoasters.

You could be forgiven for thinking the themes in this month’s episode of Physics World Stories have been stolen from Hollywood. Podcast host Andrew Glester profiles two upcoming NASA missions to asteroids: one that will explore an all-metal world, and the other will deliberately smash into a near-Earth asteroid. Glester’s first guest is Jim Bell from Arizona State University who is involved in the mission to the asteroid Psyche, which launches in 2022 and arrives in 2026. Located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter with an average diameter of 226 km, Psyche consists largely of metal. Astronomers speculate that the asteroid is the exposed core of an early planet that lost its rocky outer layers due to a number of violent collisions billions of years ago. Also joining the podcast is Angela Stickle from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. Stickle is a project scientist in the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, scheduled to launch in November aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Sounding like a remake of Armageddon or Deep Impact, the solar-powered DART craft will hurtle towards the binary near-Earth asteroid Didymos, before crashing into the smaller of the two bodies in late 2022. By observing the changes in the asteroid’s orbit, mission scientists are testing the feasibility of deflecting a large Earth-bound asteroid – should that perilous scenario transpire in the future.

In June 1925 Werner Heisenberg retreated to Helgoland in the North Sea, a treeless island offering the 23-year-old German physicist a space to think, along with some respite from the extreme hay fever he was suffering. On that remote outpost, Heisenberg had an idea that would revolutionize physics and bring profound implications for philosophy and technology. This was an event that would kickstart quantum mechanics. Carlo Rovelli. (Courtesy: Christopher Wahl) Helgoland is the title of the latest book by physicist and science writer Carlo Rovelli. It is essentially a journey through the origins of quantum physics, interwoven with narrative about Heisenberg, Dirac, Einstein and the other luminaries from the first quantum generation. Rovelli also discusses his own interpretations of the quantum world, and connects quantum theory with diverse ideas, from Buddhist thinking to the grand themes of the Russian revolution. Rovelli speaks about Helgoland in this latest episode of the Physics World Stories podcast. In a wide-ranging conversation with podcast host Andrew Glester, Rovelli discusses quantum concepts, the often overlooked role of philosophy in science, and his minimalist approach to science writing. If you enjoy this episode, make sure to also join us for the inaugural Physics World Quantum Week. Running on 14–18 June 2021, the event showcases the latest developments in quantum science and technology. It includes a series of free-to-view webinars and a curated selection of quantum articles.

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are designed to replicate human capabilities, and in some cases improve upon them. Lifelike robots are physical examples of AI technology, but it is the digital AI systems that already have a ubiquitous influence on our daily lives – from facial recognition software to decision-making tools used by banks, recruiters and the police. Too often, these systems can reflect preexisting social inequalities. In this episode of the Physics World Stories podcast Andrew Glester investigates the ethical issues that can plague AI and machine learning technologies. He finds out about the concepts of deep learning and neural networks, why these systems can amplify problems in society, and who are the people adversely affected by these flaws. It turns out that the physics community is part of the problem and potentially part of the solution. Directly and indirectly, physicists are involved in developing AI technology so are ideally placed to raise awareness of the issues. Featuring in the episode: Alan Winfield, a robot ethics researcher at the University of the West of England Julianna Photopoulos, a science writer based in Bristol, UK Savannah Thais, an experimental particle physicist at Princeton University, US To find out more about the issue of bias in AI systems, take a look at this feature article by Photopoulos, which is summarised in the video below.    

The global particle physics community has been energised by two recent results that offer tantalising glimpses of new physics beyond the Standard Model of particle physics. Researchers at CERN’s LHCb experiment have observed something unusual in the way that B mesons decay into leptons – the class of fundamental particle incorporating electrons, muons, taus and their corresponding neutrinos. Meanwhile, researchers at Fermilab may have glimpsed an unknown force at work in the way muons “wobble” in the presence of a magnetic field inside their Muon g-2 experiment. In this episode of the Physics World Stories podcast, Andrew Glester dissects these new results with the aid of particle physicists who discuss what this means for the field. Joining Glester in this episode are: Patrick Koppenburg, leader of LHCb’s user analysis software Jessica Esquivel, a physicist and data analyst at Fermilab Mark Lancaster and Rebecca Chislett, UK physicists working on the Muon g-2 experiment.

1 December 2020 was a dark day for Puerto Rico and the global astronomy community. The iconic Arecibo Observatory collapsed, with the radio telescope’s 900-tonne suspended platform crashing into the 305 m dish below. Warning signs had been there in the preceding months, but that did little to soften the shock felt by the astronomy community. In this episode of the Physics World Stories podcast, Andrew Glester speaks with astronomers about the impact of this dramatic event. Abel Méndez, a planetary astrobiologist at the University of Puerto Rico, explains why the observatory was a beacon for Puerto Rican scientists and engineers. Mourning continues but Méndez and colleagues have already submitted a white paper to the National Science Foundation with plans for a new telescope array on the same site. https://youtu.be/J-_FStTee9w Constructed in the 1960s with US funding, Arecibo was originally used for military purposes. Its powerful radar was bounced off the ionosphere to better understand the nature of the Earth’s upper atmosphere and to look for signs of incoming Soviet missiles. Seth Shostack, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, talks to Glester about Arecibo’s origins and how scientists soon saw the potential for bouncing Arecibo’s radar off astronomical objects such as asteroids. Arecibo was the world’s largest radio dish until it was surpassed in 2016 by China’s FAST telescope. Arecibo’s size and tropical setting captured the public imagination and the observatory appeared in the films GoldenEye and Contact – the adaptation of the Carl Sagan novel. Contact’s lead protagonist is Ellie Arroway (played by Jodie Foster), partly based on SETI scientist Jill Tarter. Tarter joins the podcast recounting her experiences advising Jodie Foster on the character and role.