The Four Principles of Chiral Materials

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Chirality is non-superimposable mirror images of one another. You see it in electrons and photons, you had spin up and spin down electrons. So light that twists clockwise and counterclockwise. And there's a reason for homo-chirality of life on Earth - they emit twisted lights but also transport up or down electrons. We still don't know the reason that that happens, that life selects for that.

Jessica Wade is a physicist at Imperial College London who, while spending her day working on special carbon-based materials that can be used as semiconductors, has spent her nights writing nearly 2,000 Wikipedia entries about underrepresented figures in science. That, along with numerous other forms of public engagement—including writing a children’s book about nanotechnology—is all in an effort to actually do something productive to correct gender and racial biases in STEM.

She joined Tyler to discuss if there are any useful gender stereotypes in science, distinguishing between productive and unproductive ways to encourage women in science, whether science Twitter is biased toward men, how AI will affect gender participation gaps, how Wikipedia should be improved, how she judges the effectiveness of her Wikipedia articles, how she’d improve science funding, her work on chiral materials and its near-term applications, whether writing a kid’s science book should be rewarded in academia, what she learned spending a year studying art in Florence, what she’ll do next, and more.

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Recorded February 21st, 2023

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