Doing physics in the time of COVID-19

Across the world, personal and professional lives have been profoundly affected during the past few months – and scientists are no exception. In this episode of the Physics World Stories podcast, we find out how physics and physicists are adapting to coronavirus-related lockdowns. Among physicists – as with many professions – there is a growing realisation that things are not about to go back to normal anytime soon.

Isolation from colleagues, facilities and important conferences bring obvious disadvantages. But as you will hear in the podcast, some physicists are also finding positive outcomes from the situation. Before the lockdown, did you ever meet a researcher who didn’t complain about being time-poor? Plenty were sick of travelling to international events because they felt they had to show their face. And you name an academic didn’t have a paper they kept meaning to write but never got around to it because of things like endless faculty meetings.

First up in the episode is the theoretical physicist and author Sabine Hossenfelder. Among other things during the pandemic, she has teamed up with climate physicist Tim Palmer to record a coronavirus-inspired reworking of the REM classic hit “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)”. You will also hear from Bonnie Tsim and Rebecca Waters who both attended the recent Women in Graphene Career Development Day – an online event that reimagined various aspects of real-world conferences. Perhaps the success of this virtual event is a sign of what physics conferences will be like for the foreseeable future.

For more personal accounts of the impact of the COVID-19 lockdowns, take a look at the “physics in the pandemic” series on the Physics World blog.