Physics World Stories Podcast

A small alien creature crash lands on Earth before striking up a rapport with a boy. Sound familiar? Two decades before ET was released, Indian director Satyajit Ray wrote a script for a film that would be called The Alien, which bears striking similarities with Steven Spielberg’s Hollywood blockbuster. The movie was never made. Ray was ahead of his time in many ways. Although not primarily remembered for his science fiction, the Bengali polymath was frequently inspired by a scientific way of thinking. Ray’s legacy is revisited in this latest episode of the Physics World Stories podcast. Born in Calcutta (Kolkata) in 1921, Ray was not only a film director but also an established author, essayist, magazine editor, illustrator, calligrapher and music composer. Between 1955 and 1991, Ray directed almost 30 features, as well as short films and documentaries. Many won leading prizes at international film festivals. In 1991 he was awarded an Oscar for lifetime achievement – the only such Oscar to be bestowed on an Indian director. Ray also received an honorary doctorate from the University of Oxford, the second film director to be awarded this honour after his hero Charles Chaplin. Ray’s work is explored in this episode of Physics World Stories, presented as always by science communication specialist Andrew Glester. Joining the podcast is Andrew Robinson, author of Satyajit Ray: the Inner Eye, who reflects on Ray’s personality and creative process, having known the Indian director personally. Also featuring is Moumita Dasgupta a biophysicist at Augsburg University in the US, who credits Ray’s work – especially his writing – as an inspiration for her career in science. Discover more about Satyajit Ray’s work and the story behind The Alien in Andrew Robinson’s feature article from the August issue of Physics World.

Everyone knew something big was coming. Students had camped outside CERN’s designated seminar hall overnight in the hope of grabbing one of the few unreserved seats. Finally, on the morning of 4 July 2012, the suspense was ended. Spokespeople for the large hadron collider’s two general purpose experiments, ATLAS and CMS, confirmed the rumours: both experimental teams had detected a “Higgs-like particle” and the masses were very similar. In the July episode of the Physics World Stories podcast, Andrew Glester revisits that historic day in 2012. He’s joined by two guests who were there at the particle physics lab in Geneva to live through that memorable day. Achintya Rao was a communications officer at the CMS experiment and Cristina Botta was a research scientist. Discover much more about the past, present and future of particle physics in the July issue of Physics World, a special issue to mark the 10-year anniversary of the Higgs boson discovery.

From windows and bottles, to optical fibres and solar cells, glass is an incredibly versatile material that underpins many technologies. In the June episode of the Physics World Stories podcast, Andrew Glester explores a lesser known application of glass – bioglass in healthcare. First you will hear from Julian Jones at Imperial College London, who explains how glass putty can help to heal broken bones by stimulating tissue growth. Jones has previously worked with the inventor of bioglass, Larry Hench, a materials engineer whose 1969 breakthrough was inspired by a chance conversation with an army major recently returned from the Vietnam War. Jones is currently developing “bouncy bioglass” that can stimulate bone growth while simultaneously sharing the load placed on bones – making it particularly useful for bad traumas where bones struggle to re-join. Later in the episode, Glester is joined by Martyna Michalska, a nanotechnology researcher at University College London. As part of her research, Michalska designs glass surfaces patterned with nanoscale features that can be tuned to resist unwanted bacteria. In hospital settings, surfaces could be fitted with the technology as an alternative to chemicals that bacteria can evolve to resist. Michalska is working with industrial partners and they are looking at the option of retrofitting windows and other surfaces with thin films of her nanopatterned glass. To learn more about glass-based technologies, take a look at the June issue of Physics World, a special issue inspired by the International Year of Glass (IYOG2022).

Science benefits enormously from supercomputing, which enables researchers to process vast amounts of data and conduct complex simulations. But these machines can be notorious energy guzzlers, with the largest supercomputers consuming as much power as a small city. In this episode of the Physics World Stories podcast, scientists discuss how individuals can reduce the environmental impact of supercomputing without compromising research goals. Simon Portegies Zwart, an astrophysicist at Leiden University in the Netherlands, says more efficient coding is vital for making computing greener. While for mathematician and physicist Loïc Lannelongue, the first step is for computer modellers to become more aware of their environmental impacts, which vary significantly depending on the energy mix of the country hosting the supercomputer. Lannelongue, who is based at the University of Cambridge, UK, has developed Green Algorithms, an online tool that enables researchers to estimate the carbon footprint of their computing projects. Find out more on this topic in the article “The huge carbon footprint of large-scale computing“, originally published in the March issue of Physics World.

One of longest-running physics jokes is that, despite numerous promising breakthroughs, practical nuclear fusion will forever be 30 years away. Earlier this year, there was an exciting result in the UK that suggests that – sooner or later – fusion scientists will have the last laugh. The Joint European Torus (JET) nuclear-fusion experiment based in Oxfordshire, UK, more than doubled the amount of sustained fusion energy produced in a single “shot” – smashing a previous record that JET has held since 1997. In this episode of the Physics World Stories podcast, Andrew Glester catches up with two engineers from the UK Atomic Energy Authority to learn more about this latest development. Leah Morgan, a physicist-turned-engineer explains why JET’s recent success is great news for the the ITER project – a larger experimental fusion reactor currently under construction in Cadarache, France. Later in the episode, mechanical design engineer Helena Livesey talks about the important role of robotics for accessing equipment within the extreme conditions inside a tokamak device. To hear from more scientists about the quest for practical nuclear fusion, you can also listen to this episode from Physics World’s 30th anniversary podcast series.

From Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” concertos to the Beatles’ “Blackbird” – musicians have always been inspired by nature. Many artists have even incorporated the sounds of nature into their songs. Now, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are taking a more fundamental approach, exploring the music of the building blocks of life and how they interact in harmonious ways. In this episode of the Physics World Stories podcast, host Andrew Glester speaks with Markus Buehler, an MIT engineer who is translating living structures into sound – and vice versa. In one project he has created harmonies informed by the structure of spider webs, through research that could help uncover the secrets of spider silk. More recently his team translated the spike protein of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 into sound to visualize its vibrational properties. Find out more in this feature article by Markus Buehler and Mario Milazzo, originally published in the January 2022 issue of Physics World.

After decades in the making, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) finally launched on 25 December 2021, ushering in a new era for astronomy. On Monday the $10bn mission reached its destination, the L2 Lagrange point 1.5 million kilometres from Earth, where it will remain in orbit throughout the mission. In this episode of the Physics World Stories podcast, Andrew Glester meets JWST scientists to recall their experiences of the mission launch and the telescope’s journey so far. Now, the researchers are looking ahead with excitement to the science programme, which gets under way in June or July. Jonathan Gardner, the JWST’s deputy senior project scientist, describes the fierce competition among astronomers to win time to use the state-of-the-art telescope. Gardner’s own research in deep surveys will benefit as the JWST can peer back to some of the first galaxies to form after the Big Bang. Joining Gardner on the podcast is Stefanie Milam, the JWST’s deputy project scientist for planetary science. Milam describes how the telescope will explore the watery moons of Europa and Enceladus within our solar system, as well as investigating the atmospheres of exoplanets in search of intriguing chemical signals. Find out more about the JWST mission in this feature article by Keith Cooper, originally published in the January issue of Physics World.

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.