Physics World Stories Podcast

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.

February 2021 is an exciting month for Mars exploration, with three separate missions arriving at the red planet. In this episode of the Physics World Stories podcast, Andrew Glester takes a closer look at one of those missions – NASA’s Perseverance rover. Equipped with sophisticated imaging devices, Perseverance will look for signs of ancient microbial life and will help pave the way for future human missions to our neighbouring planet. Today, space exploration is an increasingly global pursuit, involving many nations and private companies, with Mars being an enticing destination. On 9 February the Emirates Mars Mission delivered the Hope probe into Martian orbit, which will provide the most complete picture yet of the planet’s atmosphere. That will be followed by China’s Tianwen-1 spacecraft, which arrives in orbit on 10 February ahead of landing a rover in May into a massive impact basin. Completing the Mars trio is NASA’s Perseverance rover, landing on 18 February – the focus of this episode. Its destination is the Jezero Crater, a 45-km-wide basin in the Martian northern hemisphere, a landform carved by a river roughly 3.5 billion years ago. The mission will collect rock and sediment samples for future return to Earth, search for signs of ancient microbial life, characterise the planet’s geology and climate, and pave the way for human exploration beyond the Moon. You will hear from Luther Beegle, the principal investigator for the rover’s SHERLOC instrument – a Raman spectroscopy device that can detect organic matter and minerals. You also hear from Kelsey Moore, a geobiologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, whose research has informed the mission’s search for traces of ancient life. The podcast is sponsored by Teledyne Princeton Instruments. To learn more about how the company is changing scientific astronomy sign up to their upcoming astronomy webinar.

In this episode of the Physics World Stories podcast, scientists and engineers from the CERN describe how the pandemic has affected the particle physics lab and the way they collaborate with colleagues. CERN’s large hadron collider (LHC) is currently in shutdown ahead of its third run scheduled for later in 2021. José Miguel Jimenez, head of CERN’s technology department, explains how engineers have adapted in order to limit the delays brought about by the pandemic. Jimenez also looks ahead to the LHC’s next long shutdown – scheduled for 2025 – when the particle accelerator will undergo a major upgrade. The transformed high-luminosity machine (HL-LHC) will generate 10 times more collisions than at present. Also in the podcast is Archana Sharma, a physicist who’s been working as a project manager on the GEM experiment at the LHC’s CMS detector. Her team has designed gas electron multipliers that will improve the muon-detection abilities of CMS in the HL-LHC era. Glester’s final guest is Sahal Yacoob of the University of Cape Town. Yacoob’s year-long sabbatical at the LHC’s ATLAS experiment coincided with the pandemic, changing the experience somewhat. As Yacoob explains, CERN researchers were accustomed to virtual communications, but he is sorely missing those informal coffee-break chats, which can lead to unexpected developments. For another personal account of CERN during the pandemic, take a look at this feature from the January 2021 issue of Physics World. Dave Barney describes how despite lockdown he has continued his important work on developing a new calorimeter for CERN’s CMS experiment – a piece of equipment that will be pivotal to the success of the HL-LHC.

In this episode, Andrew Glester is joined by Physics World journalists to discuss some of 2020’s best physics books, along with their favourite examples of physics featuring in television and film this year. For more information about all of the media discussed, you can revisit these reviews that have appeared in Physics World during 2020. You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It’s Making the World a Weirder Place by Janelle Shane Quantum Legacies: Dispatches from an Uncertain World by David Kaiser Synchronicity: the Epic Quest to Understand the Quantum Nature of Cause and Effect by Paul Halpern The TV show Devs The Smallest Lights in the Universe: a Memoir by Sara Seager Why Trust Science? by Naomi Oreskes The film Proxima For Small Creatures Such As We: Rituals and Reflections for Finding Wonder by Sasha Sagan