People

David Smith looks back at 10 years of interviews for Physics Education.

I cannot recall quite how I came to be the 'People Person' on the Editorial Board of Physics Education with a remit to interview some of the great and the good of the world of physics, but it was a real privilege to hold the post for a period of just over a decade.

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In the second half of my teaching career I had begun to use anniversaries as an excuse to celebrate particular aspects of physics and engineering, and so it was that I jetted off to Geneva in the summer of 2004, the year of CERN's 50th birthday, having remembered just in time to buy a small digital recorder at the airport. I have always liked the 'largest physics laboratory in the world' for the contrast between the ramshackle sprawl of its buildings and the scale of the scientific research carried out there. And also (in those days anyway) for its charming lack of security—I was able to wander the length of the Meyrin site unchallenged as I hunted down Lyn Evans, the Large Hadron Collider project leader. He was a tremendously impressive figure, justifiably proud of the achievement of 'using superfluid helium as an engineering material' in the design of the LHC. There were two important messages that I took away from my first assignment: that I, and thus perhaps our readers too, could learn a lot from luckily phrased questions; and that my naïve assumption that I would be allowed to take a photograph of the interviewee was just that. The camera stayed at home from then on.

2005 was Einstein Year of course, and in January a chap called Brian Cox was reading out extracts from Albert's letters on BBC's Radio 4. I had not come across him, and I suspect that most of the listeners hadn't either at that point, but the particle physicist from Manchester sounded intriguing and proposed meeting for a drink at My Hotel in Bloomsbury. He was delightful—seriously clever and so obviously full of passion for his work, and for his music. A singer new to me called Madeleine Peyroux who 'sounds like Billie Holiday' received a strong recommendation: read Physics Education and discover new music! Little did either of us realise then that physics 'celebritydom' lay just around the corner—you heard it here first. Brian very kindly came to talk to the school Physics Society shortly afterwards, depositing his cat in the departmental office. Such visits were an unanticipated fringe benefit of the job.

I had become an admirer of Carolyn Porco, leader of the imaging team for the Cassini mission to Saturn, through the persuasive eloquence of her appearances on TV documentaries and her elegant writing in the Captain's Log on the CICLOPS website: www.ciclops.org/ Fate was on my side as the Division of Planetary Sciences for the American Astronomical Society chose to stage its 37th meeting in Cambridge (UK) in the autumn of 2005, and our orbits crossed over lunch in South Kensington. She put her survival in a field where 'males are in the majority and, as a woman you're an alien in their culture' down to having grown up with several brothers in the Bronx in New York. 'There is no more noble a thing than the study of the physics of the cosmos, and I am sure that there would be more women dedicated to it if they weren't discouraged from the outset'.

My first teaching job had been in Manhattan in the late 1970s, and as a result I used to return to the USA fairly regularly. On realising that Freeman Dyson was working at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, where Einstein had spent his final years, I popped the question, only to find that he was going to be at a conference in Boston while I was on his side of the Atlantic. An additional two hundred miles later, I was still in a position to enquire as to who amongst the 20th century physicists he had met had most impressed him. 'Of course Feynman, who was flamboyant...I think in many ways he was more brilliant than Bethe, but not quite as great a physicist'. It was sobering to be touched by greatness at both first and second hand, as well as a treat to be able to pass on some of that magic to my students.

Opportunities continued to present themselves. Carol Christian and Albert Conti had flown over to London from the Space Telescope Science Institute (the home of Hubble) in Baltimore in 2008 to tell the audience at the always popular annual European Astrofest conference about their co-creation of Sky in Google Earth, and were happy to chat between stage appearances. Later the same year a holiday in Italy allowed me access to veteran Galileo scholar Tom Settle at the Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza in Florence (now the Museo Galileo) in preparation for the International Year of Astronomy in 2009. In discussing the worth of studying the history of science, he bemoaned the fact that 'few (students) have any sense of science as an ongoing entity with trajectories from the past and into the future. To me a good scientific education would require developing in the student a knowledge of what was known, what is now known or only partially known or not known, and what the openings for the future might be'.

I was always keen to find out what had sparked an interest in physics, and in a very young Michio Kaku's case it appears to have been a fictional TV character. 'To me it was amazing seeing starships, aliens and rayguns, but after a while I noticed that Flash Gordon did not make the series, it was a scientist who had invented the city in the sky and all the gadgets. So I began to realize that everything around us is a by-product of science, that while society may honour him for his heroics, without science there is no Flash Gordon'. This information was conveyed during a particularly pleasant lunch at One Aldwych in Covent Garden where he was staying while in the UK to promote Physics of the Impossible in 2009.

Although I had spent a postgraduate year at University College London, I had never been to the Mullard Space Science Lab, their country house outpost in Surrey. So I used that as an excuse to renew acquaintance with Lucie Green in 2010, our paths having crossed in the early days of the Faulkes Telescope project in Cardiff a few years earlier. In her case 'the drive came mainly from within', and, in contrast to Carolyn Porco, 'The important thing was that there were no constraints placed on me. Also, I went to an all-girls school, so there were no subjects that were perceived to be male or female, plus the majority of my teachers were female, so it was really a case of whatever you were interested in you could pursue'. Gladstone had been amongst the guests at Holmbury House, beautifully situated in 30 acres of grounds with extensive views to the south, in its heyday and I could appreciate that it must be a wonderful place to work.

Many other tales could be told. Teaching one of Philip Campbell's sons presented me with the key to the office of the editor-in-chief of Nature in King's Cross, where he expressed the opinion that 'Every time we turn a corner in biology we discover that it's more complex than we thought it was; whereas in physics it is always possible to find an underlying simplicity on which you can then build'. An Institute of Physics Update course in Oxford brought me into contact with citizen science project leader Chris Lintott. It was shortly after Patrick Moore had died and a question mark hung over the future of The Sky at Night. He made it clear before we started that he would not be answering any questions about the programme!

I made a point of arranging most of the interviews myself, but when an offer to quiz Lee Smolin from the Perimeter Institute in Canada arrived I was quick to accept. Stretched out on a couch in a quiet corner of the basement of the gallery at King's Place, also in King's Cross, he passed on the message that 'time is real and laws of nature evolve' while promoting his book Time Reborn. Nobel Laureate and Knight Bachelor Konstantin Novoselov, whom I found practising Chinese brush painting when I knocked on his door at the University of Manchester, delighted in describing his association with artist Cornelia Parker for the opening ceremony of the refurbished Whitworth Art Gallery. 'She didn't at first have a clear plan of what could be done, but having an opportunity of working with the old masterpiece pictures and extracting graphene from them sounded like a strange and crazy enough idea for me to get engaged in'.

My successor David Richardson may possibly not yet have a clear plan, but I am sure that many strange and possibly crazy ideas will engage him as he goes in search of more inspirational personal recollections for the pages of this journal.

David Smith

The first time I remember being interested in physics as opposed to any other subject was when I did a project on nuclear physics. (It was probably when I was about 13). We were essentially sent off to write an essay and I thought it was really interesting. From that I got interested in particle physics, which I found much more fun. This is when I started to do physics as a separate subject, and I got into it then.

The physics teacher I had that inspired me was called Mr Seaman and he was quite an interesting chap. He tended to jump a lot at noises and this apparently was due to the fact that he suffered from mercury poisoning, having been shot down over Germany during the Second World War. The mercury cooling system in the plane had spilt all over him. One of the advantages of that was he used to do lots of demonstrations with mercury in which he would sweep it into the palm of his hand quite happily saying, 'You must never do this!'

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He once managed to tell me off and leave me feeling better about myself than when I had started! I had been chatting to my friend and he summoned me at the end of the lesson and I was absolutely petrified I was going to be told off—partly because my father taught maths in the same school. So every time I got told off, it got back to my parents! He said 'I got annoyed by you chatting and I don't want to get annoyed because I hope you're going to be in my class for a long time and I want us to be friends!' So I went off feeling that the physics teacher thought I could do the subject that I actually rather liked!

Having started being interested in nuclear physics, I got interested in particle physics which was a younger subject in those days. There was a prize at our school for a project that you did off your own back. Because I was keen, I wrote about particle physics. As the prize, I got Isaac Asimov's Guide to the Sciences which I read from cover to cover—probably more than once. So I decided I wanted to be a particle physicist. I went off to university, did a degree in physics and as I reached the end thought that I couldn't do particle physics as I wasn't clever enough. My other option was to be a teacher. But fortunately for me, they turned me down. In the meantime my tutor had said, 'Why don't you apply to do PhDs?' And I actually got offers to do a PhD. I figured I could go back to teaching later.

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Well it depends what you mean by an impact on the world. There are all sorts of things that particle physics has developed as it was trying to do things that are very difficult. If you look at the things that have come out of CERN, things like the early work on the World Wide Web, I don't know how you'd measure that impact for good and not so good!

I think we've been quite good at conveying what we're trying to do to the public. We're quite an organised group of people. But there's no way round it. The LHC is an expensive project for fundamental science where the actual thing you're trying to find out doesn't really have immediate practical applications and may never have practical applications. Yet this idea that it was something worth doing because it was worth doing seems to have got through, and actually there was very little 'This is an expensive white elephant'. Actually I was quite surprised when there was a lot of very positive publicity surrounding the LHC when we discovered the Higgs boson.

I believe there are a lot of spinoffs. We have colleagues working in medical imaging; we have them working so-called homeland security detecting heavy elements. So all these techniques are useful but in the end, you do it because you're interested in fundamental science.

It varies a bit depending on the stage of your career. When you're a postgraduate student, or a post doc, that often means quite a lot of time spent at CERN. It can mean being there for long periods of time and that's quite pressured. It's a 'work hard, play hard' type atmosphere and I think it still is for people who end up working at CERN full time. Some of us with teaching duties tend to go for shorter periods. It's quite an exciting place to work. You're sitting there and running the beam line at three o'clock in the morning. There are these complex experiments, all these people and you're responsible for trying to keep going and not wasting precious beam time. But it's quite a nice place to be as well. When you stop working, there's Geneva. Particularly if you're interested in skiing or climbing; there are lots and lots of opportunities to enjoy. Obviously, it's a very international environment so it's a great experience especially for younger people to go out and spend a year or so there.

When the Higgs boson discovery was announced. It was quite a chilly morning, we had to get in early to set up the video conference in a lecture theatre here, so people could watch it. I wasn't on the group that actually did the final analysis but we all knew it was coming. You're sort of thinking, 'Well this is going to be a bit of an anti-climax'. We've been looking for this. We know it's arrived. We have this big press conference. They've got Peter Higgs at CERN, all his colleagues at CERN, it's clear this is the announcement. In particle physics, when you have a discovery, the particular statement you need to hear is that you've got a five sigma signal. This means that the fluctuation you've seen is very, very unlikely to be able to have been by chance. Three sigma is evidence for something, but five sigma is the point at which you discover it. The first talk started and we all sat there. All this data was presented and there was a bump and then the spokesman said, 'And this is a five sigma signal', and I literally felt the hair stand up on the back of my neck. I was thinking, 'Yes okay, we actually did it!' It seemed odd to have that reaction because I already knew we'd done it but that was the moment that I really knew we'd done it.

I think yes, I'm sure there is. I wish I knew what it was but I don't, otherwise we wouldn't be looking for it. I think there's a contrast between now and where we were with the Higgs boson. We knew it was there, or we were very, very sure it was. Otherwise there would have been such an awful lot of theories that would have had to have been just plain wrong which had been tested in other ways. So the Higgs boson, we were very confident was there. But now we're not actually quite sure what's there. This is where you might discover something you haven't thought of, and I'm pretty sure there's something to be discovered.

The nearest I have to a physics hero, partly because I started researching him for giving talks, was Cecil Powell. He was the Bristol 1950 Nobel Laureate for work he did on studying fundamental parties using photographic emulsions.

It started when I was a new graduate student and we had a conference celebrating 40 years since the discovery of the Pion. A lot of the people who worked with him came back to Bristol and my job was to run around holding a microphone. It was interesting hearing all these people. Of course, there are all these slightly imperfect memories and they were arguing about when they'd actually seen this or done that. But you got a feeling from these rather elderly gentlemen of the excitement of the time that they were working in.

The technique he developed was very cheap. You essentially have, on photographic emulsions, charged particles taking their own photographs. Photographic emulsions were easily available so he collaborated with people all over the world in the days when you wrote letters or it took you ages to put a phone call through! He was collaborating with people in Brazil, for example. You could take these photographs, tell people how to make these emulsions, it wasn't particularly complicated. Then they would develop the pictures, send them around the world and really work together. Donald Perkins, a physicist from Oxford, said, 'Actually this is the start of these collaborations which allowed you to move on and do something like CERN. It is a huge collaborative effort where you get everyone together and they actually decide they're all going to do one thing rather than their own thing'.

The other thing about Cecil Powell is he's very much an experimentalist. What he really did was develop experimental techniques. There were interesting discoveries made, but that's where he started from, doing the experiments, not the theory.

I didn't meet him because he died relatively young, but I did work with Professor Peter Fowler who was a graduate student with Cecil Powell. He was also Rutherford's grandson which is a lovely connection. You think of 'The Physics Greats' as being a long, long time ago but they weren't. It was not that long ago at all. Because particle physics really is essentially a young subject—even now, when you look back, you think the history's not there. So I've worked with someone who was Powell's graduate student.

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No, I tend not to ponder the world of particles when I want to relax. I go and do other things. So I kick people in Tae Kwon Do and I do ballroom and Latin American dancing in which I try not to kick people. I do amateur pantomime which I don't think has any connection with particle physics at all, but possibly helps with presenting work to a wider audience.

When I started it was unusual. It's improved dramatically. At one point I noticed that, out of all the women I knew in my field in this country, three of them were mothers. But because I've got three children, I had as many as the rest of the women in the field put together. That's changing. It's sort of odd because, at the time, I just did physics because that's what I could do and what I was interested in and I didn't feel that I was being unusual. And then I started to think about the number of times I was the only woman in the meeting. I just got used to it and I almost feel now, 'Oh look, there's other women here!' It's been really nice to see that change and that's certainly true here at Bristol. Recently we've appointed a number of women to the academic staff and that is really good to see.

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There are still fewer women in the field and the number you appoint is almost statistical. We've had an influx which is nice. I'd like to see that continue obviously. I think I was the first mother on the permanent full-time academic staff. At the time you just get on with it because that's what you do! But then you look back and think, 'Oh yes, there weren't many of us, were there?'

I think I would tell them to do what they're interested in. The evidence seems to be that the things that put girls off is peer pressure. Or not even peer pressure, just the wanting to be with your friends. If you want to do a subject, do that because you're doing what's going to lead on to the things that you're going to do for the rest of your life. Sometimes it feels a bit easier to be with the people you want to be with. But if you want to do a subject, try not to let that put you off. What I've seen of the evidence is that one of the problems we have in this country is the way we select subjects at 16 where perhaps in other countries, they have a broader education to 18.

Physics has served me well, I've worked for a year or more in Switzerland and Canada and contributed to the confirmation of a Nobel Prize winning theory and I have also got to teach hundreds of talented students over the years.

David Richardson