The fascinating physics of everyday life Helen Czerski
As you heard, I’m a physicist.
And I think the way we talk about physics
needs a little modification.
I am from just down the road here;
I don’t live here anymore.
But coming from round here means
that I have a northern nana,
my mum’s mom.
And Nana is very bright;
she hasn’t had much formal education,
but she’s sharp.
And when I was a second-year undergraduate
studying physics at Cambridge,
I remember spending an afternoon
at Nana’s house in Urmston
studying quantum mechanics.
And I had these folders
open in front of me
with this, you know,
hieroglyphics – let’s be honest.
And Nana came along,
and she looked at this folder,
and she said, “What’s that?”
I said, “It’s quantum mechanics, Nana.”
And I tried to explain something
about what was on the page.
It was to do with the nucleus
and Einstein A and B coefficients.
And Nana looked very impressed.
And then she said, “Oh.
What can you do when you know that?”
(Laughter)
“Don’t know, ma’am.”
(Laughter)
I think I said something about computers,
because it was all
I could think of at the time.
But you can broaden that question out,
because it’s a very good question –
“What can you do when you know that?”
when “that” is physics?
And I’ve come to realize that when
we talk about physics in society
and our sort of image of it,
we don’t include the things
that we can do when we know that.
Our perception of what physics is
needs a bit of a shift.
Not only does it need a bit of a shift,
but sharing this different perspective
matters for our society,
and I’m not just saying that
because I’m a physicist and I’m biased
and I think we’re the most
important people in the world.
Honest.
So, the image of physics – we’ve got
an image problem, let’s be honest –
it hasn’t moved on much from this.
This is a very famous photograph
that’s from the Solvay Conference in 1927.
This is when the great minds
of physics were grappling
with the nature of determinism
and what it means
only to have a probability
that a particle might be somewhere,
and whether any of it was real.
And it was all very difficult.
And you’ll notice they’re all
very stern-looking men in suits.
Marie Curie – I keep maybe saying,
“Marie Antoinette,”
which would be a turn-up for the books –
Marie Curie, third from the left
on the bottom there,
she was allowed in,
but had to dress like everybody else.
(Laughter)
So, this is what physics is like –
there’s all these kinds of hieroglyphics,
these are to do with waves and particles.
That is an artist’s impression
of two black holes colliding,
which makes it look
worth watching, to be honest.
I’m glad I didn’t have to write
the risk assessment
for whatever was going on there.
The point is: this is
the image of physics, right?
It’s weird and difficult,
done by slightly strange people
dressed in a slightly strange way.
It’s inaccessible, it’s somewhere else
and fundamentally, why should I care?
And the problem with that
is that I’m a physicist,
and I study this.
This – this is my job, right?
I study the interface
between the atmosphere and the ocean.
The atmosphere is massive,
the ocean is massive,
and the thin layer
that joins them together
is really important,
because that’s where things go
from one huge reservoir to the other.
You can see that the sea surface –
that was me who took this video –
the average height of those waves
by the way, was 10 meters.
So this is definitely physics
happening here –
there’s lots of things –
this is definitely physics.
And yet it’s not included
in our cultural perception of physics,
and that bothers me.
So what is included
in our cultural perception of physics?
Because I’m a physicist,
there has to be a graph, right?
That’s allowed.
We’ve got time along the bottom here,
from very fast things there,
to things that take a long time over here.
Small things at the bottom,
big things up there.
So, our current cultural image
of physics looks like this.
There’s quantum mechanics
down in that corner,
it’s very small, it’s very weird,
it happens very quickly,
and it’s a long way down
in the general …
on the scale of anything that matters
for everyday life.
And then there’s cosmology,
which is up there;
very large, very far away,
also very weird.
And if you go to some places
like black holes
in the beginning of the universe,
we know that these are frontiers
in physics, right?
There’s lots of work being done
to discover new physics
in these places.
But the thing is, you will notice
there’s a very large gap in the middle.
And in that gap, there are many things.
There are planets and toasts
and volcanoes and clouds
and clarinets and bubbles and dolphins
and all sorts of things
that make up our everyday life.
And these are also run by physics,
you’d be surprised –
there is physics in the middle,
it’s just that nobody talks about it.
And the thing about all of these
is that they all run
on a relatively small number
of physical laws,
things like Newton’s laws of motion,
thermodynamics,
some rotational dynamics.
The physics in the middle
applies over a huge range,
from very, very small things
to very, very big things.
You have to try very hard
to get outside of this.
And there is also a frontier
in research physics here,
it’s just that nobody talks about it.
This is the world of the complex.
When these laws work together,
they bring about
the beautiful, messy,
complex world we live in.
Fundamentally, this is the bit
that really matters to me
on an everyday basis.
And this is the bit
that we don’t talk about.
There’s plenty of physics
research going on here.
But because it doesn’t involve
pointing at stars,
people for some reason
think it’s not that.
Now, the cool thing about this
is that there are so many things
in this middle bit,
all following the same physical laws,
that we can see those laws at work
almost all the time around us.
I’ve got a little video here.
So the game is, one of these eggs is raw
and one of them has been boiled.
I want you to tell me which one is which.
Which one’s raw?
(Audience responds)
The one on the left – yes!
And even though you might not
have tried that, you all knew.
The reason for that is,
you set them spinning,
and when you stop the cooked egg,
the one that’s completely solid,
you stop the entire egg.
When you stop the other one,
you only stop the shell;
the liquid inside is still rotating
because nothing’s made it stop.
And then it pushes the shell round again,
so the egg starts to rotate again.
This is brilliant, right?
It’s a demonstration
of something in physics
that we call the law of conservation
of angular momentum,
which basically says
that if you set something spinning
about a fixed axis,
that it will keep spinning
unless you do something to stop it.
And that’s really fundamental
in how the universe works.
And it’s not just eggs that it applies to,
although it’s really useful
if you’re the sort of person –
and apparently, these people do exist –
who will boil eggs
and then put them back in the fridge.
Who does that? Don’t admit to it –
it’s OK. We won’t judge you.
But it’s also got much
broader applicabilities.
This is the Hubble Space Telescope.
The Hubble Ultra Deep Field,
which is a very tiny part of the sky.
Hubble has been floating
in free space for 25 years,
not touching anything.
And yet it can point
to a tiny region of sky.
For 11 and a half days,
it did it in sections,
accurately enough
to take amazing images like this.
So the question is:
How does something
that is not touching anything
know where it is?
The answer is that right in the middle
of it, it has something
that, to my great disappointment,
isn’t a raw egg,
but basically does the same job.
It’s got gyroscopes which are spinning,
and because of the law
of conservation of angular momentum,
they keep spinning
with the same axis, indefinitely.
Hubble kind of rotates around them,
and so it can orient itself.
So the same little physical law
we can play with in the kitchen and use,
also explains what makes possible
some of the most advanced technology
of our time.
So this is the fun bit of physics,
that you learn these patterns
and then you can apply them
again and again and again.
And it’s really rewarding
when you spot them in new places.
This is the fun of physics.
I have shown that egg video
to an audience full of businesspeople once
and they were all dressed up very smartly
and trying to impress their bosses.
And I was running out of time,
so I showed the egg video and then said,
“Well, you can work it out,
and ask me afterwards to check.”
Then I left the stage.
And I had, literally,
middle-aged grown men
tugging on my sleeve afterwards,
saying, “Is it this? Is it this?”
And when I said, “Yes.” They went, “Yes!”
(Laughter)
The joy that you get
from spotting these patterns
doesn’t go away when you’re an adult.
And that’s really important,
because physics is all about patterns,
and a small number of patterns
give you access
to almost all of the physics
in our everyday world.
The thing that’s best about this
is it involves playing with toys.
Things like the egg shouldn’t be dismissed
as the mundane little things
that we just give the kids to play with
on a Saturday afternoon
to keep them quiet.
This is the stuff
that actually really matters,
because this is the laws of the universe
and it applies to eggs
and toast falling butter-side down
and all sorts of other things,
just as much as it applies
to modern technology
and anything else
that’s going on in the world.
So I think we should play
with these patterns.
Basically, there are a small
number of concepts
that you can become familiar with
using things in your kitchen,
that are really useful
for life in the outside world.
If you want to learn about thermodynamics,
a duck is a good place to start,
for example, why their feet
don’t get cold.
Once you’ve got a bit
of thermodynamics with the duck,
you can also explain fridges.
Magnets that you can play with
in your kitchen
get you to wind turbines
and modern energy generation.
Raisins in [fizzy] lemonade, which is always
a good thing to play with.
If you’re at a boring party,
fish some raisins out of the bar snacks,
put them in some lemonade.
It’s got three consequences.
First thing is, it’s quite good
to watch; try it.
Secondly, it sends the boring people away.
Thirdly, it brings
the interesting people to you.
You win on all fronts.
And then there’s spin
and gas laws and viscosity.
There’s these little patterns,
and they’re right around us everywhere.
And it’s fundamentally democratic, right?
Everybody has access to the same physics;
you don’t need a big, posh lab.
When I wrote the book,
I had the chapter on spin.
I had written a bit
about toast falling butter-side down.
I gave the chapter to a friend of mine
who’s not a scientist,
for him to read and tell me
what he thought,
and he took the chapter away.
He was working overseas.
I got this text message back from him
a couple of weeks later,
and it said, “I’m at breakfast
in a posh hotel in Switzerland,
and I really want
to push toast off the table,
because I don’t believe what you wrote.”
And that was the good bit –
he doesn’t have to.
He can push the toast off the table
and try it for himself.
And so there’s two important things
to know about science:
the fundamental laws we’ve learned
through experience and experimentation,
work.
The day we drop an apple and it goes up,
then we’ll have a debate about gravity.
Up to that point,
we basically know how gravity works,
and we can learn the framework.
Then there’s the process
of experimentation:
having confidence in things,
trying things out,
critical thinking – how we move
science forward –
and you can learn both of those things
by playing with toys
in the everyday world.
And it’s really important,
because there’s all this talk
about technology,
we’ve heard talks about quantum computing
and all these mysterious, far-off things.
But fundamentally, we still live in bodies
that are about this size,
we still walk about,
sit on chairs that are about this size,
we still live in the physical world.
And being familiar with these concepts
means we’re not helpless.
And I think it’s really important
that we’re not helpless,
that society feels it can look at things,
because this isn’t
about knowing all the answers.
It’s about having the framework
so you can ask the right questions.
And by playing with these fundamental
little things in everyday life,
we gain the confidence
to ask the right questions.
So, there’s a bigger thing.
In answer to Nana’s question
about what can you do
when you know that –
because there’s lots of stuff
in the everyday world
that you can do when you know that,
especially if you’ve got
eggs in the fridge –
there’s a much deeper answer.
And so there’s all the fun
and the curiosity
that you could have playing with toys.
By the way – why should kids have
all the fun, right?
All of us can have fun playing with toys,
and we shouldn’t be embarrassed about it.
You can blame me, it’s fine.
So when it comes to reasons
for studying physics, for example,
here is the best reason I can think of:
I think that each of us has
three life-support systems.
We’ve got our own body, we’ve got a planet
and we’ve got our civilization.
Each of those is an independent
life-support system,
keeping us alive in its own way.
And they all run
on the fundamental physical laws
that you can learn in the kitchen
with eggs and teacups and lemonade,
and everything else you can play with.
This is the reason, for example,
why something like climate change
is such a serious problem,
because It’s two of these
life-support systems,
our planet and our civilization,
kind of butting up against each other;
they’re in conflict,
and we need to negotiate that boundary.
And the fundamental physical laws
that we can learn
that are the way
the world around us works,
are the tools at the basis of everything;
they’re the foundation.
There’s lots of things
to know about in life,
but knowing the foundations
is going to get you a long way.
And I think this, if you’re not interested
in having fun with physics
or anything like that – strange,
but apparently, these people exist –
you surely are interested
in keeping yourself alive
and in how our life-support systems work.
The framework for physics
is remarkably constant;
it’s the same in lots and lots
of things that we measure.
It’s not going to change anytime soon.
They might discover
some new quantum mechanics,
but apples right here
are still going to fall down.
So, the question is –
I get asked sometimes: How do you start?
What’s the place to start
if you’re interested in the physical
world, in not being helpless,
and in finding some toys to play with?
Here is my suggestion to you:
the place to start is that moment –
and adults do this –
you’re drifting along somewhere,
and you spot something
and your brain goes, “Oh, that’s weird.”
And then your consciousness goes,
“You’re an adult. Keep going.”
And that’s the point –
hold that thought –
that bit where your brain went,
“Oh, that’s a bit odd,”
because there’s something
there to play with,
and it’s worth you playing with it,
so that’s the place to start.
But if you don’t have
any of those little moments
on your way home from this event,
here are some things to start with.
Put raisins in [fizzy] lemonade;
highly entertaining.
Watch a coffee spill dry.
I know that sounds a little bit
like watching paint dry,
but it does do quite weird things;
it’s worth watching.
I’m an acquired taste at dinner parties
if there are teacups around.
There are so many things you can do
to play with teacups, it’s brilliant.
The most obvious one
is to get a teacup, get a spoon,
tap the teacup around the rim and listen,
and you will hear something strange.
And the other thing is,
push your toast off the table
because you can,
and you’ll learn stuff from it.
And if you’re feeling really ambitious,
try and push it off in such a way
that it doesn’t fall butter-side down,
which is possible.
The point of all of this is that,
first of all, we should all
play with toys.
We shouldn’t be afraid to investigate
the physical world for ourselves
with the tools around us,
because we all have access to them.
It matters, because if we want
to understand society,
if we want to be good citizens,
we need to understand the framework
on which everything else must be based.
Playing with toys is great.
Understanding how to keep
our life-support systems going is great.
But fundamentally, the thing
that we need to change
in the way that we talk about physics,
is we need to understand
that physics isn’t out there
with weird people
and strange hieroglyphics
for somebody else in a posh lab.
Physics is right here; it’s for us,
and we can all play with it.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)