How to tell science stories that make people care, with physicist Laurie Winkless

Today's guest is Laurie Winkless. She's a physicist, a science writer and she's the only person I know who's actually made writing about friction interesting. You could say she's a science friction writer...

She’s appeared everywhere from Forbes to Wired to BBC, and she has written two books. Oh and she won a scholarship to do some training at NASA. As you do.

I am very excited to talk about her transition from scientist to science communication and why she thinks that's so important.

Transcript

Kia ora kaitiaki, and welcome to Now That's What I Call Green. I'm your host, Brianne West, an environmentalist and entrepreneur trying to get you as excited about our planet as I am. I'm all about creating a scientific approach to making the world a better place, without the judgement, and making it fun. And of course, we will be chatting about some of the most amazing creatures we share our planet with.

So if you are looking to navigate through everything green – or not so green – you have come to the right place. I'm very excited today. I am talking to my first ever physicist and first ever person to work at NASA. How cool is that?

Today's guest is Lori Winklis. She is a physicist, a science writer – you could say she's a “science friction” writer, which I think is quite an accolade. And no, I didn't come up with that; I got it off her website. But she's the only person I know who's actually writing about friction – interesting – which we will go into very shortly.

She's appeared everywhere from Forbes to Wired to the BBC, and she has written two books, which we will be giving away today: one on the science of surfaces – meaning friction – and one on science and the city, which is about the way physics affects everything you do and how a city runs in ways you may not even realise.

I'm not going to talk too much about her career because that's going to be one of the things we go into, but I'm very excited to talk about her transition from scientist to science communication and why she thinks that's so important.

Thank you so much for joining me, Laurie. Is it Laurie?

Laurie: Kia ora, Brianne. No, Laurie's bang on. Yeah, people pronounce it different ways, but Laurie is how I pronounce it. So, perfect.

Brianne: Now I'm going to say it wrong halfway through and slightly panic.

Laurie: No, don't worry about it. You wouldn't be alone in that. I get all sorts of things.

Brianne: It's so funny. I don't know if you get this, but so many people are like, “Oh, how do you say your name?” Or they'll say, “Hi, Brianne,” and I'll say, and they'll specifically ask me, and then they'll repeat it incorrectly.

Laurie: Anyway, I get Laura a lot. Even when my email address is my full name, I will very often get Laura. I'm like, “No, no, it is actually my name. Laurie is my name. It's not that uncommon.” Anyway, DME.

Brianne: Thank you for joining me. You really are my first physicist because, to be honest, the idea of speaking to a physicist is a little intimidating. I asked on our Instagram stories what people wanted me to ask a physicist, and I specifically said, “Please don't ask me to ask about string theory,” because not only am I not smart enough to understand it, I don't think I'm smart enough to ask questions about it.

I don't think I'm smart enough to explain it. I've read a little bit and I think I'm actually worse off than had I not read anything before. But I do want to start with your early stage. When did you know you wanted to go and be a scientist? And why the focus on physics? It's unusual.

Laurie: Yeah, no, I think that's fair. I don't have a single moment that I remember. I was, I think like most scientists, an extremely annoying kid – like really annoying – always asking annoying questions, breaking stuff so I could figure out how it worked, you know?

And my parents and my family were very supportive of that, which I really appreciate. So I think that curiosity was in me somehow, kind of without any nurturing, but then it was nurtured into being.

My dad is actually an engineer. He's a toolmaker by training and very handy – very good with his hands and very practical, and also very, very smart. And he always encouraged the fact that I was also interested in how things worked, and I wanted to learn how to use all the tools, and I wanted to help him do all the DIY projects in the house, despite being like the baby – I'm the youngest of my family.

My mum has a theatre background. So I feel like now – it didn’t feel like this when I was younger – but I feel like now I'm a real mash-up of my parents. I've got the performance and creative side from my mum, and the technical, engineering, physics side from my dad.

But yeah, I think my curiosity was initially very focused on space, right? Which is such a classic kid thing to be interested in. My brother and I had a telescope, and that's when I started to think about the universe around us. I was quite young – I'm kind of six or seven – and really starting to understand and become interested in the solar system and planets.

I think at some point someone told me that if I wanted to do space stuff, I probably needed to be good at physics. Unfortunately. And I was always good at maths – I loved maths – and I was always pretty good at physics in school.

I was terrible at biology. Like, I have such admiration for biologists. Squishy stuff? I just can't. I find physics and chemistry are a lot cleaner and straighter – have straighter edges or something – which is not true, of course. But I think that was something I admired about those sciences as a kid.

And then I was lucky and had good teachers who encouraged my interests. I read a lot of popular science as I got older too – as a teenager, I started to read a lot of popular science. And again, they were quite often physics-y, engineering-y, space-y stuff.

So yeah, there wasn't really a moment. I just followed my stream of curiosity and was encouraged along the way. Physics is kind of where I popped out at the end of it.

Brianne: You didn’t say, “You know what, I'm going to be a physicist” when you were seven?

Laurie: Well, I did tell my mum what university I was going to go to, apparently at the age of four. I have no memory of this, but we were walking past Trinity College in Dublin, which is a beautiful university, and I asked what it was. She said, “Oh, that's a school for big people, but you have to work really hard to get into that school.”

And I was like, “I'm going to go to that school someday.” And I did.

Brianne: Aw, that's cute.

Laurie: Not finished yet. Not finished yet, yeah. I might start another one in my 50s maybe, who knows. Yeah, when I was working at NPL, my really good boss – I really loved working with him – had an idea for a research project. We had funding that would fund me for kind of three to four years on a specific topic. And we thought, like, if I could also get a PhD out of this big research project that we had to deliver anyway, maybe it would be worth it.

But it all kind of… for various reasons, it just didn't work out in the end. So I got a couple of years not quite into it and decided that it wasn't the right fit for me or the project in the end. So we just carried on delivering the science itself, but I was no longer registered as a PhD student.

Yeah, so I have mixed feelings about a PhD. But kind of like you, I do harbour the idea of doing one at some point.

Brianne: It feels like the pinnacle of… you could say it's some insane external validation. I think there's an element of that in it for me, but – and I don't care if that's unhealthy.

Laurie: Yeah, no, me neither.

Brianne: Yeah, I'm doing a couple of master's papers every semester to just sort of chip away at it. And like, the obsession with my results is probably not very good. I screenshotted – I'm just gonna say it, guys – got an A+ for my… what was it?

Brianne: Molecular microbiology. It was fascinating, actually. It was all about AMR – antimicrobial resistance – and it's not… it's not good. But as an aside, yeah. So I get the hang of it.

Maybe we'll both go back to it one day. We can cheer each other on. Yeah, last minute. So can you write a PhD sort of at 9pm at night, the day before you're supposed to submit it?

Laurie: I don't know. I mean, I do have a friend who wrote it in a couple of weeks, but I will not name him to save his blushes.

Brianne: Oh, okay. No, well, that actually makes me feel a bit better. Cool. Okay. One day, one day.

So, onto NPL. You're now in science comms. Let's have a little bit of a conversation about this because a fair few science communicators are now coming out – and they're all doing a wonderful job. But we need more, because the anti-science narrative seems… perhaps it's just the echo chamber I'm in, but it seems to be booming.

And I'm personally getting all sorts of quite odd questions. You know, “Oh, is this drug now apparently made with bits of fetus?” is one question. And, you know, these people aren't stupid. They're not gullible, but they are hearing these things from people they should theoretically be able to trust. I shan't name names, but I should imagine you can think of at least one or two people I'm talking about.

And it's really scary, actually, because already it's doing harm. The US is currently in the largest outbreak of measles it's had in 50, 60 years, I think it was. There's all sorts of things going on far beyond just disease. We need more science communicators.

Why did you get into it? And how, I suppose? How do you call yourself a science communicator?

Laurie: I kind of fell into it a little bit. NPL – one of the most amazing things, as a junior scientist working in a lab like that – there were loads of amazing reasons. But one of the programmes they had was they actually supported each staff member to go out into the community and talk about science, in whatever form you wanted.

So we had a science ambassadors programme. There's a UK-wide science ambassadors programme called STEMnet – it's fantastic. NPL was one of the signatories to that programme. And what that meant was that they had to support their staff to go and talk to the public.

So we actually had in our contract that we had a certain number of days per year that you were allowed to use – that I was allowed to use – to go and do science communication. Because the lab felt like that's part of the remit of doing science: also talking to non-scientists about the science we're doing. That was a real priority for the lab and still is.

So that was a very privileged position to be in because it actually was part of my job. Okay, it was a teeny, teeny, tiny part of my job, but it was still there. It was still supported and enabled by the lab.

So we started doing… I started doing science outreach kind of fairly often and fairly early on in my time at NPL. A lot of the time it was going to a school and giving a talk. Some of my favourite things were like working with teachers and telling them about nanotechnology and thermal energy harvesting, which was what my research was on. So kind of upskilling teachers and telling them about what cool stuff is happening in the lab now, because you know, they're busy people. They can't be reading loads of research papers.

And I really enjoyed that because it felt like I was indirectly helping to get to the next generation by helping their teachers. So I really enjoyed that process.

And I started writing. I've always been a journal keeper as a kid – I had a diary, many of them – but I've always loved writing. English was kind of my next favourite subject in school after physics (physics and maths are the same in my head, so after those two, English).

And yeah, I'd always loved writing. And you write a lot in science anyway. You spend a lot of time writing papers and applying for research grants and writing presentations and all that stuff. But I started to write about science for non-scientists. So I started to just faff around at the edges of writing about science for a more general audience.

And I was kind of doing that secretly – had like a secret blog. I didn't tell anyone I was doing it, just as a practice really, like to kind of get myself out of my science-focused head and to just lift my head up and look more broadly at society and see who I could talk to. So it was just a bit of fun initially, and I started getting really into it.

I think I started getting into science outreach in general more because I had some level of talent in it. I'd always been a stage school kid. Like I said, my mum's from a theatre background. I've been involved in shows my whole life. So even though I'm actually not a very extroverted person naturally, I'm really good at faking it.

Brianne: Don't we call it ambiversion now?

Laurie: Yeah, maybe. Really good at faking confidence. And also, I genuinely love people. I love talking to people about stuff.

I think I had some level of talent in it and my lab supported it. And they allowed me to do more and more of it until the point I started kind of attracting attention from outside the lab. So I started working with a group called The Naked Scientists, who is a fantastic podcast in the UK. And for a little while there, I was like their physics correspondent. So every few episodes, I'd go on the show and talk about a specific piece of research, some new physics news that had come out.

And that was awesome because I found that really hard. I like to do hard things because I think you have to be weak at stuff before you can become strong at it. So I really enjoyed that, flexing those muscles a bit.

I've always had a very community focus to everything I do. Partly, I think, because of my upbringing. I'm from a big family. We're well established in our local community. My parents know everybody, everybody knows them. So the community, the wider community, has always been very important to me.

I never wanted to be in science to be in a kind of an ivory tower. I always wanted to tell people about what we were doing. It wasn't about pure academic pursuit of knowledge – that was part of it – but the other part of it was like, “And now I need to give back. And now I need to tell people what we're doing.”

And that's just… yeah, it's definitely because of the way I was brought up. So science communication kind of fitted into that. I didn't think about it strategically at all. Not at all. It just kind of happened.

Brianne: The best careers do.

Laurie: Yeah. And I think you never really know what you think you're going to… no. And I think the older I've gotten – since I've passed 40 now – I find myself getting very philosophical about my career and much more open to bringing my creativity into my job.

Because I think for a long time in physics, especially as a woman (and I hate to say this, and I think it is different now), but I was very often the only woman in the room. I was very often the only woman at the steering group meeting. I was very often being spoken over by an electrician to my male colleague, even though it was my piece of equipment we were setting up in my lab.

That gets kind of exhausting, and I think you protect yourself in the ways you need to. And I think for a long time, I minimised a lot of my personality or my creative interests. I kind of just packed them away a little bit and had to present myself as a serious physicist.

And I think the older I've gotten now, I don't really care anymore because I'm very confident in myself and who I am and what I've achieved and the things I care about and the things I still want to achieve. So I think that that has come later – that level of being really comfortable in my own skin and in that combination of creativity and science.

They now feel like natural bedfellows in a way they didn't when I was in the lab. Even when I was doing science outreach, it still felt a bit like I was hiding a little bit from myself.

So yeah, this science communication thing – it just kind of felt right. And it felt like if I worked really hard at it, I could get good at it. Yeah. So that's kind of why I ended up trying to get better at it.

Brianne: It is interesting listening to you talk because I talk to a lot of scientists and they're all fascinating, but communication is a particular skill and that is very much something you have. You are a delight to talk to. You can tell you're a storyteller – a science friction writer, sorry – in a way that a lot of scientists struggle with. So it's definitely a skill, and you have got good at it, which is why you happen to have two books.

Now, this is not a reflection on your book at all. I started reading this and I got distracted, and it's absolutely nothing to do with the book and everything to do with the fact that I can't stick to anything. I pick it up and put it down. I think I got distracted by a book about rabies, which happens. Oh God, it was horrific.

Anyway, I love your writing style, which is why, of course, we're giving away a couple of copies. Laurie has kindly signed these. They are very hard to get hold of. So you are very lucky to have it. I have a Kindle version and I'm very excited. It is next on my TBR.

But I'm a big fan of Mark Miodownik – I don't know if that's how you say his name.

Laurie: Miodownik. Yeah, he's wonderful.

Brianne: The moment I saw it on the back, I thought, “I've said his name before… oh, this is awful.”

Laurie: Don't worry. He's also used to his name being mispronounced. He's a very cool dude and won't be worried at all. He won't be upset.

Brianne: Oh, you've met him. Because I love the way – just like what you've done in Sticky – is talk about how science is part of everyday life in a way where people think, “Oh, too hard. I'm never going to understand it,” and making it real world. Which is actually a really good way to teach maths as well.

So we are giving those away. So if you are not following us on Instagram, what are you even doing? Or TikTok – we're on TikTok now, which is a decision I don't regret. Already had one community guidelines violation for talking the truth about lab meat and how it's made in bioreactors. I don't even understand.

Anyway. So how did you write your first book? How did that happen?

Laurie: So, back in the olden days when Twitter was not a cesspit, it was actually a lovely place to do science communication. Like, there were loads of scientists on there, loads of science journalists and science communicators on there, just hanging out. I don't know how it happened, but it just became a place for science. And now it feels so weird to say that because it's fallen so far.

But anyway, so back in the day, science and science communication was a big thing on Twitter. And I spent a lot of time talking about science online and would do all these long threads about metrology – so, like, measurement science – or about materials and all of this stuff. I just found it really fun.

I'd feature lots of scientists. I'd write a little tweet about lots of people who I admire, including Mark Miodownik. And at some point I started sharing my writing there. So I was writing articles – I was writing news articles for scientific journals about papers that were being published. They're still not very public-friendly, but they're a lot more public-friendly than the papers.

And I'd also started writing proper science journalism. So I'd started pitching story ideas to editors and I was getting the occasional thing published. So I was sharing a lot, and it was kind of quite obvious that I'm a physicist and I'm talking about physics and materials.

I get a DM one day from this man called Jim…

The mighty Jim.
Yeah.

Laurie: Jim is a publisher at Bloomsbury and he said, oh, do you want to get lunch someday? I'd love to talk to you about books. And I was like, sure. At no point did I consider that he was asking me if I would be interested in writing a book. I thought like he wanted me to review stuff. I don't know. I was very naïve.

Brianne: I love that. Most people would be like, he wants me to write a book. He's going to give me a series. This is going to be the next Harry Potter except non-fiction.

Laurie: I was just like, sure, let's have lunch. So we had lunch in a place in Camden in North London and in that conversation he said, so have you ever thought about writing a book? And I was like, no. And immediately lying, like immediate lie because...

Brianne: Never considered it. Of course. There's four manuscripts at my house, but no, never.

Laurie: Like as a kid, even, I was just like, oh, I wonder if I'll ever write a book someday, not knowing what it would be about, you know. But he said, you know, have a think about it and have a think of some ideas of topics you might want to write about. And if any of them sound like goers, then maybe you want to put a proposal together. So this wasn't like a free ride in. This was like a nice to meet you. You're an interesting person on the internet talking about physics, which is a topic that's deathly boring apparently. So maybe you'd want to write a book.

Laurie: So I went away and came up with a couple of different ideas for books. And one was the science of London. And I'd been living in the city for ages at this point. As a city dweller, I'm from a small town, but as the city dweller in this magnificent city, I just found myself being really fascinated by the infrastructure that kept it moving. So the tube particularly, big public transport, big train fan, huge, huge train fan. So the tube was just like magic for me. And I would just notice stuff. I started noticing the positions of sensors on the tube or the breeze on the tube when

Laurie: you walk down the escalator or replacing traffic lights or replacing water pipes. And for me, the city suddenly became this organism in my mind. It became this organism that all of these things are operating together in this way that we do not notice until they stop working. So until there's something wrong.

Brianne: Is that very true?

Laurie: Yeah. And I thought, I want to write a book about the hidden science of London. So this was the idea I went to Jim, the publisher, with. And he said, I like it, but I think it's too narrow. Can you broaden it out a bit? So in a conversation, I was like, oh, maybe we could just do like all cities. Again, naivety is a wonderful thing. So, and he was like, yeah, I love it. So I was like, great, no problem. I can do that. So put together a proposal and that was a process in itself. I had to think about

Laurie: who would read this magical, mysterious book that I hadn't written yet, how long it might be, how many chapters it would have, what would be in each chapter. You have to do all of that. Oh, so you have to do a lot of upfront planning. Yeah, a lot. And I thought it was weird at the time, but for Sticky, it became really important, actually. I found it really very helpful. But So I put this proposal together, it went through the first decision conference, and then it got through the second one and I was like...

Laurie: Yeah. And I was like, oh my God, this is like getting a bit weird now. And then I get an email from Jim to say they want to commission it. And I cried.

Brianne: I bet you did.

Brianne: What a cool feeling. Yeah.

Laurie: So that was the kind of beginning of it. I will say that like I didn't get a single penny for the first book until some books got sold. I didn't even get an advance for Signs in the City.

Brianne: It's not something you do for the money a lot of the time, right?

Laurie: Oh God, no. I'll tell you that. If that's what you're getting into writing books for, So, that became my first book and it took me about two and a bit years to write. And it came out, I think it's eight years ago, it could be nine years ago now. And yeah, it was the coolest thing I think I'd ever done at the time. It felt so cool and weird. And to be honest, now I look back at the book and I'm like, oh God, it's not cringey, but my naivety and my youth are peppered through it. And that's okay. I'm still

Laurie: really proud of it because it opened so many doors to me after that. The reason I write for Forbes now is because of science and the city. So I've been writing for Forbes for years and years and years because I had this book that was published. So yeah, I'm very proud of it as my first book baby.

Brianne: Good. Yeah, you certainly shouldn't be cringed, but I can understand because your opinions develop and you think, oh, it's not black and white as I thought it was. I get it. Why friction?

Brianne: Why was the next one about something that is incredibly niche, but really quite important, shall we say?

Laurie: I am a glutton for punishment, I think is the first thing to say. No, it was a weird thing. There was a few different things happened on related things that made me zoom in on this idea of a book about friction. And the first was actually when I was writing Science in the City and I was thinking about how train wheels move because they're made from steel and they move on steel tracks.

Laurie: And I was like, that's so cool. And then I was thinking about tyres that we use on roads and how they grip onto the road and how most of the noise that we hear on roads is not actually from the engines of vehicles, it's from the interaction between the tyre and the tarmac.

Brianne: And this is the sort of thing that other people don't think about, right? And it's actually fascinating. And it sounds, and I imagine people are like, this is a weird thing to fixate on. But actually, when you look at the way and why things do what they do, even the smallest of things, it's fascinating. And I wish more people understood that. I think sometimes

Laurie: it's a little bit, people are a bit afraid to be a bit weird or there's, you know, and like,

Brianne: I love being weird. The best people are the ones that are, if you like, what people would call them weird, right? They have fascinations about unusual things. They are passionate about stuff that other people aren't. And they are particular about things. They, I used to be embarrassed about the fact I was weirdly obsessed with animals, saving worms and snails and coming in and showing people things I found outside and people were like, great, it's a worm. And I did, I always felt really weird about it. Then I realised actually that's part of what makes people really cool is these different fascinations. So I can understand that.

Laurie: Yeah, totally. And yeah, and I think for me, it was just, it's that like curiosity, like I've never lost that. And I hope never to lose that in my whole life. If I remain curious till the day I die, then that the more you realise you don't know. 100%. Yeah. And the thing with friction, like why I kept coming back to it was I just, I started thinking about where things meet, like thinking about the train wheels and the car tyres, and then thinking about water repellent surfaces and thinking about the lotus leaf.

Laurie: And I had done that for a totally unrelated, tiny research project at NPL. And I just kept thinking about surfaces. I kept thinking about the top of things and the interfaces between things. And for me, it just was like, there's so much that happens at interfaces. There's so much of the universe is defined by the interactions between surfaces. And friction for me was just one part of those interactions, but it

Laurie: was the one I was most interested in. And I was like, surely someone has written a book about friction, like surely. And I dug around for ages and obviously no one had because they're not insane. And it was another one of these things like, oh, it's a cool idea. And then I just realised later how enormous a topic it was going to be. But yeah, so no one had written a book about friction. And I was like, I think there's something here. I think this is an idea for another book.

Brianne: So you're the world's only science friction writer. I'm determined to wedge that in as many times as possible.

Laurie: I mean, there's textbooks about friction, but they're not that interesting. So yeah, I kind of pitched that, so went through the same process again, sent in this application or this proposal for this book. And again, it kind of morphed a bit in the process of writing it. But yeah, ultimately it is a book about friction, but that includes things like aerodynamics and how things move

Laurie: through water, hydrodynamics. I talk a lot about the natural world actually in the book, which is unusual for physicists, I think. I had to learn a lot, let's put it that way.

Brianne: The squishy things.

Laurie: The squishy things, yeah. But also about things like tyres and earthquakes. There's a whole chapter on earthquakes because most of plate tectonics is defined by frictional interactions between plates. So it ended up just becoming this like vast book and there's loads of things I didn't even include in it. You know, in the end there's a few things I wish I'd included but didn't. But time ran out. Sticky took me five years to write, so time was very much out by the time I submitted it. Yeah. The amount of work that would go into a non-fiction...

Brianne: Because it's a funny line, right? It's non-fiction storytelling.

Laurie: Yeah.

Brianne: Does it have an official term?

Laurie: No, I don't. I think, yeah, I think that's a good description as it is.

Brianne: Because non-fiction brings to mind a little bit of a sort of a luxury and no one's, you don't tend to read textbooks for joy, especially, I'm sorry, especially a physics one. I'm sure they're fascinating. No, I think that's fair. But yeah, because you do manage to make a very dry topic, really, really palatable. So I do really recommend people go and give it a read. I mean, you've got plenty of articles around about too.

Laurie: So they're an excellent way to get an insight into your writing style? Yeah, I try and take the science guide approach rather than science lecturer approach. I want people to come with me as we find out stuff together because, yeah, there's a lot about science that I know. There's a lot about physics that I know, and I do have that knowledge and that expertise, but I don't know that much about every single thing that I write about. So that means I need to interview actual experts in those topics. And I'd rather bring my readers with me, you know, like physically in some cases if I could, but in the course of my writing, I want them to feel like they're with me interviewing this

Laurie: expert. They're with me when we're visiting this lab. And they're kind of alongside me as I ask difficult questions. And as I dig through the literature. When with Sticky, I wrote, I think I had something like seven or 800 references for Sticky. Like it was, that's more than a PhD thesis would normally have.

Brianne: Oh, thank God. I was going to say, the world's new PhD. Okay, good to know. I can totally understand why. And it just says that you've done it properly because you're right, you're not the expert in everything. There is no such thing. And it speaks to your critical thinking and your understanding of actual science that you do go and talk to experts

Laurie: rather than trying to be the fountain of knowledge. Nah, no time for that.

Brianne: Okay, I'm gonna ask you some quick fire, fun questions. What is your favourite friction fact?

Laurie: Okay, my favourite friction fact, there's so many of these too by the way, but my favourite one is that we have only recently discovered why a curling stone moves the way that it does until literally a few years ago. The physics of curling stones, so this is the sport where you slide a big rock on a sheet of ice. Which always looks hilarious, but apparently is a lot of fun. So much physics as well. My goodness, so much. Truly, really, truly.

Laurie: It's absolutely delightful. Yeah, we've only just really discovered how they work. Because if you take a bottle and you slide a bottle along a countertop, and if you do that while you twist the bottle as you slide it, it will rotate in a particular way. So it will rotate, I'm going to get this wrong now, but it will rotate in the opposite way to which you spin it. So I mean like you spin it and it will move forward and it will veer off and it will veer off in the opposite direction. And this is called asymmetric friction. Is this the whole curling, the David Beacon kick thing? Kind of. It's like, it's even more complicated because we're on a surface, on a physical surface. So moving through the air is actually a bit easier in some ways to get things to bend.

Laurie: But when you're sliding on a surface, it's the way that if you're sliding a bottle, the bottle's kind of leaning forward. There's more friction on the front than the back. So it's the motion of the back that the same direction in which it spins. So that's the exact opposite to what friction physics would expect. And yeah, we really only have discovered why. And it's because of this really specific interaction between the ice, which on a curling rink is pebbled, so it's

Laurie: bumpy, it's not smooth. And the bottom of a curling stone is also rough. There's two theories, we still don't know which one it is, but we know it's probably some combination of those two theories. And I love that we have the sport that's been around for like 500 years and now we watch at the Winter Olympics and we're really only still understanding the physics behind it now. And I love stuff like that.

Brianne: And that's pretty true about so much of almost all science disciplines, right? You know that it works, but we're not quite sure why. We don't really know why painkillers work, although they just released a study about acetaminophen the other day, didn't they? So, interesting. Okay. That's not one I would have picked as a, yeah, I know people who'd curl, who curl,

Laurie: who are curlers. And yeah, so it's a lot of fun. Yeah, it is a lot of fun. It turns out though, even if you know loads of theory, if you've never done it before, you will be crap at it. Because I was humbled very quickly when I went to visit a curling rink, knowing all the physics, and then was absolutely dreadful at it.

Brianne: I don't want to insult curlers, but it just looks like you sort of

Laurie: throw gently, but slide a stone. Nah, the speed of rotation, the weight behind it, the way you release it, the sweepers, they help to straighten out the curl. There's so much physics goes into curling, it's really astonishing. I love talking to curlers about it because a lot of them had a real instinctive understanding of what must be happening. Having no background in physics, they still had a sense of why the stone was moving this way. And that is another example of how science is just part of the world.

Laurie: It's not separate from, it's not a thing that you get to opt out of, I don't think. It's just embedded in the way we exist. And yeah, people get a sense of it, even if they have never looked at an equation.

Brianne: Fricking love it. So good. So interesting. Never would have thought I'd say that about curling. Sorry. Naseby is famous for curling and only curling. Yeah, I thought it might be. Is there even any, anyway, it's a whole other topic. What is one science myth, presumably physics related, that you wish would die?

Brianne: We are going to do a whole separate microgreens episode on physics myths. So you're going to kill a whole lot of them. So this could be a little taster of what we're going to talk about.

Laurie: I mean, it’s too big, but it has to be climate change being a hoax.
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Brianne: Oh, okay. We’re going to go there.
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Lauire: Yeah, I’m so over it. And I think I’ve gotten — I used to be really patient about it. I used to try and meet people where they are and say, “Seen, that’s making you think this.” And I’ve just lost a lot of the patience for that now, to be honest, because I think there are some people who I just don’t think I can get through to. And I can’t get through to everyone. So I kind of dip out of that. I’m not saying they’re hopeless, but I also relate to that. It’s — I don’t want us to lose hope. I think there’s a lot of doomism in climate

Laurie: change. Like, yes, it’s real. Yes, it’s happening. Yes, we need to take action. But to me, I get sad really when people are just like, “Well, why are we even bothering? Like, what’s the point?” It’s like, because every day will make a difference. Every day that we do to stop burning fossil fuels will be better than waiting. And so yeah, the climate stuff, I’m so over it. I’ve lost all patience and time for explaining it to people who just do not want to hear the truth.

Brianne: No, I 100% agree. I’ve stopped calling them climate change deniers. They are climate change confused because that is specifically aggressively patronising. And that’s how I feel we should be to these people now. Because it’s funny, isn’t it? How many of these people who have big platforms, right,

Brianne: who are campaigning against doing anything about climate change and their evidence is compelling. If you don’t know what you’re looking at, right, they look like they know what they’re talking about. And that is frustrating, but they’re all linked in some way to the fossil fuel industry.

Brianne: Recent chats to someone on LinkedIn, in his defence, very respectful, which is a nice change. He was a lawyer for one of the largest oil and gas companies in Aotearoa.

Laurie: So it’s frustrating. It’s frustrating. And I think I just, I want to help, like I want to help people understand, but facts aren’t enough.

Brianne: They’re not even, no.

Laurie: Facts alone are not enough. And if they were, misinformation would have died a death, but facts need legs to walk on and legs are, the legs are stories, you know, like we need to be telling stories about it. But even with our best efforts, I think that there are some people who I personally can’t —

Brianne: reach. I don’t think they can’t be reached, but I personally cannot do it. Totally. Yeah. We did a couple of episodes and videos on how to talk about climate because you’re not going to change the mind of a bunch of these climate confused, but you are potentially going to get through to people who are just lingering in the comments and reading. Right. And I think that’s the key.

Brianne: If you want to.
Oh, yeah, I hear you. That is without question the most frustrating myth. Do you have like a fun one to like end the episode on a cheerful note?

Laurie: Oh, I’ll tell you another friction one if you want. In the early 2000s, there were these swimsuits that everyone was wearing in the Olympics. These were like shark inspired swimsuits. They actually ended up getting banned because they were seen as kind of performance enhancing. Yes. Do you remember this?
Yeah.

Brianne:
Were they actually?

Laurie:
They were performance enhancing, but they had absolutely nothing to do with sharks whatsoever.

Brianne: So they didn’t have denticles or anything on them?

Laurie: No, they had things that looked like denticles, but they were just printed onto the fabric. And actually there’s a shark researcher who took some of this fabric and found that it was better - it had lower drag when you turned the fabric inside out and when you got it the right way out.

So that was a really fun one because I think Speedo really leaned really heavily into the

Laurie: shark aesthetic and marketing around those suits. But actually probably what kept them, what made them performance enhancing was one, they supported the swimmer’s core so they could move more efficiently through the water. They probably also sat slightly higher in the water so it was slightly kind of buoyant and that would also reduce the water resistance that they would experience. And also they were incredibly smooth and form-fitting so you didn’t have any —

Laurie: all your bumps and wrinkles and hair were all hidden in the suit.

Brianne: Do swimmers have bumps, wrinkles?

Laurie: Yeah, maybe. I don’t know.

Brianne: They look kind of perfect.

Laurie: But I love that one because it’s another one of those things where there’s a marketing angle and then there’s the actual science. The actual science says, nah, it’s just so true almost all the time. It’s great. Really enjoy that.

Brianne: Okay, my final question is the one I always end on, of course. I wonder if this is going to be related to the previous climate change relation. If you were supreme global overlord and you had the power to do anything you wanted to make the world a better place, what would be the first thing you would do?

Massively increase investment in renewable energy and public transport above all. Because I think more than half of the world lives in cities now, right? We are urbanites, we are an urban species. And the way that we move around and build in our cities is having a very rapid impact on our environment. So our cars are a major problem. It’s not

Laurie: a problem having any cars. The problem is having so many cars and so many large, heavy vehicles.

Brianne: SUVs and stuff.

Laurie: Yeah, SUVs are a problem on so many levels. I’ve written about them for Forbes many times on this. They actually make traffic worse also just as an FYI. So like people who talk about SUVs like they’re magic, you’re actually making the traffic worse and other SUV owners are also making the traffic worse just by their physical presence.

Brianne: Interesting.

Laurie: Yeah, the environmental impact of these types of vehicles is just enormous. It’s enormous and it’s just getting worse and worse and worse. And even if we have, if we switch to 100% EVs, we still have other issues. We still produce lots of tyre pollution because they’re heavy too, just like fossil fuel vehicles. And also we just can’t move that many people around efficiently if we’re all moving in our own cars. So public transport, huge investment in that,

Laurie: for sure. That’s a major one for me in all cities. That’ll be the first thing I do. And then alongside that, I would massively increase investment in renewables and throw out any ideas of starting to mine for new oil and gas. Like we are starting to do here. So yeah, they’re the two big ones for me. I think if we could get those both on handled, I think that would make a huge impact. It’s probably an argument for eating less meat as well, but it’s just not something I know enough about. I know there’s an argument

Laurie: for that. But yeah, those two would be my top two. So yeah, investment in renewables, investment in mass public transport in all cities in the world.

Brianne: You’re just saying that because you like trains.

Laurie: I do love trains.

Brianne: I grew up on the Isle of Man until I was seven and moved here. And just at the back of our house was a train track. And in the Isle of Man, they painted all of the trains the same colour as various Thomas tank engines. So, you know, I’d wave at Thomas and the yellow, the green one, Percy. I don’t really remember, but apparently I’d sit on top of the slide every afternoon when I got home and I’d wave at the train. So I get the train thing.

Laurie: They’re very cool. Yeah. And I also grew up by a train station my whole life. My grandfather was a railway engineer. My mum was convinced that I somehow have part of his spirit in my body because of my love of railways. So yeah, I am biased, but the bias is scientifically supported.

Brianne: Just look at the tube. You can’t argue with the efficiency. You couldn’t get people around, that number of people around that quickly any other way apart from teleportation. And I don’t believe we’re right there yet.

Laurie: I think we’re still a way off.

Brianne: Three years isn’t that what they keep saying about fusion? Oh we should have talked about fusion!

Laurie: Next time.

Brianne: Next time. Next time. Thank you. You have been so interesting and I know that you, well, you’ve come to terms with your weirdness as you’re putting it now but that’s what makes these sorts of conversations fascinating and I really appreciate it. And thank you very, very much for signed copies of these.

Brianne: I am very excited to give them away. You have the delight, now I’ve put you on the spot, of what do you want people to answer in the comments to get in the draw? So it could be something like their favourite physics facts or a myth.

Brianne: I mean, it doesn’t have to be related to physics

Laurie: or friction or anything, really. Yeah, okay. Yeah, no, I think let’s do, what is your favourite surprising physics fact? So it doesn’t have to be impressive or huge or anything, just tell me something surprising in the world of physics.

Brianne: Okay, amazing. And then you’ll be able to pick the winner, so you have to come up with a good one.

Laurie: Okay, that’s it.

Brianne: And we will pop this up on Instagram today. You will see the giveaway up there. Oh, also on again on TikTok. Thank you. You have been wonderful.