Skip to main content

Laurie Winkless - Four Way Interview

Laurie Winkless is a physicist with an undergraduate degree from Trinity College, Dublin, and a master’s degree in space science from university College London. Laurie has been communicating science to the public for more than a decade, working with schools and universities, the royal Society, Forbes, and the naked Scientists, amongst others. She’s given TeDx talks, hung out with astronauts, and appeared in The Times Magazine as a leading light in STeM. Her first book is Science and the City.

 Why science?

 I guess part of the answer is that I was a curious child, full of questions on everything from how we make paint, or how a fridge works, to how car engines turn petrol into motion. Luckily, I have a very supportive family, so no matter how random the question, finding the answer was always encouraged. I've also always enjoyed doing things with my hands - learning through experimentation - and have been obsessed with space exploration for as long as I can remember! At school, English, science and maths were my favourite subjects, and I genuinely, briefly, considered studying journalism at university. But once I got into my physics degree, I knew I'd made the right call. That led to a summer scholarship at the Kennedy Space Centre, and a masters in space science. My years at the National Physical Lab were hugely eye-opening for me - I felt as if I was finally doing science 'properly' - and I loved the process of research. Asking the right question is key to that - half of the scientific process, I'd say - and the best ones lead you  down a path you might not have expected. They were my favourite days in the lab - when I had a result that didn't make sense! I  see myself as a 'lapsed physicist', taking time out to explore the other side of my interest - writing about science  for the general public. I hope to find a way to combine the two eventually!

 Why this book?
Firstly, because I'm an adopted Londoner - I moved here from Ireland in 2005, and I fell in love with the living, breathing metropolis that is London. But as a physicist, it was understanding how it all worked that really drew me in. And then I read a report that said that more than half of our global population - 54% - now lived in cities. I found that extraordinary. With that proportion showing no sign of stopping, I wondered about how our future cities would cope with the challenges that would bring. How we would  deliver power to people, provide water, remove waste, build transport networks... all in the face of a changing climate and unprecedented population growth. Science and the City gave me opportunity to explore all of those questions and more, and importantly, to introduce them to non-scientists.

 What’s next?

 Well, I'll be leaving London in a few months - off on a new adventure. I'm hoping that it'll come with lots more inspiration, and plenty of 'I've never done that' moments! I also have the beginnings of an idea for another book - a little different from Science and the City, but still physics / engineering / materials-y. I still need to convince Bloomsbury to let me write it... so we'll have to wait and see!

 What’s exciting you at the moment?

 Oh all good science/tech/engineering excites me! But if I were to pick a few, I'd say the use of waste products in new and interesting ways - human faeces as a transport fuel, and landfill plastic that is being transformed into roads and bricks for homes. Also, developments in batteries, and a smarter approach to energy harvesting, such as perovskite solar cells and Power Over Wifi.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Introducing Artificial Intelligence – Henry Brighton & Howard Selina ****

It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge  Introducing  … series (a vast range of books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as …  for Beginners , puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point. Funnily,  Introducing Artificial Intelligence  is both a good and bad example of the series. Let’s get the bad bits out of the way first. The illustrators of these books are very variable, and I didn’t particularly like the pictures here. They did add something – the illustrations in these books always have a lot of information content, rather than being window dressing – but they seemed more detached from the text and rather lacking in the oomph the best versions have. The other real problem is that...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more