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

God: the Science, the Evidence - Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies ***

This is, to say the least, an oddity, but a fascinating one. A translation of a French bestseller, it aims to put forward an examination of the scientific evidence for the existence of a deity… and various other things, as this is a very oddly structured book (more on that in a moment). In The God Delusion , Richard Dawkins suggested that we should treat the existence of God as a scientific claim, which is exactly what the authors do reasonably well in the main part of the book. They argue that three pieces of scientific evidence in particular are supportive of the existence of a (generic) creator of the universe. These are that the universe had a beginning, the fine tuning of natural constants and the unlikeliness of life.  To support their evidence, Bolloré and Bonnassies give a reasonable introduction to thermodynamics and cosmology. They suggest that the expected heat death of the universe implies a beginning (for good thermodynamic reasons), and rightly give the impression tha...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Infinite Alphabet - Cesar Hidalgo ****

Although taking a very new approach, this book by a physicist working in economics made me nostalgic for the business books of the 1980s. More on why in a moment, but Cesar Hidalgo sets out to explain how it is knowledge - how it is developed, how it is managed and forgotten - that makes the difference between success and failure. When I worked for a corporate in the 1980s I was very taken with Tom Peters' business books such of In Search of Excellence (with Robert Waterman), which described what made it possible for some companies to thrive and become huge while others failed. (It's interesting to look back to see a balance amongst the companies Peters thought were excellent, with successes such as Walmart and Intel, and failures such as Wang and Kodak.) In a similar way, Hidalgo uses case studies of successes and failures for both businesses and countries in making effective use of knowledge to drive economic success. When I read a Tom Peters book I was inspired and fired up...
Post a Comment
Read more

The War on Science - Lawrence Krauss (Ed.) ****

At first glance this might appear to be yet another book on how to deal with climate change deniers and the like, such as How to Talk to a Science Denier.   It is, however, a much more significant book because it addresses the way that universities, government and pressure groups have attempted to undermine the scientific process. Conceptually I would give it five stars, but it's quite heavy going because it's a collection of around 18 essays by different academics, with many going over the same ground, so there is a lot of repetition. Even so, it's an important book. There are a few well-known names here - editor Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker - but also a range of scientists (with a few philosophers) explaining how science is being damaged in academia by unscientific ideas. Many of the issues apply to other disciplines as well, but this is specifically about the impact on science, and particularly important there because of the damage it has been doing...
Post a Comment
Read more