Skip to main content

Marty Jopson - Four Way Interview

Marty Jopson has a PhD in cell biology and builds science props, but he is best known for his regular appearances as the resident scientist on the BBC's The One Show. He does live stage performances around the UK, which involve naked flames and end in a loud bang. His latest book is The Science of Food.

 Why Science:

 Because it’s fun and I get a huge buzz finding out new things and then passing that knowledge on to other people. As a science communicator, it’s my job to talk to people about science on the telly, on stage and in books, so I’ve spent a lot of time considering why science is important, not just to me but to everyone. I could harp on about how science and technology have shaped our world, how medicine keeps us alive or how engineers have built everything. I could spend my time trying to communicate the science behind the deeper secrets of the mind or the darkest recesses of the universe. But in the end the audience I am interested in is the audience that doesn’t know they are interested in science. The key for me in my work is to share my enthusiasm for science. So, why science? Because it's fun.

 Why this book?

 Lots of reasons, but it really sprang from the first book I wrote, The Science of Everyday Life. In that I talked about quite a number of food-related science nuggets and I realised that I had so much more I wanted to say on the subject. I have spent a lot of time working on TV programmes about processed food and became very familiar with the food technologist’s subtle science. On top of that, I used to be a plant scientist and that is where some really exciting science is going on right now, but you don’t hear about it often. Lastly, I do love to cook and it was a way to marry two of my great passions - science and food. 

 What’s next?

 Immediately on the horizon I have a couple of new science stage shows to work on. I spend a lot of my time touring the UK going to science festivals and schools performing science shows. My shows are full of props and demonstrations and it takes a considerable while to develop each show. Lurking in my brain is a show to go with the Science of Food book, but also one on microscopy. After that, I would love to write something specifically aimed at kids and come the New Year, the BBC will be knocking on my door wanting to film again. 

 What’s exciting you at the moment?

 So many things! In the workshop, I just bought myself a new table saw and I'm about half way through refurbishing my massive Van de Graaf generator. On the stage show front I’m hoping to get my hands on some swanky microscopes soon for my new show, and when I say swanky - woo hoo - these are the bee's knees, but I can’t say any more right now. At home my daughter just started GCSEs this year and it turns out that for English Literature she’s doing two of my favourite books (Merchant of Venice and Lord of the Flies). I can’t wait to hear how she tackles them. Then there is the fountain pen that a friend just gave me. I’m rediscovering the joy of writing things on paper with ink. Oh and it’s my birthday in a few days and a bunch of my friends are joining me for a curry. All this excitement, I may need a lie down.
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