Skip to main content

Kathryn Harkup - Five Way Interview

Kathryn Harkup is a chemist and author. Kathryn completed a doctorate on her favourite chemicals,  phosphines, and went on to further postdoctoral research before realising that talking,  writing and demonstrating  science appealed a bit more than hours slaving over a hot fume-hood. For six years she ran the outreach in  engineering, computing, physics  and maths at the University of Surrey, which involved writing talks on science topics that would appeal to  bored teenagers (anything disgusting  or dangerous was usually the most  popular). Kathryn is now a freelance science communicator delivering  talks and workshops on the quirky side  of science. Her new book is The Secret Lives of Molecules.

Why chemistry?

My interest in chemistry comes from a combination of a great teacher, a fascination with fire, explosions and pretty colours, and a love of finding things out. For me, the science is a great mix of big theories and practical experimentation. I love learning and I also love making things. Chemistry has rules and systems of organisation that appeal to the methodical and organised side of my personality, but practical chemistry is also an art and a skill. It is a subject that has enormous potential for creativity, spectacle and surprises. The products of this science can be intellectual oddities with no obvious use, and others can have rapid and direct impact on everyday lives. Like all the other sciences, chemisty has its share of interesting characters who have contributed to the advancement of the discipline, as well as fascinating stories.

Why this book?

The Secret Lives of Molecules was a natural followup to The Secret Lives of the Elements. I thoroughly enjoyed getting reacquainted with members of the periodic table for the first book, but chemistry is much more about how those elements interact with each other and combine forces to become something greater than the sum of their parts. I didn't want to write a textbook explaining the nuts and bolts of chemical interactions - there are plenty of those already. For me, one of the most interesting aspects of any subject is finding out how it fits in with everything else. I wanted to put some of these molecules into a context. For example, retinal is not a particularly interesting molecule in terms of the atoms it is made of or how they are arranged, but without it we, and many other animals on the planet, couldn't see. A rather ordinary molecule can have an extraordinary role simply because it happens to do something very well, such as change shape when a photon of light hits it. It was great fun finding new ways to present familiar substances and researching molecules I had never heard of before but that play an important part in our lives. Most importantly, I just wanted to tell some interesting stories.

There seem to be fewer popular chemistry books than any other aspect of science. Why do you think this is?

Physics and biology have within them some very visually impressive and relatable topics - space science or zoology - or they encompass big ideas such as gravity or evolution. There are plenty of aspects of both these subjects that rarely get written about in popular science books. I think chemistry can be a tough subject to grasp because the majority of it is not easily relatable. Appreciating how atoms and molecules too small to be seen by the naked eye can be manipulated and built up into all the different things around us is a huge conceptual leap. Chemistry books can very quickly get bogged down in minutiae that is difficult or tedious to follow - I hope I have avoided this.

What’s next?

I hope more chemistry. Writing The Secret Lives has made me remember why I enjoyed chemistry in the first place, thinking about atoms, molecules and their interactions. I love figuring out why chemicals can have the effects they do, be that in a global scale, such as with ozone, or the very personal, such as with hormones. It might be time to go back to finding out about poisons, those chemicals that in tiny amounts can have particularly dramatic effects.

What’s exciting you at the moment?

At the moment I am finding out about ants by reading a lovely book, Empire of Ants. It covers the science of these creatures as well as anecdotes of researching them in far flung parts of the globe and the problems of transporting them and studying them in the lab. I'm thoroughly enjoying it.


 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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

The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here.  We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Einstein's Fridge - Paul Sen ****

In Einstein's Fridge (interesting factoid: this is at least the third popular science book to be named after Einstein's not particularly exciting refrigerator), Paul Sen has taken on a scary challenge. As Jim Al-Khalili made clear in his excellent The World According to Physics , our physical understanding of reality rests on three pillars: relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. But there is no doubt that the third of these, the topic of Sen's book, is a hard sell. While it's true that these are the three pillars of physics, from the point of view of making interesting popular science, the first two might be considered pillars of gold and platinum, while the third is a pillar of salt. Relativity and quantum theory are very much of the twentieth century. They are exciting and sometimes downright weird and wonderful. Thermodynamics, by contrast, has a very Victorian feel and, well, is uninspiring. Luckily, though, thermodynamics is important enough, lying behind ...
Post a Comment
Read more