Skip to main content

Sharon Ann Holgate - five way interview

Former Young Professional Physicist of the Year, Sharon Ann Holgate has a doctorate in experimental physics and has worked for the past twenty-five years as a freelance science writer and broadcaster. She has presented on BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service, and written for newspapers and magazines including Science, New Scientist and The Times Higher Education Supplement. She was co-author of The Way Science Works, a children’s popular science book shortlisted for the 2003 Junior Prize in the Aventis Prizes for Science Books, and has written four undergraduate physics textbooks. She also contributed to the popular science books 30-Second Quantum Theory and 30-Second Energy. In 2022 Sharon Ann won the Institute of Physics’ William Thomson, Lord Kelvin Medal and Prize 'for work in communicating science to a wide variety of audiences and for positive representations of scientists from non-traditional backgrounds'. Her latest book is Nuclear Fusion: The Race to Build a Mini-Sun on Earth. 

Why science?

I didn’t realise it at the time, but it was actually watching an episode of Fingerbobs as a 4-year-old child that inspired my interest in science. Crow wanted a drink but couldn’t reach the water in the bottom of a large beaker, so he began dropping in pebbles until the water level rose enough for him to sip it. I can remember dragging my Mum into the garden to collect some stones and then to the kitchen to find a jug so that we could repeat what I had just seen. I was absolutely transfixed by the water rising! 

Why this book? 

The climate emergency is one of the biggest challenges the world has ever faced. So the seeking of new, clean forms of electricity generation that would reduce our reliance on fossil fuels is an important and exciting topic to write about.  The history of fusion research is also fascinating: I particularly enjoyed learning about the 1950s machines such as the quirkily named Perhapsatron and the sci-fi sounding Hydromagnetic Plasma Gun. Discovering more about the ITER project in southern France and the work taking place at the National Ignition Facility in the United States was equally engrossing, as was interviewing scientists and engineers from the private companies currently building and testing a range of different fusion technologies.   

What date would you put on nuclear fusion power stations going live, and why then?

A few years after a commercially viable fusion technology has been perfected. Recent fusion history has shown that there is no point in trying to estimate a specific date. As with any developing area of science, fusion research is a process of discovery so you can’t necessarily achieve a definite aim within a set time frame. 

What’s next? 

Promoting my forthcoming book Communicating Science Clearly: A Self-Help Guide for Students and Researchers. Then, as a follow-on from winning the Lord Kelvin Medal, I am hoping to be able to use my experiences as a person with a physical disability to help encourage students from diverse backgrounds to enter science. 

What’s exciting you at the moment? 

Some of the recent advances in materials science and technology have certainly caught my eye. For instance the next generation of solar cells contain a layer of perovskite which makes them more efficient at converting sunlight into electricity. Also, who would have thought people would be walking around in trainers made from fungi!


 

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

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

Nanotechnology - Rahul Rao ****

There was a time when nanotechnology was both going to transform the world and wipe us out - a similar position to our view of AI today. On the positive transformation side there was K. Eric Drexler's visions in the 1986 Engines of Creation. Arguably as much science fiction as engineering possibilities, it predicted the ability to use vast armies of assemblers to put objects together from individual atoms.  On the negative side was the vision of grey goo, out of control nanotechnology consuming all in its path as it made more and more copies of itself. In 2003, for instance, the then Prince Charles made the headlines  when newspapers reported ‘The prince has raised the spectre of the “grey goo” catastrophe in which sub-microscopic machines designed to share intelligence and replicate themselves take over and devour the planet.’ These days the expectations have been eased down a notch or two. Where nanotechnology has succeeded, it has been with the likes of atom-thick mat...
Post a Comment
Read more