Richard Sear

Frogs and snails, And puppy-dogs’ tails

According to the nursery rhyme* I was told when I was a child, boys are made from “Frogs and snails, And puppy dog’s tails” while girls are made from “Sugar and spice, And everything nice”. I am rewriting my biological physics lectures to talk a little bit about what we are really made of. This does include sugars, but is mainly water, protein, fats and related molecules, and mineral. We are roughly half water, with the remainder 20% protein, and 10% each of lipids and the mineral in our bones. Lipids are the molecules that make up the membranes in our cells as well as what we call fat. There are smaller amounts of lots of other stuff, like sugars, DNA, etc.

Is British science meritocratic?

I think UK science is pretty meritocratic, certainly few seem to care where you went to school or university. But there have been some alarming newspaper articles on some professions being dominated by those who went to private schools; for example 71% of judges were privately educated. They don’t report figures for science*. And at yesterday’s Open Day a parent of a prospective student asked a colleague and I about how much employers care about where a physics graduate does their degree. We both thought that most would judge an applicant mostly on their merits although the prestige of their university is not completely irrelevant.

Are university degrees a Veblen good?

A general election is coming, in May 2015. The political parties will be aiming to put out policies for university education in the run-up to the general election. Labour seem to be going for reducing fees from £9,000 to £6,000. The Conservatives, as a matter of principle, like both free-market competition and low taxes. But here these two, competition and spending less taxpayers’ money, may contradict each other.

From Afghanistan to the Virgin Mary’s cloak

On Sunday I went to the National Gallery‘s Making Colour exhibition. It was fascinating. One of the first paintings you see is Sassoferra to‘s Virgin Mary – shown to the left. It was painted over 350 years ago, but the blue cloak is still stunning. The exhibition was basically on how artists achieved beautiful colours like that of the cloak.

PhD thesis summaries for the social-media era

It is a bank holiday weekend, and our brains need a rest, and maybe some fun. So try lolmythesis.com. Theses are long, PhD theses are often around 200 pages in physics — hard and time-consuming to write, sometimes quite hard to read. lolmythesis.com is where students boil down their master works into a single, hopefully amusing and illuminating line.

Some of them are just great. The front page features the most recent ones, which changes constantly, but at the moment we have: “Turns out society is screwed without fossil fuels”, which is good to know, and “Sometimes when people don’t say things, they don’t say things differently”, which sounds deep.

Physics degrees can pay off, but will they save us?

Back in 1999, only a couple of years after I was appointed at Surrey, I went to a summer school on statistical physics, in St Andrews, Scotland. One of the lecturers was a guy called Jean-Phillippe Bouchaud. He gave some interesting lectures on the statistical physics of glasses, these are systems like window glass in which the molecules are stuck, at least most of the time. Since then our careers, and I suspect our salaries, have diverged. He is now senior management of France’s largest hedge fund, Capital Fund Management.

Gluing jelly back together

There were a lot of great talks in the Liquids 2014 conference, but one stood out. It stood out because it was based on a beautifully simple idea, and because it might just save lives. The talk was by Ludwik Leibler (ESPCI, Paris). It considered the problem of how to stick two polymer gels together. Polymer gels are soft solids that are mostly water but are solid because long polymer molecules form a network inside them. Many foods are polymer gels. Jelly is a classic example.

Why is evolution so much better than us?

One of the things I work on is the nucleation of crystals. Nucleation is how crystals start to form, and so control over nucleation basically means being able to start a crystal growing where we want and when we want. We scientists have tried really quite hard to do this, for decades, and to be honest we are still pretty rubbish at it. We still can’t predict what we need to do to make a crystal on command. Sometimes nothing happens when we want a crystal to nucleate, other times when we want one crystal to form, instead we get dozens. It is a bit of a tale of woe.

Breaking laws

I have just got back from Liquids 2014, a conference in Lisbon. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and Lisbon was great – sunny, friendly and with great seafood. I will probably write a post or two on the best talks later, but now I want to talk about how I learnt of two scientists trying to reinvent thermodynamics.

Swift movement in shrink-to-fit genes

The remarkable fact that people who work on understanding our DNA always mention in their talks is that we have about 1.5 m of DNA in the nucleus of each of cells, and these nuclei are only around 5 thousandths of a millimetre across. That is a lot of DNA in a small space. Stretched out the DNA is longer than some of us are tall, but this DNA is crammed into a space too small to see with the naked eye.