A key part of the scientific method is communicating the insights to an audience, for any field of research or problem context. This is where the ultimate value comes from: by sharing the cutting-edge results that can improve our understanding of the world and help deliver new innovations in people's lives. Effective science communication sits at the intersection of data, research, and the art of storytelling.
In this episode of the DataCafé we have the pleasure of welcoming Laurie Winkless, a physicist, author and science communications expert. Laurie has extensive experience in science journalism, having written numerous fascinating articles for Forbes Magazine, Wired, Esquire, and The Economist. She has also authored two science books which we will talk about today:
Laurie tells us about the amazing insights in her books from her research, interviews and discussions with leading scientists around the world. She gives us an idea of how the scientific method sits at the core of this work. Her efforts involve moving across many complicated data landscapes to uncover and articulate the key insights of the scientists working in these fields. And she does this through the art of storytelling, in a manner that can capture people's imagination whilst educating and surprising them at the same time.
Interview guest: Laurie Winkless, physicist, author, science communicator. Contactable via her website, and on twitter, mastodon, and linkedin.
Further information:
- www.lauriewinkless.com
- "Why do things stick to each other?" Talk by Laurie Winkless at The Royal Institution.
- https://twitter.com/laurie_winkless
- https://scicomm.xyz/@LaurieWinkless
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurie-winkless/
- Sticky: The Secret Science of Surfaces
- Science and the City: The Mechanics behind the Metropolis
Thanks for joining us in the DataCafé. You can follow us on twitter @DataCafePodcast and feel free to contact us about anything you've heard here or think would be an interesting topic in the future.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Jason (00:00):
Joining me in the data Cafe today is Laurie wingless, a
physicist, author, and sciencecommunicator. Laurie has a
background in physics physicsdegree from Trinity College
Dublin, which is where we firstmet. She then went on to work in
the UK National PhysicalLaboratory as a research
scientist specializing infunctional materials. She's an
amazing science communicatorwho's written a really
(00:22):
impressive number of fascinatingblogs, articles, publications
across the likes of Forbes,wired and Esquire. And what's
really impressive is publishedtwo science books, most recently
sticky the secret science ofsurfaces. And her first book
science and the city was on themechanics behind the metropolis.
(00:42):
Laurie, it's such a pleasure towelcome you to the data Cafe
today.
Laurie (00:46):
It's so lovely to be here, Jason, thanks. Thanks for
waiting for the invite.
Jason (00:50):
So I wanted to talk first about sticky. And this is really
cool. The secret science ofsurfaces, which all around us in
the world, and we interact withthem all the time, loads of
fascinating case studiesthroughout your book. And what
surprised me in that context alittle bit is that there's still
(01:10):
this kind of ongoing discoveryin defining what is stickiness,
even the friction is such animportant concept in physics.
Can you tell me a bit about whythis is? So in the kind of
challenges in this field ofresearch?
Laurie (01:24):
Yeah, I think the, the main reason really I call the
book Sticky is because it's aword that we as humans,
regardless of our scientificbackground, have this kind of
instinctive understanding of orhave a relationship with. So you
know, I've often asked peoplewhen I, when I say the word
sticky, what do you think of,and someone might say, Oh, my
(01:45):
kids with their sticky handsafter eating something sweet,
or, you know, like the theadhesives and paints in my
garage, you know, people havethis relationship with the word
sticky, so we understand what itmeans. But then, when we put our
scientist hats on, there's noscientific definition for the
word sticky. You know, thereisn't a single metric that we
(02:05):
can use to describe something assticky. It's not something like
density, you know, where we havean actual measurement, we have a
real number, a real metric thatwe can use. And we can then
compare things in terms of theirdensity, or their math or
whatever, you know, theircrystal structure. So you know,
we've got all of thesedefinitions that we can use in
science. But the word sticky isnot one of them. And therefore,
(02:28):
the kind of interaction betweenbetween materials is also one
that is really difficult, butimpossible, in fact, to
summarize, in a single metric,now, it's not to say we don't
have any metrics, we have lotsof lots of things, like the word
viscosity, for example, thatwill tell us something about how
(02:49):
a fluid will move, or how aliquid will interact. So
something that's more viscous iskind of more sticky in inverted
commas, you know, it has thisresistance to flow. So maybe
that's a metric that we coulduse, and we can use in some
contexts or thinking aboutstickiness. But then what about
between dry surfaces, or solidsurfaces? How do we describe
(03:11):
that, and you said, friction,right, we talk about friction
all the time, all the time.
With things like the coefficientof friction, that's probably
another metric that maybe wecould use to describe how solid
surfaces interact. So thecoefficient of friction being a
measure of how hard or how easyit is for two surfaces to slide
(03:31):
along one another. That couldmaybe be considered, I would
argue that to be considered oneof these measures that helps us
to describe how surfacesinteract. But that itself is a
weird metric. And this isn'tsomething I had fully grasped,
actually, to be honest, before Istarted researching this book,
which is that the coefficient offriction is not something that
(03:53):
we can predict. We can't takeeverything we know on the atomic
level about two materials, andput it into a series of
equations and then out pops acoefficient of friction, we
can't do that we don't have thatability to do that. That number
is something that's always beenmeasured experimentally. So it's
always been an average. And whenI think about how often I used
(04:17):
coefficients of friction indifferent equations, or in
different contexts, we don'thave a way to, you know, we
don't have a way to calculatethis from first principles. And
I just loved that idea that wehad this we have this
fundamental, these fundamentalkind of forces and interactions
that define so much of how wemove through the world as as
(04:37):
people, but also how much wemove through the world of
scientists and people whoactually do scientific research.
And yet, there's still all thesequite big gaps or approximations
that we have to use. And thatwas kind of were the beginnings
of the idea of a book aboutfriction, which is effectively
what's sticky is came about thekind of existence of these terms
(05:00):
in the real world in invertedcommas, and, and their absence
from the scientific literature.
Jason (05:06):
There was a really nice example that you gave in a talk
with the Royal Institute or
Laurie (05:12):
Yeah, the Royal Institution. Yeah, that was a
real pinch me.
Jason (05:17):
Where you talked about the different temperatures of
ice rink, depending on thedifferent sports. And that was
really impressive, because ofthe different ways that the
athletes can almost tell whathow cold the ice is, depending
on the sport.
Laurie (05:33):
Yeah, I found that might as well. And I think it was
something I kept coming back toin different contexts to, you
know, we can have thisinstinctive understanding of
something incredibly see thiswith crafts, people, you know,
we see this with glass blowers.
And they understand theintricacies of how glass moves
in a way that scientists it's adifferent type of understanding,
it's no less real, it's no lessimportant. It's no less valid,
(05:56):
it's just different. And when Ispoke to both athletes and
icemakers, you know, becausethere are like professional
icemakers, who, who the Olympicsfly over to each games to set up
all the rinks, they have thatinstinctive understanding of the
ice. And an athlete can tell youfrom almost the moment,
especially like speed skaterswhere you want to keep friction
(06:16):
as low as possible. They can,they can tell you that it feels
like it's fast ice, or the icemakers will sometimes tell you
that they can hear when theathletes are training on the
rink, whether it's going to be agood race, like so they have all
of this understanding. And they,they have known how to create
ice. And these rinks are verythin, the layers of ice that are
(06:39):
on the Olympic rank are muchthinner than you might imagine.
And they're built up Layer LayerLayer by layer over days and
days for a single rank. Butthey've known how to do that.
And they've managed to, youknow, change their recipes. And
they use very specific types ofwater and all of that stuff. But
none of them would describethemselves as a scientist, at
least none of the ones I would,I would have interviewed. And
(07:01):
yet, it's only really in fairlyrecent years that we have been
able to fully explain andunderstand, you know, from a
scientific point of view, whyice is slippery. And how the
surface the the slipperiness ofthe surface of ice, the friction
on the surface of ice changeswith temperature. That's pretty
recent that we've actuallymanaged to put numbers and an
(07:22):
information behind that theseice makers have been doing it
for like, a century.
Jason (07:28):
That's amazing. Yeah, I was really surprised when you
said that the colder the ice,the less slippy It was, yeah,
really interested me.
Laurie (07:36):
Yeah, like ice that's minus 100 degrees C is like a
very rough surface, it's, it hasvery, very high friction, it's
not at all slippery. I mean, wecan't we don't really interact
with ice at that temperature.
But within the ranges that weusually operate, or we usually
kind of interact with ice,you're kind of between maybe
minus 10 and zero degrees C,that's kind of where most
interactions, human interactionswith ice. Ice is very slippery
(07:59):
indeed. So I yeah, I find thatreally interesting. You know, it
what seems like a sillyquestion, why is like slippery,
actually ended up leading medown a really interesting path.
And I learned heaps.
Jason (08:14):
That's the bit where you ask the question, and this is
uncovering the scientificmethod. And where that comes
into all of the research thatboth you're doing in the pursuit
of the book, and all of thescientists are doing in the
pursuit of stickiness and thefields that they're working in,
going through the datacollection and analysis, the
experimentation, testinghypotheses, building models,
(08:35):
running simulations, like whatparticularly impressive or
surprising scientificbreakthrough stood out to you
when writing sticky.
Laurie (08:45):
are heaps of them, like in the in the sense that I went
into this with some ideas oftopics that I felt like were
really well understood. Right.
So I was like, there's some ofthese topics that I'm going to
cover that I know will have bigquestion marks at the end of
them. You know, I know that wedon't really fully understand,
like, we don't know how topredict the coefficient of
friction, right. I knew though,I knew that was a question. But
(09:06):
then there were other topicswhere I thought, oh, yeah, all
the sciences totally. So enoughon this one. So that would be
like a nice, straightforwardresearch and writing process.
Almost always, I would speak topeople and eventually I'd keep
asking questions. And eventuallythey'd be like, Yeah, we don't
really understand. Like, I know.
(09:28):
I wanted something nice. I'm oneof those in some ways is like
the gecko, which is the star ofone of the chapters in the book.
And in that chapter, it reflectsmy own research experience was I
wanted to go through history andsee how we used to think the
gecko could create these amazingfeats like they can climb almost
(09:50):
any surface you can imagine.
They could do it really quickly,very fast, very lightweight. How
are they doing it? Alright, so Iwanted to go back through and
see what was wrong. You knowwhat The previous theories were
with the goal of getting to theline. Now we know precisely
everything exactly correct aboutthe gecko. And I didn't really
get to that end point. You know,there were people thought there
(10:12):
might have been, it might actlike a suction cup, maybe that's
its feet are kind of creatingthe vacuum in there. Maybe they
were covered in these kind ofmicro hooks, like if any of your
listeners are climbers, climbingboot, crampons tend to just have
hard hooks on them. There was atheory for a long time that
maybe that's how the gecko didit. And that was it went to
Velcro. Yeah, exactly Velcro,like, there's all these ideas
(10:35):
that people have tested. Andthen disproven, to get to the
point at which we, we kind ofnow have a fairly complete
understanding of the gecko. Andmostly that's been because of
microscopes and our developmentof increasingly, you know, high
resolution microscopes like thescanning electron microscope,
that was really the first timeand that's not very long ago,
(10:56):
right? That was really the firsttime that people could zoom in
far enough on the geckos foot torealize that what agak was
actually doing is it's tappinginto Vander Waals interaction.
It's covered in these hairs, itstoes are covered in these hairs,
those hairs have lots of splitends. And the ends of those
split ends are just a few atomsand left. So a gecko can get its
(11:16):
foot into contact, that's aboutone nanometer away from the
atoms in the wall. And, youknow, I was like, Whoa, this is
this is crazy. And then I metengineers who are trying to kind
of tap into some of thatunderstanding and seeing if they
can reproduce some of thosefeatures, to to create, you
know, better grippers or Yeah,claiming robots or anything like
(11:41):
that. And they've had hugesuccess. But they haven't gotten
anywhere near the level ofdetail or intricacy, we can't
create anything as, as complex.
And as detailed and hierarchicalstructures, we can create them
as small as the gecko has them.
You know, we're way way offthat. And I didn't think that
was true. I thought we werelike, Yeah, we got it. We know
(12:04):
exactly how it works. I findthat quite surprising. And maybe
it's just because I'm not abiologist, I hadn't put a lot of
thought into how lizards howgeckos work. But I find it
surprising that even though wenow have engineers who have who
have successfully tapped into alot of heavy geckos foot
operates and have been using iton the International Space
(12:27):
Station. There's even a coupleof companies who've developed
these grippers to apply infactories where you're lifting
awkwardly shaped objects up, youknow, moving them around. We're
still nowhere near getting tofull grips of high jackals.
footworks. And I loved that.
Yeah.
Jason (12:46):
Because there was a chap in your book who tried to climb
up the side of a building byreplicating that process. But
yeah, he was kind of riskinghimself doing it. There.
Laurie (12:58):
He's a really interesting guy. Eliot hawks,
you know, he developed and itdid work. Yeah, he really did
scale the side of a building,like, probably more like spider
man, really than a gecko in thatsense, you know? But yeah, I
mean, I'm not sure. I trust inthe engineering of the science,
but I'm not sure if they handedme the climbers, if I would have
mentored it myself. Yeah,
Jason (13:18):
he's really taking the experiment to the extreme there.
Oh, that's really cool. There'sloads of examples like this in
the book that made me likethink, wow, what is it in nature
that we're trying to replicate,and for example, flight, and,
you know, we see animals flying,and then we replicate flight and
(13:38):
have to overcome things likeaerodynamic drag, but even more
like real world applications foranybody who plays sports. So
things like golf balls flyingthrough the air at curling, as a
sports and swimming. And whilepeople were swimming, and a
couple of things that stood outto me, like when I use post-its,
(13:59):
it's they don't leave a residuebehind, or when I use superglue,
it doesn't stick to the insideof its container. It's like all
of these kinds of real world andalmost fun to think about
examples. And then the importantones about like vehicles needing
to break and understandingearthquakes, for example, yeah,
what are the kinds of bigimpacts and future developments
(14:21):
that all of this knowledge isgoing to head towards?
Laurie (14:25):
Yeah, that's a huge question. And I think I think
that it's the main thing for me,is that we're starting to
understand things like frictionat a different scale than we
used to understand this. Youknow, we've been very good at
manipulating friction, always,you know, since for millennia,
we've been masters of being ableto reduce friction where we
(14:48):
needed to, and to increasefriction where we needed to do
that because friction isn'talways bad. You know, sometimes
we think of it as just a form ofenergy loss. But you know, you
mentioned vehicles we need forShouldn't in order to travel
fast, we need the tire to gripin order to be able to travel
forward. But I think what's beeninteresting in the last few
years, and I'm hopeful that willrelate to a real kind of game
(15:12):
change in the world of friction,and tribology, which is really
the study of friction, is we noware developing a fairly
sophisticated, still incomplete,but fairly sophisticated
understanding of what happensway down at the nanoscale. So,
you know, you think aboutfriction, things like friction,
(15:32):
and then, you know, loads ofaspects of thermodynamics to,
really, it's about statistics,right? You need big numbers of
things. And that gives you theinformation that you need. But
what happens, like when you havejust a couple of atoms, you
know, if you've got likeatomically, flat surfaces, and
you're sliding them along oneanother, why do we still see
(15:53):
something that looks a bit likefriction? Why do we see a
resistive force like what thehell is going on? So I, that in
the very last chapter of thebook, I kind of delved into that
very murky, murky world, notsure if I came out entirely on
solid from it. But you know,that idea of what, what are the,
(16:13):
what's the fundamental mechanismbehind friction. And there are
loads of researchers doinginteresting research at that
scale, using things like theatomic force microscope, excuse
me, to slide across atomicallyflat surfaces, or very perfectly
engineered surfaces that aresteps so we can understand how
the tip interacts as it goesdown to step versus up the step.
(16:36):
And, you know, we're reallystarting to understand what is
going on way down there at theatomic scale. And what I'm
hopeful about, and what I hopehappens is that we started to
bridge the gap between those twoareas of knowledge, this
macroscale understanding offriction that we've had for
centuries, and has allowed us todevelop things like lubricants
that we can use on Mars rovers,that's like totally normal thing
(17:01):
that we can do now as humans,which is crazy. And now we're
starting to understand whathappens way down at the atomic
scale. If we can bridge thatgap, there is no reason that we
couldn't develop surfaces thatare incredibly efficient at
sliding across one another, likemaybe we could do away with
(17:22):
lubricants entirely. And thatwouldn't be a bad thing. Because
a lot of lubricants are madefrom fossil fuels. You know,
could we find ways to controlfriction? If we really
understand that at that scale?
And we really understand thatthat scale? Could we develop a
unified model that would allowus to actually transition that
information from way down at theatomic scale to the industrial
scale? And that is the bigquestion. Like that was one
(17:46):
thing that a lot of people a lotof trade biologists who I spoke
to, were fascinated by bridgingthat gap and, and what
opportunities that might open upto us. So that's definitely
something I'm keeping an eye on,for sure.
Jason (18:02):
Amazing. And part of what struck me by talking through the
process of like earthquakes, andyeah, what a big impact they
have reminded me of your bookscience and the city and how
important the design of citiesis because we're putting those
on a world and a platform thatcan shake and shake dramatically
(18:23):
with, you know, devastatingconsequences, potentially. And I
wanted to ask you a little bitabout the amazing engineering
that goes into theinfrastructure that powers our
metropolises, and what kind ofdiscoveries you made writing
science in the city?
Laurie (18:40):
Yeah, for sure. I might even start kind of I'll tie back
to your question aboutearthquakes, because I hadn't
really thought about the well,you know, I thought about the
challenges of buildinginfrastructure in seismic areas,
on a very hand wavy level, youknow, and it was only when I
started looking into it, that Irealized that it's actually a
(19:01):
New Zealander who inventedwhat's probably the most like
ubiquitous, what we call baseisolation piece of
infrastructure, and they'recalled led rubber bearings. And
that kind of tells you what theyare. But his name was Bill
Robinson, and I, I'd never heardof him before ever in my life.
And he's his work and hisengineering and his invention
(19:22):
has saved I would say 10s of1000s of lives, because these
lead rubber bearings are used asa basis as a lot of very large
structures. So in Wellington,where I live now, there's a
museum called to Papa and toPapa is like a huge museum on
the waterfront in Wellington,and it's quite a new I think it
(19:44):
was like 1980s or something thatit was built in. And I and it
actually is built on these LEDrubber bearings. And what they
are are these kinds of layers ofsteel and rubber and steel and
rubber. Like I said, and whichwere many, many layers deep,
with a central core of lead, andthe laminated layers kind of act
(20:06):
as a spring. And they kind ofpull the building back if it
moves laterally in the quake,but then the lead in the middle,
because it's such a soft metal,it kind of acts as the damper.
So it kind of dampens the motionbecause it can, it can flex and
flow a little bit. So thecombination of those two can
give you buildings that canwithstand large buildings that
(20:27):
can withstand a surprisinglylarge earthquake. There was one
example and I had to look thisup, because I couldn't remember
what the name of the buildingwas. It's called the
telecommunications computercenter in Kobe in Japan. And
during the 1995 earthquake, thatwas basically the only building
that was left standing. And itused these LED rubber bearings
that were invented by this NewZealander who passed away about
(20:49):
10 years ago, and I had neverheard of this man. And, and that
was generally doing researcharound cities, I kept, I kept
coming across things that I knewI knew nothing about, and also
invented by people that I'dnever heard of. So that was a
really fun part of the process,because I would hope that in
writing about cities, and youknow, I've written about cities,
(21:11):
since science and city came outfor Forbes and stuff, writing
about this topic, I would hopewould introduce people to
looking at their city in aslightly different way, you
know, just changing the way theyview the metropolis. But you
know, a lot of the book is alsoabout really historic things
like the tube. And yeah,something I hadn't fully kind of
(21:34):
appreciated is how much of arole the tube itself played in
shaping London. So you know, inthe early days, they literally
put train stations in thecountryside, and give the
workers houses near the newstation. So the shape, the shape
of London is entirely defined bywhere tube lines were, you know,
(21:55):
we think of, you know, you lookat Dublin, for example. And
we're having to kind of retrofitinfrastructure on sometimes
challenging streets. But inVictorian London, they were
building the infrastructurebefore they had the houses. So
it's, it's quite a differentapproach. And, and again, that
changed that changed the way Ithought about cities and urban
(22:15):
planning and, and really abouthow brave we need to be if we
want to build cities that arebetter for people, and more
sustainable as we move forward.
So they were the kind of themesthat I took away from the book,
I suppose.
Jason (22:29):
Have you been through many earthquakes or what was?
Laurie (22:32):
Yeah, a couple of nothing too major. Thankfully,
just just the odd little rumble,but everyone has this app on
their phone in New Zealand.
There's a network of seismicsensors all over the country.
And it sends you alerts on yourphone. And so everyone's kind of
not obsessed with them. Butyou're just aware, you're just
aware of them. So they couldfeel the little ones you kind of
(22:52):
a lot of them you don't evennotice because they're very,
very small. But yeah, the oddtime you'll get one and it feels
like you've you know, a very,very big truck has just like
rammed into the fence outsideyour house. Yeah, I don't know.
That's the funnest thing to gothrough. But I've been lucky and
haven't Touchwood. Anyway, Ihaven't been through a series
one as yet.
Jason (23:13):
Yeah. It's, it's amazing.
There's so many cool science,technology and the engineering
aspects that you describe inscience in the city. And you
bring it together. And in one ofthe later sections called
Connect, you highlight theinvisible connections as well,
that we may not be as clearlyobvious to us. And it's kind of
summarized as tradecommunications and food raises
(23:36):
questions about informationtransfer via GPS and satellites,
supply chain supply chainnetworks, and the optimization
and global food distributionthrough reports and we're seeing
post pandemic, how damaging someeffects and interruptions to
that can be. So what keychallenges and like aspects of
(23:58):
these may become more and moreimportant in the future?
Laurie (24:05):
I think you've hit the nail on the head. Jason, I think
the pandemic has reallyhighlighted how fragile our
global trade network is. There'shuge benefits, obviously, to
having a much more globalizedand much more connected world.
But when so much of you knowmanufacturing, for example, so
much of it is kind ofconcentrated in one part of the
(24:25):
world like China, for example.
When an event like this happens,and everything grinds to a halt,
we don't really have a plan B.
And definitely when I've beentalking to people even just kind
of was my city's hat on, whenI've been talking to people in
different parts of the worldabout totally different
challenges. One of the thingsthat has been mentioned in lots
(24:47):
of contexts to me, is how we'regoing to start re localizing
some aspects of our life. Andthat might be kind of
distributed energy generation,for example. So instead of we're
Buying on a, on a centralizedgrid, we're going to see many
more kind of community led gridsor solar panels that are based
in, in buildings and thebuilding taps into that power or
(25:10):
sells off what it doesn't use orcombined heat and power plants
within within, within a, youknow, big skyscraper or
whatever, trying to kind ofcentralized low relocalized some
of those aspects and and ofcourse, you think about things
like urban farms, or peoplegrowing vegetables and things I
(25:30):
think we're possibly too fargone to, to move entirely away
from a globalized world. But Ido think that the pandemic has
really shown that we need tohave more resilient
infrastructure within our local,you know, and I say local with,
you know, maybe split the worldup into eight or something
within closer to homeeffectively, because as it is,
(25:52):
it's just, we're so reliant,often on just one region or one
port. In some cases. We've seenthat that doesn't really work in
in times of crisis. So Idefinitely when I'm talking to
electricity, people thinkingabout electricity thinking
people thinking about foodproduction, about materials
production, you know, a lot ofthe focus is on trying to not
(26:16):
just recycle materials,construction materials, but
actually really change the waythat we build our cities based
on materials becoming availablewhen we demolish old buildings.
So there's a lot more I'vedefinitely seen, like a general
trend of people saying, whataspects of urban life can we
kind of re localize to make it abit more resilient, and feed
(26:38):
feed that within a broaderglobal system?
Jason (26:42):
Where, and it's bringing to mind the idea of that
circular economy? Yeah, headtowards ton. I know, as we grow
older, and I have more friendswho are becoming homeowners, and
they talk about like buyingsolar panels and contributing
back to the grid. Those areconversations I never heard of
when I was younger, and peoplewanting allotments to grow their
(27:03):
own food. So it's a greatinitiative that we're seeing.
Laurie (27:07):
Totally agree, I have exactly the same as you Jason on
that.
Jason (27:12):
And as we head towards like this on precedented
connectivity, and regeneratingso much like tons of data
nowadays, and starting to embedInternet of Things, people have
wearable tech, we're seeing moreand more robotics, artificial
intelligence, potentiallyshaping and changing our lives.
And one thing that comes to mindis self driving cars in the
(27:33):
future. You paint a reallyexciting, but also lovely
picture of a possible day in thelife and a future city at the
end of science. What kind ofimportant aspects of AI and
future tech, have you comeacross in your work that will
become more prevalent in oureveryday lives? And perhaps
(27:53):
sooner than we think?
Laurie (27:56):
That's a good question.
I have, and I'm possiblypreaching to the converted here,
but I have kind of mixedfeelings around big data. And I
think that we have such anatural tendency as humans to
just want to be constantlygathering information, you know,
we need to be gatheringinformation and gathering more
data at all times. And actually,it's not always helpful. You
(28:18):
know, it's not always Yeah, itdoesn't always kind of work. And
so I say, I would hope that wewill start well, maybe this is
really naive of me. But my hopeis that we become a bit more
discerning with the way that weuse data and the way that we
collect data. And that we don'tmove towards a system where
those people who are alreadymarginalized are even more
(28:41):
marginalized by the fact thatinformation is being gathered on
them. And I think as humans,we're pretty, we're pretty
terrible at that, you know, wehave lots of Silicon Valley
bros, who only think about thetechnology and they don't really
think about the implications.
They often don't even talk tothe people who's, you know,
(29:02):
they're pretending or wishingthat their technology is going
to serve, to see what theyactually need. So my hope is
that we will get a bit morediscerning in that regard. And
the data that we are collectingis, is for good reasons. And not
just for tracking reasons or formarketing reasons. Like around
driver, driverless cars are aninteresting one in particular,
(29:23):
because I think, actually thebarrier there is not technology,
the barrier to you know, havingautonomous vehicles is
regulation. And I don't thinkit's a bad thing, necessarily,
because what we don't want tohave is a situation which we've
seen multiple times in the lastfew years as autonomous vehicles
have been on streets, where theythe computer makes the wrong
(29:47):
decision, and they crash intosomething they crash into
someone. And so we really needto get get our stuff together
when it comes to regulatingautonomous vehicles so that you
When, obviously because thesecars don't know how to do
anything that we don't tell themhow to do, right, we have to
teach them how to work. So howdo we teach them to make a moral
(30:08):
decision? What happens ifsomeone is in a car in their
autonomous vehicle that's beingdriven by the by the car itself.
And a situation occurs that thecar has to make a decision
between saving its passenger, orsaving someone on the street?
That's an impossible positionfor a computer to be in? So
yeah, that's I think, generally.
And I think this is possibly my,my mind has changed a little bit
(30:31):
since I wrote science and city.
Because I've looked into this abit more now and realize that
maybe my naivety was painting,possibly too shiny a picture of
of how we use data in cities. Soyeah, my hope is that we just
become a bit more discerning,with more diverse workforces
moving into the tech sector,which is so long overdue. We
(30:53):
have many more people arguingfor their case and arguing and
saying, No, this is not fair,this is going to this is going
to, you know, separate out thispart of society, this is going
to impact these people. So wehave many more diverse voices in
the room. And I think with thatcomes better decisions around
data, I hope.
Jason (31:11):
Yeah, fully, fully agree.
I love that point, actually. Andit brings me on to the idea of
how important the scientificmethod itself is the application
of it. And in all of your work,you are employing the scientific
method in highlighting thescientific method as it has been
(31:32):
employed by the people whoyou're talking to in these
various fields of research andthe work that they are living
and breathing. And thosescientists and researchers
themselves have a diversity ofbackgrounds and cultures and
their own communication styles.
And you're bringing that alltogether and creating this like
(31:52):
common theme, especially inthese two books that we've
talked about. And it's a keyaspect of science communication.
And I wanted to like justfinally ask you, for anybody
working in both science and anyway with data, delivering
insights. Do you have any toptips for how to communicate
effectively and successfully?
Laurie (32:13):
Yeah, I am. I think if I were to summarize it in one, if
I had to give one top tip,because I've been asked before,
it's like, what one singlething? Would you say? I'm like,
Oh, wow, that's a lot ofpressure. Yeah, but I think it's
to simplify your message always.
We have such, like, and I guess,you know, and especially Irish
people, we talk a lot, and wetalk around the houses and, and
(32:33):
it's part of our culture, andit's part of what makes us who
we are. But when we're trying tocommunicate something important.
Often we feel we should padaround it. And actually, in my
experience, all that does isdilutes the central message. So
the my key tip is to just keepasking yourself, what it is you
(32:54):
want to your audience to takeaway from this interaction. So
whether that's in terms of like,infographics or a talk that
you're giving, or even, youknow, an elevator pitch, you
have to give, what is the keymessage you want them to walk
away with. And that should bethe central goal, everything
else should support youachieving that goal. Every
(33:16):
anything beyond that,unfortunately, is extraneous. So
you just have to leave it asideif you if your goal is to
communicate a specific topic ora specific idea. If your goal in
general is to kind of get peopleinterested in engaged in
science, that's where you kindof have the opportunity to tell
stories. And that's what I seemy book says, you know, I get to
(33:38):
I get to put the padding inthere, I get to faff around in
the lab with some scientists orsome geologists and see how
their equipment works. Becausethat's painting a picture for my
readers, you know, it's takingthem with me on this visit and
meeting these people with me.
Because I'm not the expert,right on any of the topics that
I write about, I am not theperson doing the research, I am
(34:02):
the person more my job I see myjob is as someone who can
synthesize, you know, gather allthis huge amounts of data. And I
do very much take a scientificview. Honestly, I think I
probably read more researchpapers to most scientists. You
know, I take all thisinformation and try and wrap a
story around it so that it's notoverwhelming for my readers. But
(34:25):
if your goal is to communicate asingle idea, unfortunately, you
kind of have to move most ofthat away, you have to pick one
very straightforward story, andyou have to just zoom in as
tightly as you can. So I wouldalways recommend that people
even if you're writing aparagraph, I try and I delete
full sentences and see if myparagraphs still make sense.
(34:47):
It's not that I will have a veryshort, shorter paragraph by the
end but I really challengemyself to just always try and
focus on on the single ideabecause that is what you want.
You know if you're trying to getsomeone to to change their mind
like or, or get funding orwhatever. Just focus on the
single message and keepchallenging yourself to
simplify, simplify, simplify.
Jason (35:09):
That's brilliant. You've immediately got me thinking of
the times when somebody asks meto write a report about
something, and I just write andwrite and write and send it off.
But if they tell me write it in200 words, wow, that's the
hardware. Yeah. And soeverything you've spoke, you
said, just speaks to me in thatregard. And Laurie, this has
(35:30):
been absolutely brilliant,really, really interesting
stuff. And you have a website,and you're on Twitter actively
on Twitter, if anybody wants toget in touch. How should they
reach out to you?
Laurie (35:41):
Yeah, Twitter's probably the best because I've never
office. So I'm at Laurie L a u ri e _ w i n k l e s s , or my
websites, my name also you canfind me on there. And I'm on
LinkedIn and stuff too. So butyeah, Twitter is where I go to
just just talk.
Jason (36:02):
Brilliant. That's LaurieWinkless dot com?
Laurie (36:05):
Yeah. LaurieWinkless dot com Yeah, my new shiny new
website.
Jason (36:08):
It's lovely.
Unknown (36:09):
Thank you. Brilliant.
Jason (36:10):
Laurie, thank you so much for joining us in the data Cafe
today. It's been an absolutepleasure.
Laurie (36:15):
Thanks, Jason. It's been a real pleasure to hang out with
you again.
Jason (36:19):
Thanks for joining us today at the data cafe. You can
like and review this on iTunesor your preferred podcast
provider. Or if you'd like toget in touch. You can email us
Jason that data cafe.uk OrJeremy at data cafe.uk or on
Twitter at DataCafé podcast.
We'd love to hear yoursuggestions for future episodes.
Joining me in the data Cafe today is Laurie wingless, a
physicist, author, and sciencecommunicator. Laurie has a
background in physics physicsdegree from Trinity College
Dublin, which is where we firstmet. She then went on to work in
the UK National PhysicalLaboratory as a research
scientist specializing infunctional materials. She's an
amazing science communicatorwho's written a really
(00:22):
impressive number of fascinatingblogs, articles, publications
across the likes of Forbes,wired and Esquire. And what's
really impressive is publishedtwo science books, most recently
sticky the secret science ofsurfaces. And her first book
science and the city was on themechanics behind the metropolis.
(00:42):
Laurie, it's such a pleasure towelcome you to the data Cafe
today.
Laurie (00:46):
It's so lovely to be here, Jason, thanks. Thanks for
waiting for the invite.
Jason (00:50):
So I wanted to talk first about sticky. And this is really
cool. The secret science ofsurfaces, which all around us in
the world, and we interact withthem all the time, loads of
fascinating case studiesthroughout your book. And what
surprised me in that context alittle bit is that there's still
(01:10):
this kind of ongoing discoveryin defining what is stickiness,
even the friction is such animportant concept in physics.
Can you tell me a bit about whythis is? So in the kind of
challenges in this field ofresearch?
Laurie (01:24):
Yeah, I think the, the main reason really I call the
book Sticky is because it's aword that we as humans,
regardless of our scientificbackground, have this kind of
instinctive understanding of orhave a relationship with. So you
know, I've often asked peoplewhen I, when I say the word
sticky, what do you think of,and someone might say, Oh, my
(01:45):
kids with their sticky handsafter eating something sweet,
or, you know, like the theadhesives and paints in my
garage, you know, people havethis relationship with the word
sticky, so we understand what itmeans. But then, when we put our
scientist hats on, there's noscientific definition for the
word sticky. You know, thereisn't a single metric that we
(02:05):
can use to describe something assticky. It's not something like
density, you know, where we havean actual measurement, we have a
real number, a real metric thatwe can use. And we can then
compare things in terms of theirdensity, or their math or
whatever, you know, theircrystal structure. So you know,
we've got all of thesedefinitions that we can use in
science. But the word sticky isnot one of them. And therefore,
(02:28):
the kind of interaction betweenbetween materials is also one
that is really difficult, butimpossible, in fact, to
summarize, in a single metric,now, it's not to say we don't
have any metrics, we have lotsof lots of things, like the word
viscosity, for example, thatwill tell us something about how
(02:49):
a fluid will move, or how aliquid will interact. So
something that's more viscous iskind of more sticky in inverted
commas, you know, it has thisresistance to flow. So maybe
that's a metric that we coulduse, and we can use in some
contexts or thinking aboutstickiness. But then what about
between dry surfaces, or solidsurfaces? How do we describe
(03:11):
that, and you said, friction,right, we talk about friction
all the time, all the time.
With things like the coefficientof friction, that's probably
another metric that maybe wecould use to describe how solid
surfaces interact. So thecoefficient of friction being a
measure of how hard or how easyit is for two surfaces to slide
(03:31):
along one another. That couldmaybe be considered, I would
argue that to be considered oneof these measures that helps us
to describe how surfacesinteract. But that itself is a
weird metric. And this isn'tsomething I had fully grasped,
actually, to be honest, before Istarted researching this book,
which is that the coefficient offriction is not something that
(03:53):
we can predict. We can't takeeverything we know on the atomic
level about two materials, andput it into a series of
equations and then out pops acoefficient of friction, we
can't do that we don't have thatability to do that. That number
is something that's always beenmeasured experimentally. So it's
always been an average. And whenI think about how often I used
(04:17):
coefficients of friction indifferent equations, or in
different contexts, we don'thave a way to, you know, we
don't have a way to calculatethis from first principles. And
I just loved that idea that wehad this we have this
fundamental, these fundamentalkind of forces and interactions
that define so much of how wemove through the world as as
(04:37):
people, but also how much wemove through the world of
scientists and people whoactually do scientific research.
And yet, there's still all thesequite big gaps or approximations
that we have to use. And thatwas kind of were the beginnings
of the idea of a book aboutfriction, which is effectively
what's sticky is came about thekind of existence of these terms
(05:00):
in the real world in invertedcommas, and, and their absence
from the scientific literature.
Jason (05:06):
There was a really nice example that you gave in a talk
with the Royal Institute or
Laurie (05:12):
Yeah, the Royal Institution. Yeah, that was a
real pinch me.
Jason (05:17):
Where you talked about the different temperatures of
ice rink, depending on thedifferent sports. And that was
really impressive, because ofthe different ways that the
athletes can almost tell whathow cold the ice is, depending
on the sport.
Laurie (05:33):
Yeah, I found that might as well. And I think it was
something I kept coming back toin different contexts to, you
know, we can have thisinstinctive understanding of
something incredibly see thiswith crafts, people, you know,
we see this with glass blowers.
And they understand theintricacies of how glass moves
in a way that scientists it's adifferent type of understanding,
it's no less real, it's no lessimportant. It's no less valid,
(05:56):
it's just different. And when Ispoke to both athletes and
icemakers, you know, becausethere are like professional
icemakers, who, who the Olympicsfly over to each games to set up
all the rinks, they have thatinstinctive understanding of the
ice. And an athlete can tell youfrom almost the moment,
especially like speed skaterswhere you want to keep friction
(06:16):
as low as possible. They can,they can tell you that it feels
like it's fast ice, or the icemakers will sometimes tell you
that they can hear when theathletes are training on the
rink, whether it's going to be agood race, like so they have all
of this understanding. And they,they have known how to create
ice. And these rinks are verythin, the layers of ice that are
(06:39):
on the Olympic rank are muchthinner than you might imagine.
And they're built up Layer LayerLayer by layer over days and
days for a single rank. Butthey've known how to do that.
And they've managed to, youknow, change their recipes. And
they use very specific types ofwater and all of that stuff. But
none of them would describethemselves as a scientist, at
least none of the ones I would,I would have interviewed. And
(07:01):
yet, it's only really in fairlyrecent years that we have been
able to fully explain andunderstand, you know, from a
scientific point of view, whyice is slippery. And how the
surface the the slipperiness ofthe surface of ice, the friction
on the surface of ice changeswith temperature. That's pretty
recent that we've actuallymanaged to put numbers and an
(07:22):
information behind that theseice makers have been doing it
for like, a century.
Jason (07:28):
That's amazing. Yeah, I was really surprised when you
said that the colder the ice,the less slippy It was, yeah,
really interested me.
Laurie (07:36):
Yeah, like ice that's minus 100 degrees C is like a
very rough surface, it's, it hasvery, very high friction, it's
not at all slippery. I mean, wecan't we don't really interact
with ice at that temperature.
But within the ranges that weusually operate, or we usually
kind of interact with ice,you're kind of between maybe
minus 10 and zero degrees C,that's kind of where most
interactions, human interactionswith ice. Ice is very slippery
(07:59):
indeed. So I yeah, I find thatreally interesting. You know, it
what seems like a sillyquestion, why is like slippery,
actually ended up leading medown a really interesting path.
And I learned heaps.
Jason (08:14):
That's the bit where you ask the question, and this is
uncovering the scientificmethod. And where that comes
into all of the research thatboth you're doing in the pursuit
of the book, and all of thescientists are doing in the
pursuit of stickiness and thefields that they're working in,
going through the datacollection and analysis, the
experimentation, testinghypotheses, building models,
(08:35):
running simulations, like whatparticularly impressive or
surprising scientificbreakthrough stood out to you
when writing sticky.
Laurie (08:45):
are heaps of them, like in the in the sense that I went
into this with some ideas oftopics that I felt like were
really well understood. Right.
So I was like, there's some ofthese topics that I'm going to
cover that I know will have bigquestion marks at the end of
them. You know, I know that wedon't really fully understand,
like, we don't know how topredict the coefficient of
friction, right. I knew though,I knew that was a question. But
(09:06):
then there were other topicswhere I thought, oh, yeah, all
the sciences totally. So enoughon this one. So that would be
like a nice, straightforwardresearch and writing process.
Almost always, I would speak topeople and eventually I'd keep
asking questions. And eventuallythey'd be like, Yeah, we don't
really understand. Like, I know.
(09:28):
I wanted something nice. I'm oneof those in some ways is like
the gecko, which is the star ofone of the chapters in the book.
And in that chapter, it reflectsmy own research experience was I
wanted to go through history andsee how we used to think the
gecko could create these amazingfeats like they can climb almost
(09:50):
any surface you can imagine.
They could do it really quickly,very fast, very lightweight. How
are they doing it? Alright, so Iwanted to go back through and
see what was wrong. You knowwhat The previous theories were
with the goal of getting to theline. Now we know precisely
everything exactly correct aboutthe gecko. And I didn't really
get to that end point. You know,there were people thought there
(10:12):
might have been, it might actlike a suction cup, maybe that's
its feet are kind of creatingthe vacuum in there. Maybe they
were covered in these kind ofmicro hooks, like if any of your
listeners are climbers, climbingboot, crampons tend to just have
hard hooks on them. There was atheory for a long time that
maybe that's how the gecko didit. And that was it went to
Velcro. Yeah, exactly Velcro,like, there's all these ideas
(10:35):
that people have tested. Andthen disproven, to get to the
point at which we, we kind ofnow have a fairly complete
understanding of the gecko. Andmostly that's been because of
microscopes and our developmentof increasingly, you know, high
resolution microscopes like thescanning electron microscope,
that was really the first timeand that's not very long ago,
(10:56):
right? That was really the firsttime that people could zoom in
far enough on the geckos foot torealize that what agak was
actually doing is it's tappinginto Vander Waals interaction.
It's covered in these hairs, itstoes are covered in these hairs,
those hairs have lots of splitends. And the ends of those
split ends are just a few atomsand left. So a gecko can get its
(11:16):
foot into contact, that's aboutone nanometer away from the
atoms in the wall. And, youknow, I was like, Whoa, this is
this is crazy. And then I metengineers who are trying to kind
of tap into some of thatunderstanding and seeing if they
can reproduce some of thosefeatures, to to create, you
know, better grippers or Yeah,claiming robots or anything like
(11:41):
that. And they've had hugesuccess. But they haven't gotten
anywhere near the level ofdetail or intricacy, we can't
create anything as, as complex.
And as detailed and hierarchicalstructures, we can create them
as small as the gecko has them.
You know, we're way way offthat. And I didn't think that
was true. I thought we werelike, Yeah, we got it. We know
(12:04):
exactly how it works. I findthat quite surprising. And maybe
it's just because I'm not abiologist, I hadn't put a lot of
thought into how lizards howgeckos work. But I find it
surprising that even though wenow have engineers who have who
have successfully tapped into alot of heavy geckos foot
operates and have been using iton the International Space
(12:27):
Station. There's even a coupleof companies who've developed
these grippers to apply infactories where you're lifting
awkwardly shaped objects up, youknow, moving them around. We're
still nowhere near getting tofull grips of high jackals.
footworks. And I loved that.
Yeah.
Jason (12:46):
Because there was a chap in your book who tried to climb
up the side of a building byreplicating that process. But
yeah, he was kind of riskinghimself doing it. There.
Laurie (12:58):
He's a really interesting guy. Eliot hawks,
you know, he developed and itdid work. Yeah, he really did
scale the side of a building,like, probably more like spider
man, really than a gecko in thatsense, you know? But yeah, I
mean, I'm not sure. I trust inthe engineering of the science,
but I'm not sure if they handedme the climbers, if I would have
mentored it myself. Yeah,
Jason (13:18):
he's really taking the experiment to the extreme there.
Oh, that's really cool. There'sloads of examples like this in
the book that made me likethink, wow, what is it in nature
that we're trying to replicate,and for example, flight, and,
you know, we see animals flying,and then we replicate flight and
(13:38):
have to overcome things likeaerodynamic drag, but even more
like real world applications foranybody who plays sports. So
things like golf balls flyingthrough the air at curling, as a
sports and swimming. And whilepeople were swimming, and a
couple of things that stood outto me, like when I use post-its,
(13:59):
it's they don't leave a residuebehind, or when I use superglue,
it doesn't stick to the insideof its container. It's like all
of these kinds of real world andalmost fun to think about
examples. And then the importantones about like vehicles needing
to break and understandingearthquakes, for example, yeah,
what are the kinds of bigimpacts and future developments
(14:21):
that all of this knowledge isgoing to head towards?
Laurie (14:25):
Yeah, that's a huge question. And I think I think
that it's the main thing for me,is that we're starting to
understand things like frictionat a different scale than we
used to understand this. Youknow, we've been very good at
manipulating friction, always,you know, since for millennia,
we've been masters of being ableto reduce friction where we
(14:48):
needed to, and to increasefriction where we needed to do
that because friction isn'talways bad. You know, sometimes
we think of it as just a form ofenergy loss. But you know, you
mentioned vehicles we need forShouldn't in order to travel
fast, we need the tire to gripin order to be able to travel
forward. But I think what's beeninteresting in the last few
years, and I'm hopeful that willrelate to a real kind of game
(15:12):
change in the world of friction,and tribology, which is really
the study of friction, is we noware developing a fairly
sophisticated, still incomplete,but fairly sophisticated
understanding of what happensway down at the nanoscale. So,
you know, you think aboutfriction, things like friction,
(15:32):
and then, you know, loads ofaspects of thermodynamics to,
really, it's about statistics,right? You need big numbers of
things. And that gives you theinformation that you need. But
what happens, like when you havejust a couple of atoms, you
know, if you've got likeatomically, flat surfaces, and
you're sliding them along oneanother, why do we still see
(15:53):
something that looks a bit likefriction? Why do we see a
resistive force like what thehell is going on? So I, that in
the very last chapter of thebook, I kind of delved into that
very murky, murky world, notsure if I came out entirely on
solid from it. But you know,that idea of what, what are the,
(16:13):
what's the fundamental mechanismbehind friction. And there are
loads of researchers doinginteresting research at that
scale, using things like theatomic force microscope, excuse
me, to slide across atomicallyflat surfaces, or very perfectly
engineered surfaces that aresteps so we can understand how
the tip interacts as it goesdown to step versus up the step.
(16:36):
And, you know, we're reallystarting to understand what is
going on way down there at theatomic scale. And what I'm
hopeful about, and what I hopehappens is that we started to
bridge the gap between those twoareas of knowledge, this
macroscale understanding offriction that we've had for
centuries, and has allowed us todevelop things like lubricants
that we can use on Mars rovers,that's like totally normal thing
(17:01):
that we can do now as humans,which is crazy. And now we're
starting to understand whathappens way down at the atomic
scale. If we can bridge thatgap, there is no reason that we
couldn't develop surfaces thatare incredibly efficient at
sliding across one another, likemaybe we could do away with
(17:22):
lubricants entirely. And thatwouldn't be a bad thing. Because
a lot of lubricants are madefrom fossil fuels. You know,
could we find ways to controlfriction? If we really
understand that at that scale?
And we really understand thatthat scale? Could we develop a
unified model that would allowus to actually transition that
information from way down at theatomic scale to the industrial
scale? And that is the bigquestion. Like that was one
(17:46):
thing that a lot of people a lotof trade biologists who I spoke
to, were fascinated by bridgingthat gap and, and what
opportunities that might open upto us. So that's definitely
something I'm keeping an eye on,for sure.
Jason (18:02):
Amazing. And part of what struck me by talking through the
process of like earthquakes, andyeah, what a big impact they
have reminded me of your bookscience and the city and how
important the design of citiesis because we're putting those
on a world and a platform thatcan shake and shake dramatically
(18:23):
with, you know, devastatingconsequences, potentially. And I
wanted to ask you a little bitabout the amazing engineering
that goes into theinfrastructure that powers our
metropolises, and what kind ofdiscoveries you made writing
science in the city?
Laurie (18:40):
Yeah, for sure. I might even start kind of I'll tie back
to your question aboutearthquakes, because I hadn't
really thought about the well,you know, I thought about the
challenges of buildinginfrastructure in seismic areas,
on a very hand wavy level, youknow, and it was only when I
started looking into it, that Irealized that it's actually a
(19:01):
New Zealander who inventedwhat's probably the most like
ubiquitous, what we call baseisolation piece of
infrastructure, and they'recalled led rubber bearings. And
that kind of tells you what theyare. But his name was Bill
Robinson, and I, I'd never heardof him before ever in my life.
And he's his work and hisengineering and his invention
(19:22):
has saved I would say 10s of1000s of lives, because these
lead rubber bearings are used asa basis as a lot of very large
structures. So in Wellington,where I live now, there's a
museum called to Papa and toPapa is like a huge museum on
the waterfront in Wellington,and it's quite a new I think it
(19:44):
was like 1980s or something thatit was built in. And I and it
actually is built on these LEDrubber bearings. And what they
are are these kinds of layers ofsteel and rubber and steel and
rubber. Like I said, and whichwere many, many layers deep,
with a central core of lead, andthe laminated layers kind of act
(20:06):
as a spring. And they kind ofpull the building back if it
moves laterally in the quake,but then the lead in the middle,
because it's such a soft metal,it kind of acts as the damper.
So it kind of dampens the motionbecause it can, it can flex and
flow a little bit. So thecombination of those two can
give you buildings that canwithstand large buildings that
(20:27):
can withstand a surprisinglylarge earthquake. There was one
example and I had to look thisup, because I couldn't remember
what the name of the buildingwas. It's called the
telecommunications computercenter in Kobe in Japan. And
during the 1995 earthquake, thatwas basically the only building
that was left standing. And itused these LED rubber bearings
that were invented by this NewZealander who passed away about
(20:49):
10 years ago, and I had neverheard of this man. And, and that
was generally doing researcharound cities, I kept, I kept
coming across things that I knewI knew nothing about, and also
invented by people that I'dnever heard of. So that was a
really fun part of the process,because I would hope that in
writing about cities, and youknow, I've written about cities,
(21:11):
since science and city came outfor Forbes and stuff, writing
about this topic, I would hopewould introduce people to
looking at their city in aslightly different way, you
know, just changing the way theyview the metropolis. But you
know, a lot of the book is alsoabout really historic things
like the tube. And yeah,something I hadn't fully kind of
(21:34):
appreciated is how much of arole the tube itself played in
shaping London. So you know, inthe early days, they literally
put train stations in thecountryside, and give the
workers houses near the newstation. So the shape, the shape
of London is entirely defined bywhere tube lines were, you know,
(21:55):
we think of, you know, you lookat Dublin, for example. And
we're having to kind of retrofitinfrastructure on sometimes
challenging streets. But inVictorian London, they were
building the infrastructurebefore they had the houses. So
it's, it's quite a differentapproach. And, and again, that
changed that changed the way Ithought about cities and urban
(22:15):
planning and, and really abouthow brave we need to be if we
want to build cities that arebetter for people, and more
sustainable as we move forward.
So they were the kind of themesthat I took away from the book,
I suppose.
Jason (22:29):
Have you been through many earthquakes or what was?
Laurie (22:32):
Yeah, a couple of nothing too major. Thankfully,
just just the odd little rumble,but everyone has this app on
their phone in New Zealand.
There's a network of seismicsensors all over the country.
And it sends you alerts on yourphone. And so everyone's kind of
not obsessed with them. Butyou're just aware, you're just
aware of them. So they couldfeel the little ones you kind of
(22:52):
a lot of them you don't evennotice because they're very,
very small. But yeah, the oddtime you'll get one and it feels
like you've you know, a very,very big truck has just like
rammed into the fence outsideyour house. Yeah, I don't know.
That's the funnest thing to gothrough. But I've been lucky and
haven't Touchwood. Anyway, Ihaven't been through a series
one as yet.
Jason (23:13):
Yeah. It's, it's amazing.
There's so many cool science,technology and the engineering
aspects that you describe inscience in the city. And you
bring it together. And in one ofthe later sections called
Connect, you highlight theinvisible connections as well,
that we may not be as clearlyobvious to us. And it's kind of
summarized as tradecommunications and food raises
(23:36):
questions about informationtransfer via GPS and satellites,
supply chain supply chainnetworks, and the optimization
and global food distributionthrough reports and we're seeing
post pandemic, how damaging someeffects and interruptions to
that can be. So what keychallenges and like aspects of
(23:58):
these may become more and moreimportant in the future?
Laurie (24:05):
I think you've hit the nail on the head. Jason, I think
the pandemic has reallyhighlighted how fragile our
global trade network is. There'shuge benefits, obviously, to
having a much more globalizedand much more connected world.
But when so much of you knowmanufacturing, for example, so
much of it is kind ofconcentrated in one part of the
(24:25):
world like China, for example.
When an event like this happens,and everything grinds to a halt,
we don't really have a plan B.
And definitely when I've beentalking to people even just kind
of was my city's hat on, whenI've been talking to people in
different parts of the worldabout totally different
challenges. One of the thingsthat has been mentioned in lots
(24:47):
of contexts to me, is how we'regoing to start re localizing
some aspects of our life. Andthat might be kind of
distributed energy generation,for example. So instead of we're
Buying on a, on a centralizedgrid, we're going to see many
more kind of community led gridsor solar panels that are based
in, in buildings and thebuilding taps into that power or
(25:10):
sells off what it doesn't use orcombined heat and power plants
within within, within a, youknow, big skyscraper or
whatever, trying to kind ofcentralized low relocalized some
of those aspects and and ofcourse, you think about things
like urban farms, or peoplegrowing vegetables and things I
(25:30):
think we're possibly too fargone to, to move entirely away
from a globalized world. But Ido think that the pandemic has
really shown that we need tohave more resilient
infrastructure within our local,you know, and I say local with,
you know, maybe split the worldup into eight or something
within closer to homeeffectively, because as it is,
(25:52):
it's just, we're so reliant,often on just one region or one
port. In some cases. We've seenthat that doesn't really work in
in times of crisis. So Idefinitely when I'm talking to
electricity, people thinkingabout electricity thinking
people thinking about foodproduction, about materials
production, you know, a lot ofthe focus is on trying to not
(26:16):
just recycle materials,construction materials, but
actually really change the waythat we build our cities based
on materials becoming availablewhen we demolish old buildings.
So there's a lot more I'vedefinitely seen, like a general
trend of people saying, whataspects of urban life can we
kind of re localize to make it abit more resilient, and feed
(26:38):
feed that within a broaderglobal system?
Jason (26:42):
Where, and it's bringing to mind the idea of that
circular economy? Yeah, headtowards ton. I know, as we grow
older, and I have more friendswho are becoming homeowners, and
they talk about like buyingsolar panels and contributing
back to the grid. Those areconversations I never heard of
when I was younger, and peoplewanting allotments to grow their
(27:03):
own food. So it's a greatinitiative that we're seeing.
Laurie (27:07):
Totally agree, I have exactly the same as you Jason on
that.
Jason (27:12):
And as we head towards like this on precedented
connectivity, and regeneratingso much like tons of data
nowadays, and starting to embedInternet of Things, people have
wearable tech, we're seeing moreand more robotics, artificial
intelligence, potentiallyshaping and changing our lives.
And one thing that comes to mindis self driving cars in the
(27:33):
future. You paint a reallyexciting, but also lovely
picture of a possible day in thelife and a future city at the
end of science. What kind ofimportant aspects of AI and
future tech, have you comeacross in your work that will
become more prevalent in oureveryday lives? And perhaps
(27:53):
sooner than we think?
Laurie (27:56):
That's a good question.
I have, and I'm possiblypreaching to the converted here,
but I have kind of mixedfeelings around big data. And I
think that we have such anatural tendency as humans to
just want to be constantlygathering information, you know,
we need to be gatheringinformation and gathering more
data at all times. And actually,it's not always helpful. You
(28:18):
know, it's not always Yeah, itdoesn't always kind of work. And
so I say, I would hope that wewill start well, maybe this is
really naive of me. But my hopeis that we become a bit more
discerning with the way that weuse data and the way that we
collect data. And that we don'tmove towards a system where
those people who are alreadymarginalized are even more
(28:41):
marginalized by the fact thatinformation is being gathered on
them. And I think as humans,we're pretty, we're pretty
terrible at that, you know, wehave lots of Silicon Valley
bros, who only think about thetechnology and they don't really
think about the implications.
They often don't even talk tothe people who's, you know,
(29:02):
they're pretending or wishingthat their technology is going
to serve, to see what theyactually need. So my hope is
that we will get a bit morediscerning in that regard. And
the data that we are collectingis, is for good reasons. And not
just for tracking reasons or formarketing reasons. Like around
driver, driverless cars are aninteresting one in particular,
(29:23):
because I think, actually thebarrier there is not technology,
the barrier to you know, havingautonomous vehicles is
regulation. And I don't thinkit's a bad thing, necessarily,
because what we don't want tohave is a situation which we've
seen multiple times in the lastfew years as autonomous vehicles
have been on streets, where theythe computer makes the wrong
(29:47):
decision, and they crash intosomething they crash into
someone. And so we really needto get get our stuff together
when it comes to regulatingautonomous vehicles so that you
When, obviously because thesecars don't know how to do
anything that we don't tell themhow to do, right, we have to
teach them how to work. So howdo we teach them to make a moral
(30:08):
decision? What happens ifsomeone is in a car in their
autonomous vehicle that's beingdriven by the by the car itself.
And a situation occurs that thecar has to make a decision
between saving its passenger, orsaving someone on the street?
That's an impossible positionfor a computer to be in? So
yeah, that's I think, generally.
And I think this is possibly my,my mind has changed a little bit
(30:31):
since I wrote science and city.
Because I've looked into this abit more now and realize that
maybe my naivety was painting,possibly too shiny a picture of
of how we use data in cities. Soyeah, my hope is that we just
become a bit more discerning,with more diverse workforces
moving into the tech sector,which is so long overdue. We
(30:53):
have many more people arguingfor their case and arguing and
saying, No, this is not fair,this is going to this is going
to, you know, separate out thispart of society, this is going
to impact these people. So wehave many more diverse voices in
the room. And I think with thatcomes better decisions around
data, I hope.
Jason (31:11):
Yeah, fully, fully agree.
I love that point, actually. Andit brings me on to the idea of
how important the scientificmethod itself is the application
of it. And in all of your work,you are employing the scientific
method in highlighting thescientific method as it has been
(31:32):
employed by the people whoyou're talking to in these
various fields of research andthe work that they are living
and breathing. And thosescientists and researchers
themselves have a diversity ofbackgrounds and cultures and
their own communication styles.
And you're bringing that alltogether and creating this like
(31:52):
common theme, especially inthese two books that we've
talked about. And it's a keyaspect of science communication.
And I wanted to like justfinally ask you, for anybody
working in both science and anyway with data, delivering
insights. Do you have any toptips for how to communicate
effectively and successfully?
Laurie (32:13):
Yeah, I am. I think if I were to summarize it in one, if
I had to give one top tip,because I've been asked before,
it's like, what one singlething? Would you say? I'm like,
Oh, wow, that's a lot ofpressure. Yeah, but I think it's
to simplify your message always.
We have such, like, and I guess,you know, and especially Irish
people, we talk a lot, and wetalk around the houses and, and
(32:33):
it's part of our culture, andit's part of what makes us who
we are. But when we're trying tocommunicate something important.
Often we feel we should padaround it. And actually, in my
experience, all that does isdilutes the central message. So
the my key tip is to just keepasking yourself, what it is you
(32:54):
want to your audience to takeaway from this interaction. So
whether that's in terms of like,infographics or a talk that
you're giving, or even, youknow, an elevator pitch, you
have to give, what is the keymessage you want them to walk
away with. And that should bethe central goal, everything
else should support youachieving that goal. Every
(33:16):
anything beyond that,unfortunately, is extraneous. So
you just have to leave it asideif you if your goal is to
communicate a specific topic ora specific idea. If your goal in
general is to kind of get peopleinterested in engaged in
science, that's where you kindof have the opportunity to tell
stories. And that's what I seemy book says, you know, I get to
(33:38):
I get to put the padding inthere, I get to faff around in
the lab with some scientists orsome geologists and see how
their equipment works. Becausethat's painting a picture for my
readers, you know, it's takingthem with me on this visit and
meeting these people with me.
Because I'm not the expert,right on any of the topics that
I write about, I am not theperson doing the research, I am
(34:02):
the person more my job I see myjob is as someone who can
synthesize, you know, gather allthis huge amounts of data. And I
do very much take a scientificview. Honestly, I think I
probably read more researchpapers to most scientists. You
know, I take all thisinformation and try and wrap a
story around it so that it's notoverwhelming for my readers. But
(34:25):
if your goal is to communicate asingle idea, unfortunately, you
kind of have to move most ofthat away, you have to pick one
very straightforward story, andyou have to just zoom in as
tightly as you can. So I wouldalways recommend that people
even if you're writing aparagraph, I try and I delete
full sentences and see if myparagraphs still make sense.
(34:47):
It's not that I will have a veryshort, shorter paragraph by the
end but I really challengemyself to just always try and
focus on on the single ideabecause that is what you want.
You know if you're trying to getsomeone to to change their mind
like or, or get funding orwhatever. Just focus on the
single message and keepchallenging yourself to
simplify, simplify, simplify.
Jason (35:09):
That's brilliant. You've immediately got me thinking of
the times when somebody asks meto write a report about
something, and I just write andwrite and write and send it off.
But if they tell me write it in200 words, wow, that's the
hardware. Yeah. And soeverything you've spoke, you
said, just speaks to me in thatregard. And Laurie, this has
(35:30):
been absolutely brilliant,really, really interesting
stuff. And you have a website,and you're on Twitter actively
on Twitter, if anybody wants toget in touch. How should they
reach out to you?
Laurie (35:41):
Yeah, Twitter's probably the best because I've never
office. So I'm at Laurie L a u ri e _ w i n k l e s s , or my
websites, my name also you canfind me on there. And I'm on
LinkedIn and stuff too. So butyeah, Twitter is where I go to
just just talk.
Jason (36:02):
Brilliant. That's LaurieWinkless dot com?
Laurie (36:05):
Yeah. LaurieWinkless dot com Yeah, my new shiny new
website.
Jason (36:08):
It's lovely.
Unknown (36:09):
Thank you. Brilliant.
Jason (36:10):
Laurie, thank you so much for joining us in the data Cafe
today. It's been an absolutepleasure.
Laurie (36:15):
Thanks, Jason. It's been a real pleasure to hang out with
you again.
Jason (36:19):
Thanks for joining us today at the data cafe. You can
like and review this on iTunesor your preferred podcast
provider. Or if you'd like toget in touch. You can email us
Jason that data cafe.uk OrJeremy at data cafe.uk or on
Twitter at DataCafé podcast.
We'd love to hear yoursuggestions for future episodes.
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