{"id":518,"date":"2010-12-15T12:01:30","date_gmt":"2010-12-15T12:01:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/?p=518"},"modified":"2012-10-13T19:02:40","modified_gmt":"2012-10-13T19:02:40","slug":"wheres-the-wow-factor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/2010\/12\/15\/wheres-the-wow-factor\/","title":{"rendered":"Where’s the Wow Factor?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Where\u2019s the Wow Factor? was a question posed at the Physics Meets Biology meeting in September in the context of teaching Biological Physics, as I discussed before<\/a>.\u00a0 I was reminded of this question while attending this year\u2019s Institute of Physics Condensed Matter and Materials Physics (CMMP) Division meeting. The Division has held an annual conference close to Christmas, certainly ever since I was a graduate student (which is going back a bit now), but up till now I have never attended simply because at no point did its programme seem relevant to me.\u00a0 This year three IOP groups<\/a> \u2013 Biological Physics, Polymer Physics, and Liquids and Complex Fluids – have come together to ensure there is a new strand in the programme.\u00a0 Traditionally it has concentrated on \u2018hard\u2019 condensed matter, things like metals, semiconductors and quantum solids.\u00a0 This year, additionally, 4 out of the 7 Plenary Lectures also have some relevance to this \u2018soft\u2019 strand.\u00a0 So I, and a fair number of my colleagues from this field have ventured to Warwick to see whether this meeting now has more relevance. (OK, I\u2019m one of the Plenary Lecturers, so I don\u2019t actually have a choice about attending, but I could have breezed in and out of again, but have chosen not to do so.)<\/p>\n

Listening to the first talk in the Biological Physics Symposium, given by my Cambridge colleague Ray Goldstein<\/a>, I certainly felt the \u2018wow\u2019 factor was there. It was a beautiful talk about cytoplasmic streaming, a phenomenon known about for more than a hundred years, but still barely understood.\u00a0 It occurs in plants, in which there is a strong circulating flow within the cytoplasm of the cells, but the biological relevance of it has not been obvious.\u00a0 Working on aquatic plants such as chara<\/em> and nitella<\/em>, which have huge cells maybe a centimetre or more in length, he has been able to image the flow in great detail, via both fluorescence microscopy and MRI, and begin to study how it varies from place to place within the cell; he has also studied the behaviour of the internal membrane, the tonoplast which surrounds the vacuole, in response to the circulation. He has shown that the tonoplast circulates too, and he had an amazing video to demonstrate this.\u00a0 Although there is not yet a complete answer to why this cytoplasmic streaming happens, Goldstein argued persuasively that this is an excellent micromixer, predating microfluidic designs by many millions of years.<\/p>\n

At the September meeting in Oxford the speaker who posed the wow factor question seemed to think that only topics like astrophysics would grab the imagination, particularly of the young who we need to entice into physics. I cannot agree. As ever it seems to me that it is horses for courses \u2013 some schoolchildren will doubtless look up at the night sky and be inspired to ask questions and demand answers which may indeed lure them into a physics\/astrophysics degree; others will be less excited by this and want to know about totally different things. Astrophysics is only one facet of the joy of physics and it depresses me that some of these other aspects, perhaps more \u2018mundane\u2019 because closer to our everyday world, are so readily overlooked. As a teenager I quite explicitly turned my back on cosmology \u2013 having briefly flirted with it \u2013 because I wanted to study things that seemed more relevant to our lives, but which were still \u2018physics\u2019.\u00a0 That has of course been the course I have followed ever since, as I have wandered through the study of metals, polymers, food, colloids, plants and ultimately cells (the header at the top of my blog illustrates three of these topics, but not in fact plants). \u00a0I am sure other school children also will find the \u2018wow factor\u2019 in things that are neither millions of light years away nor only to be found in the Large Hadron Collider (high energy physics being another subject that is assumed to hold the attention of the young).<\/p>\n

This is one of the reasons I so welcome the broadening of what the CMMP sees as part of its remit.\u00a0 Soft matter and biological physics are both subjects which touch upon our everyday world, both lend themselves readily as topics which schoolchildren can relate to, and so we need to ensure the physics they encapsulate is recognized and disseminated. It is no coincidence that Ray Goldstein\u2019s work, coupled with his colleague Alison Smith <\/a> from Cambridge University\u2019s Plant Sciences Department, featured in last summer\u2019s Royal Society\u2019s Exhibition (Meet the Algae<\/a>), a key part of the Royal Society\u2019s outreach activity and attended by some thousands of schoolchildren.\u00a0 Another example of using this topic to explain the excitement of science to the young was the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures<\/a> given by the University of Sheffield’s Tony Ryan<\/a> on \u2018Smart Stuff\u2019 in 2002. For too long our schools and our university courses have excluded so much potentially exciting physics in their teaching \u2013 and indeed (in the case of university departments), their research.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Where\u2019s the Wow Factor? was a question posed at the Physics Meets Biology meeting in September in the context of teaching Biological Physics, as I discussed before.\u00a0 I was reminded of this question while attending this year\u2019s Institute of Physics … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,9,18,1],"tags":[166,169,167,168],"class_list":["post-518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biological-physics","category-education","category-interdisciplinary-science","category-uncategorized","tag-algae","tag-cytoplasmic-streaming","tag-ray-goldstein","tag-teaching-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=518"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}