On Red Dwarfs and Other Particles

I managed to be the ‘plus one’ at a book launch last night, at a club in Soho. Very pleasant do it was, too, and I met some very interesting people, including the two stars of the show (Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw).

The Q&A session, after the comedy routine, was kicked off by some noodle (cough) asking ‘Is string theory completely mental?’ and there followed a rather interesting discussion on scrunched up dimensions. Or universes. Or something.

You see, I know I understood it at the time.

Anyway, you can do the maths: you’ve got electricity and magnetism and light; then with string theory gravity simply falls out. Which is pretty amazing, really. I followed up — after making the disclaimer that I’m a squishy biologist and I like to do experiments — with asking about how you might actually go about testing it. And the answer is either (a) build a bigger LHC or (b) we can’t even conceive how to begin. The problem is that the energies required to smash particles together hard enough to see strings (simplifying wildly) are not attainable, so until some bright cove figures out a different paradigm we’re a bit stuck.

Talking with Alison Wright (to whom I offer an unreserved apology for using the term “Nature proper”) it was funny to hear how physicists are sometimes jealous of the empirical nature of biology, whereas I’m often frustrated that there isn’t such a solid theoretical underpinning. Physics papers are different, too: there’s a lot of ‘Oh, we predict this particle has these properties, here’s the experiment showing it, KTHXBAI’ without any of the hand-waving and conjecturing that makes biological papers so bloody long and cumbersome.

Physics as a field could well be dying, I heard: this and the fact that all the money is in biology means that physicists will be looking to collaborate more and more with us squishies. Not that the resultant papers will be publishable, because reviewers tend not to understand the other discipline in each case. So there’s a problem there which might prove lucrative to anyone of the right mind.

Anyway, after all that, and talking to Jeff Forshaw (who is a very nice bloke), Alison said to me, ‘That’s Robert Llewellyn, that is; I should go and tell him I’m from Northampton too.’ I made a little rugby joke about the road to Leicester, and then decided what the hey, this is London after all.

Robert is also a very nice bloke, and he was holding a four week old baby when I shook his hand, so he’s also rather dextrous.

The Pawns, whose favourite two shows are Top Gear and Red Dwarf, are in a state of disbelief this morning. ‘No,’ I told Rachel, ‘I didn’t ask for his autograph because that’s rather crass at such events.’ But I do have a photograph, which despite my profile information, I’m not sharing.

Keep banging the rocks particles together, guys. And gals.